Thomas Tuchel has defended Chelsea’s decisions to sell Tino Livramento and Marc Guehi.
Guehi’s performances for Crystal Palace earned him a first England call-up last month and he is set to face his former club when the two sides meet in the FA Cup semi-final at Wembley on Sunday.
Full-back Livramento, meanwhile, has gone on to make 25 appearances for Southampton this season since joining the club for a fee of £5m.
Chelsea have struggled with injuries in defence this season and potentially face a big defensive overhaul in the summer with Antonio Rudiger and Andreas Christensen both out of contract.
It means that Livramento and Guehi might well have got chances in the the Blues side had they been kept on.
But head coach Tuchel insisted that he is still content with the decisions made in the summer – in which he had a say – and that both players wanted a new challenge.
“It’s a decision we took together and we are happy about these decisions,” Tuchel said at a press conference.
“You cannot go back and reflect, because at the point where we took the decision it was the right thing to do given the circumstances.
“For Tino Livramento, for example, we had a plan and we preferred a loan but he saw his future to go and the situation was then better to agree to a sale.
“For Marc it is a fantastic development and it’s very hard or maybe even impossible to say that if we kept him he would have been better, worse or the same because maybe he needed exactly that.
“Maybe he needed the change of environment, maybe he needed a different club, maybe he needed a bigger role and more minutes to develop his full potential.”
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