Lyon want just €10m for wonderkid Cherki

Robin Bairner

• 8 Dec 2023 10:56 GMT
• 3 min read

Lyon are ready to allow wonderkid Rayan Cherki to depart the club for just €10 million, according to reports.

Although a player courted by PSG, Chelsea and Real Madrid in the summer, Cherki has endured a wretched season with Lyon. While the club’s performance has been dreadful – they are bottom of Ligue 1 – the 20-year-old found himself peripheral to the thinking of previous head coach Fabio Grosso, who branded him “not special”.

Interim boss Patrice Sage has reintegrated Cherki back into the starting XI, but his performance against Marseille in a 3-0 midweek defeat has seen the attacker once again the subject of significant criticism.

Now L’Equipe reports that Lyon are willing to cut their losses in one of France’s most exciting prospects in recent years by allowing him to leave for just €10m with 18 months left on his contract.

Cherki criticism

Cherki was particularly criticised by 1998 World Cup winner Christophe Dugarry on RMC.

“When it’s been months and months since you’ve been unable to change the way your playing and you’re doing the same stupid things game after game and making the same mistakes and producing the same behaviour, the same ridiculous way of playing football…

“I wonder if the kid has all his mental faculties to analyse and to think,” Dugarry said of the France U21 star.

“Who are the people around him?”

Cherki has just a single assist from 14 Ligue 1 matches this season for a Lyon side that is presently propping up the standings with just seven points.

It comes in sharp contrast to the form that he showed in the second half of last term, when he scored three and created three in his last 15 matches of the campaign.

Lyon’s valuation of the player, meanwhile, is in line with Cherki’s Estimated Transfer Value (ETV) of €11m, which is down from a high of €20m in January 2021.