How Strasbourg have developed Andrey Santos | OneFootball

“Nothing is set in stone,” Andrey Santos said to L’Équipe when asked about his future. The twenty-year-old has grown up in a modern era where players keep their cards close to their chests, even when the rest of the table has already caught a glimpse.

Each impressive performance in an RC Strasbourg Alsace shirt only seems to confirm the assumption that this will be the Chelsea loanee’s last season away from his parent club. After spending the last season and a half in Ligue 1, he seems destined for the bright lights of the Premier League.

For BlueCo, the consortium that owns both Chelsea and Strasbourg, there is perhaps an incentive even outside of Santos’s obvious abilities to cart him back to London. He looks as if he will be the first player that the owners can point to as an example of their multiclub model bearing fruit.

Too raw for Nottingham?

Santos was first swept up in the BlueCo universe when Chelsea bought him from Vasco da Gama in January 2023. Then a teenager, he was given half a season to remain at his boyhood club before Chelsea set up a season-long loan in the summer for the midfielder to join Premier League side Nottingham Forest.

It proved perhaps too early for Santos to make an impact at that level. His then-manager Steve Cooper implied as much: “Everyone would have liked him to play more. He’s a really good young player, but there aren’t a load of players his age who are playing regularly in the Premier League.”

It was clear that for Chelsea, who had invested €13.1 million on the Brazilian, Cooper’s explanation and Santos’s two appearances were simply not enough, and in January 2024, he was on the move to sister club Strasbourg, where his playing time would be far more assured.

A cold welcome to the east of France

His arrival in Strasbourg was not met with much fanfare, in part because he would miss the first two games due to international duty with the Brazil Olympic team. However, more notably, he entered in the shadow of the deeply unpopular decision to sell Matz Sels to Forest.

For the ultras, it seemed a crude caricature of life under BlueCo; club servants removed while the team deepened its status as a feeder to London. It was an opinion that wouldn’t change much in the early stages as Santos made only bit part appearances against FC Lorient and Stade Brestois, before being an unused substitute against Montpellier HSC and AS Monaco.

After this, things began to evolve rapidly. Patrick Vieira would finally thrust Santos into the starting lineup, and the then-teenager ran with the opportunity. Santos started the final nine games of the campaign, where he became the glue within the team, dictating the build-up phase.

However, the turning point for the fans came in that final stretch of the 2023/24 season when Santos scored his first goal for the club against rivals FC Metz in the Derby de l’Èst, as he told L’Équipe, “I felt they had adopted me. This season [their love] is even stronger.”

Andrey Santos set for ‘magnificent career’

The decision to send Santos back to Strasbourg for this campaign was not a simple one to take, but it appears to have been the right one for his development as he has grown this season into one of the best midfielders in the league, having benefitted immeasurably from being a consistent starter under summer appointment Liam Rosenior.

“The style he wants is perfect for me,” Santos said of his head coach to L’Équipe. “He asks me to do everything: defend, win the ball back, and pass it as cleanly as possible. But he also gives me the freedom to be myself, to shoot from distance, to enter the box. I feel useful.”

For the English manager, there is little doubt that Santos is destined for great things, as he told The Athletic, “He’s going to have a magnificent career… He’s Brazilian, but he doesn’t play like one. He’s so smart, and his stats are through the roof in terms of scoring goals, winning duels. He’s going to have an outstanding career.”

It’s far too early to say if holistically the BlueCo pathway between the east of France and west of London is working as intended, but in the case of Andrey Santos we can be certain of the fact that his loan spells in Strasbourg have helped shape a raw talent into a player who looks ready for the Premier League.

GFFN | Nick Hartland