Six Chelsea players with one final chance to impress or face axe next season – from £58m man to academy star

The Chelsea players who need to improve in 2025/26 – or find themselves on the transfer list.

Chelsea, in their current incarnation, are many things – improving, free-spending, and perhaps a little chaotic, for starters – but one thing they most certainly are not is patient. Players who don’t make an immediate impression get replaced rather quickly.

The owners always seem to be on the lookout for a new toy, and players who aren’t perceived to be carrying their weight will find a new face taking their place in the starting line-up before they know. A significant investment in talented youngsters such as Kendry Páez and Estevão Willian means there will also be a lot of fresh blood looking to break into the first team at the expense of any stragglers.

As such, several players need to prove their worth very soon or find themselves in the same boat as Raheem Sterling, Axel Disasi and quite a few others – on the transfer list and out of Enzo Maresca’s plans. Here are six current stars who will likely still be in the side come September, but who probably need to show the coach just how good they are sooner rather than later for the sake of their careers.

Nicolas Jackson

By most standards, a return of 24 goals in your first 65 Premier League games would be pretty impressive, especially for a relatively young striker who hadn’t played in England before. Jackson, however, still hasn’t fully convinced most observers, and it’s hard to escape the feeling that he really should have scored rather more.

His ability to get into dangerous positions with his sharp movement and blistering pace is beyond doubt, but all too often he takes the wrong option, and according to the xG model he ‘should’ have scored 31 goals on average with the chances he’s had. Throw in his braindead red card in the Club World Cup, and you have a player who needs to demonstrate that he can develop a cooler head (and cooler finishing skills) to keep his place in the long term. Liam Delap’s arrival suggests that Jackson already faces a battle to keep his spot.