What Danny Welbeck could offer Chelsea: Goals, channel runs and vital know-how

As Chelsea prepare to buy a striker for the seventh straight summer, Danny Welbeck has emerged as a surprise candidate.

The 35-year-old forward is into the final year of his contract with Brighton & Hove Albion and, off the back of his two best-ever Premier League seasons (10 and 13 goals), he might offer Xabi Alonso some solutions to Chelsea’s seemingly-perennial No 9 problem.

Welbeck is at the opposite end of the continuum to Liam Delap, the Manchester City academy graduate whom Chelsea signed from relegated Ipswich Town last summer. A young Delap offered raw potential, physical quality and respectable goals numbers. The same can be said for Marc Guiu, bought in 2024, and Nicolas Jackson, who joined the year before him.

The acquisition of Welbeck would be just as far from the marquee approach that Chelsea went for with Kai Havertz (2020) and Romelu Lukaku (2021).

What exactly makes the former England international so lucrative? His profile.

Welbeck has truly come to life under Brighton head coach Fabian Hurzeler, scoring 25 goals in 76 appearances under him, just two fewer than he scored in 112 matches for Arsene Wenger at Arsenal in the 2010s, and 21 of those are non-penalty strikes in the Premier League.

“He is not only scoring goals but he’s in a brilliant shape, finding good connections between his teammates, creating a good togetherness,” Hurzeler said of Welbeck after he netted a brace against Liverpool in March. “I think he can help every team in the world — including England,” he added, with talk ongoing then of Thomas Tuchel’s World Cup squad.

In an era of ball-to-feet No 10s and withdrawn strikers, Welbeck stays high, runs the channels and occupies defenders. He does his best work in the penalty box and makes a habit of darting in-behind to attack through balls. Here’s left-footed Georginio Rutter slipping him through for a left-footed finish at home to Bournemouth (the match-winning goal).

Here’s a Georginio Rutter assist in a 2-1 Premier League win at home over Newcastle. Welbeck keeps centre-backs Malick Thiaw and Sven Botman pinned, and then runs past them before beating Nick Pope one-v-one.

It’s not hard to imagine how Cole Palmer, as a left-footer off the right, could create for Welbeck from these positions.

Welbeck’s penalty-box threat is important too. The goalscoring success he has enjoyed in recent years — 2024-25 and 2025-26 were his first double-digit league goal hauls — owes a lot to smart positioning. Welbeck likes to lurk at the back-post and is clever at nudging defenders to put them off balance.

He can score with both feet, plus his head, and repeatedly gets into quality scoring areas. Since the start of last season, he’s had as many big chances as Cole Palmer (37 — both have scored 17) and former Brighton forward Joao Pedro is the only Chelsea player with more (43).

Welbeck’s equaliser in Brighton’s comeback win over Chelsea at Stamford Bridge last season showed this. He kept himself between blue shirts and in Joshua Acheampong’s blind spot, waiting for winger Yankuba Minteh to go outside Malo Gusto. Then he sprinted to the six-yard box to header a hard-hit cross past Robert Sanchez.

Welbeck and Pedro dovetailed together well at Brighton in 2023-24 and 2024-25 — a similar kind of combination to the one that Palmer and Jackson had for Chelsea, before the latter was shipped out on loan to Bayern Munich.

Considering that Pedro last season was the first Chelsea player to hit 15 non-penalty goals in a league season since Tammy Abraham in 2019-20, then adding in a striker who he can definitely play off could help raise his game to another level.

There is an irony in how similar Jackson and Welbeck operate as strikers, particularly if the latter comes in to replace the former.

Considering how youth-oriented Chelsea have been for the past few years, boasting the youngest average team in each of the past three Premier League seasons, making a signing with experience and goalscoring instincts would be a worthwhile investment. The last player aged 30-plus to score for them in the Premier League was Thiago Silva, in April 2024, and the last such striker was Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang in October 2022 (The Athletic also reported on Monday that Chelsea were in talks to sign 36-year-old Brentford and England midfielder Jordan Henderson).

There’s plenty that Welbeck, who featured in title-winning sides under Sir Alex Ferguson, and has 42 caps for England, could teach up-and-coming forwards. For instance, he’s been offside fewer times in the past three seasons than Jackson in either of his two Chelsea terms. And he committed fouls at almost half the rate of Delap in 2025-26.

Welbeck in action against Xabi Alonso for Manchester United in March 2013 (ANDREW YATES / AFP via Getty Images)

Keeping Welbeck fit has been the hard part. Hamstring, ankle and knee injuries have disrupted his career — meaning that he played just 5,800 minutes in all competitions in his mid-20s, the kind of volume that Enzo Fernandez came close to last season alone, and partially explains his late-career peak.

Hurzeler and Brighton had to manage some back issues he had last season, though did so successfully, as he appeared in all-but-one of their 38 league matches.

That is more impressive when you know that Brighton made the most final-third regains in the division last season. Welbeck was tasked with leading the press, as Hurzeler wanted to trap opponents out wide and needed the intensity to be set by his striker, who had to stop the centre-backs from passing to one another.

Alonso will no doubt want players capable of implementing strong out-of-possession principles. He’s always made space for goalscorers in his teams too, Patrick Schick and Victor Boniface at Bayern Leverkusen, and he used Kylian Mbappe as a striker at Real Madrid.

In many ways, Welbeck is a very un-Chelsea signing, and that’s why it would be so smart.