Aston Villa boss Unai Emery is reportedly open to allowing Calum Chambers to leave the club as he continues to stamp his mark on the squad.
After Cameron Archer joined Middlesbrough on loan for the rest of the season, Frederic Guilbert moved on in a free transfer to sign for Strasbourg this week.
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Danny Ings was the next to leave after he was unveiled as a West Ham player on Friday, and so Emery is starting to trim the squad with a view of bringing in reinforcements that are a better fit for his ideas and style of play moving forward.
While Alex Moreno joined us from Real Betis to bolster our options at left-back, Villa have announced that an agreement has been reached to sign young Colombian forward Jhon Duran from Chicago Fire, but we’re still awaiting official confirmation that the transfer has been completed.
Now, it’s been reported by The Mirror, that Chambers is another player who can leave the club this month, joining Morgan Sanson, Marvelous Nakamba, Ludwig Augustinsson and Jan Bednarek in the group that could follow Ings out the exit door.
Speaking at his pre-Southampton press conference on Thursday, Emery publicly revealed that he has told Augustinsson, Nakamba and Sanson that they can leave if the right opportunity comes up, and so those are specific examples where the Villa boss himself has stated that he’s ready to approve those departures.
However, this is the first time that reports have included Chambers and Bednarek in the conversation, with both players arriving under former boss Steven Gerrard and likely to play a limited role moving forward.
Emery knows Chambers from his previous stint in charge at Arsenal, and so the initial expectation was that he could lean on him given the familiarity with the way he likes to work.
That said, with Tyrone Mings and Ezri Konsa continuing to be the preferred defensive partnership, coupled with Diego Carlos coming back from injury perhaps next month and with Villa having options in other positions that push Chambers down the pecking order, it’s arguably an obvious one to streamline the squad further and move him on.
Time will tell if Villa are indeed open to offers and importantly whether or not the interest from other clubs is there, but it does seem as though Emery could be clearing space in the squad this month to then give himself flexibility in the transfer market to start bringing in his own players who can help him build something at Villa in the long run.
