Chelsea pursuit of Kounde and Kimpembe has cost them over Barcelona and Bayern Munich transfers

Todd Boehly's summer has been anything but relaxing. He won't have see much of London outside of the Stamford Bridge offices and he is all but living out of a suitcase as he sprints across Europe to start, continue, and tie up transfer negotiations for incoming and outgoing players.

It's the life of a sporting director being done by a man that has spent the first four months of the year attempting to buy the club in the first place. So far, he's done a very respectable job in building new contacts and putting himself into a fresh industry, it's worked as well as it could have.

Deals for Raheem Sterling and Kalidou Koulibaly are the rewards for the hard work. Missed opportunities for Ousmane Dembele, Matthijs De Ligt, Robert Lewandowski and Raphinha will make the two completed transfers taste sweeter but also prove the point that this is a specialist role and Boehly isn't a specialist.

The interest that Chelsea have so far held has been genuine, if not always completely confident, and in most of the cases there has been little chance that the Blues have really missed. Players have taken their own decisions and forced them into transfer situations in the cases of Raphina, De Ligt, Lewandowski and Dembele. Chelsea tried and came second.

However, by being tied up in attempts to recruit Jules Kounde for large periods of the past 12 months, a deal which may still come through, there is a sense of distraction to the deal. A move for the Frenchman has been on, off, and back on again, and that's just this week. It has seen concern arise over the future of Levi Colwill as the youngster is left in a state of limbo as to where he will be in the pecking order should one, or two, more centre-backs still come through the door.

Not