By Adegboyega Adeleye vanguard
Benfica boss Roger Schmidt has slammed Chelsea for their January transfer pursuit of Argentina midfielder Enzo Fernandez.
Chelsea are in talks about signing the 21-year-old and have reportedly had three meetings with Benfica this month to convince Fernandez to Stamford Bridge.
Fernandez, who joined Benfica from River Plate in August 2022, has a release clause of about £106m
However, Schmidt believes Chelsea’s approach in pursuit of the world cup winner by offering lower than the release clause, despite indicating an intention to pay the full amount is ‘disrespectful’ and has left him unsettled.
The Benfica manager said, “What the club is doing who wants Enzo, it’s disrespectful against all of us, against Benfica and I cannot accept what they are doing,”
“To make the player crazy, and then to pretend they can pay the clause and later they want negotiate I think is not what I understand about a good relationship between clubs who maybe want to discuss about the player.”
According to him, the club are not willing to let him go but expected Chelsea to pay the release clause instead of starting the negotiation process again. However, if Fernandez wants to leave the club and Chelsea pays the clause in his contract, Benfica will not stop him from leaving.
He added: “Enzo, we don’t want to sell him, nobody wants to sell him at this club,” said Schmidt. “Everybody knows he has a clause in his contract and, of course, if the player wants to leave and somebody comes and pays the clause we cannot work against that and so then maybe we will lose the player.
“There’s a club who want our player, they know we don’t want to sell the player, they tried to get the player on their side and they know that they only can get this player when they pay the clause so it’s a very clear situation.”
Schmidt also praised Enzo Fernandez and described him as ‘ a fantastic football player.’
He said: “First of all Enzo is a very good boy and a fantastic football player. We like him a lot and, of course, we want that he stays at Benfica.
“Of course, the situation for him is not so easy because he played the World Cup, he became world champion, he got offers, and there’s a lot of money on the table.
“In this situation as a young player you think about that, [it can] confuse you a little bit. I think that everybody can understand but, nevertheless, he’s a very good boy.
“He was not there last week, he had no permission to go to Argentina. He missed the training so that is not acceptable [and] that’s why it will have consequences.”
The 2022 world cup best young player played 89 minutes for Benfica in a 3-0 defeat against SC Braga following his return to Portugal after playing a key part in helping Argentina win the World Cup.