Very active in the last summer transfer window, Strasbourg signed five players from Chelsea. A few weeks after their arrival in Alsace, what is the verdict on their first steps with the club?

Revived by a home thrashing of Auxerre (5-1) after four consecutive defeats, Strasbourg have had a stop-start opening to the season.

Probably not helped by too big a squad overhaul in the last summer window, with close to £85m (€100m) spent and 17 signings registered, the Alsace club are suffering the full effect of a transfer mistake recently highlighted by Ismael Doukoure: a sizeable quota of foreign players and not a single signing with any Ligue 1 experience.

Among the summer arrivals, Hugo Oliveira’s side signed five players from Chelsea, the club with which Strasbourg share the same owner, BlueCo, in a collaboration designed to make transactions between the two sides easier.

They are Brazilian forward Deivid Washington, who cost £13.6m (€16m), English attacking midfielder Omari Kellyman, who cost £5.1m (€6m), Danish goalkeeper Filip Jorgensen on loan, Portuguese defensive midfielder Dario Essugo on loan and Swedish right-back Genesis Antwi on loan. Five players with radically different playing time and performances since the start of the 2026-27 season.

Three positives and two disappointments

A few months after their arrival in France, what verdict can be drawn? Three positives and two disappointments stand out.

On the positive side, Dario Essugo has made four starts in seven appearances, with two goals and one assist. In terms of presence on the pitch, Filip Jorgensen outstrips the competition with nine starts in nine matches and a status strengthened by wearing the captain’s armband in three games. Although he has not yet kept a clean sheet, he has made 32 saves.

Genesis Antwi, for his part, has started eight times, with Hugo Oliveira only leaving him on the bench against Auxerre. The 19-year-old has just been rewarded for his good performances with a first call-up to Graham Potter’s Sweden squad for the upcoming international break and the Nations League matches against Bosnia-Herzegovina and Poland.

Zero minutes for Strasbourg’s second most expensive signing

For the two other Chelsea recruits, however, the verdict is not very impressive. Deivid Washington, Strasbourg’s second most expensive signing of summer 2026, has so far been a flop: the Brazilian has still not played a single minute.

Finally, Omari Kellyman has only one appearance, for just six minutes, in a 3-0 defeat to Rennes on 25 October. In other words, the pile-up of players in Strasbourg’s squad has not stopped some from standing out while others remain on the sidelines. It is one way of weighing up the pros and cons of the club’s huge summer 2026 recruitment drive.