Five years after making a dream move to then-reigning Premier League champions Chelsea in 2015, Abdul Rahman Baba is nearing the end of a third loan spell away from the club with La Liga outfit Real Mallorca.
With the left-back’s year-long spell ending soon and having signed a five-year deal with the Blues when he joined, so is his time at Stamford Bridge. With the Ghanaian now way down the pecking order at the 2019 Europa League winners, chances of a contract extension are remote, and Baba is edging ever closer to the exit in West London.
It’s been an unfortunate turn of events for the former Augsburg man who was highly rated at the time he switched to the Premier League from the Bundesliga. He won an incredible 83 percent of his tackles in his only year in the German top flight and was described as an all-action full-back capable of influencing games at both ends of the pitch, per The Telegraph.
Indeed, the West African was primed to rival Chelsea’s title-winning left-back at the time, Cesar Azpilicueta, and succeed where the overly attacking Filipe Luis failed. The Brazilian wideman returned to Atletico Madrid only a year after leaving Diego Simeone’s men, as he was unable to truly execute Jose Mourinho’s instructions.
Five years down the line, it’s safe to say those Baba expectations were never matched, let alone exceeded. One could mitigate for his failure at the Bridge, too: in hindsight, leaving the Bundesliga too early was a bad call, the upheaval of 2015/16 in West London didn’t help and, of course, a series of career-altering injuries that have crippled his development in the last three years.
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The nature of Baba Rahman’s decline is underlined by how he’s not even in the conversation to become Chelsea’s next left-back under current boss Frank Lampard. The five-time Premier League champions are chasing a new left-back this summer, with Leicester City’s Ben Chilwell publicly the top target, while Ajax’s Nicolas Tagliafico and Porto’s Alex Telles are reportedly backup options.
Had their on-loan Mallorca full-back not stalled spectacularly in recent seasons, this could have been his time to finally become the club’s undisputed left-back with the Blues’ legend having reservations over Marcos Alonso, who is naturally a wing-back, and Emerson, who has struggled to impress at Stamford Bridge.
For the Chelsea loanee, it hasn’t just rained but it’s poured too, with an unceasing spate of layoffs plaguing him since a meniscus rupture at the 2017 Africa Cup of Nations.
Even though the ex-Asante Kotoko defender was on his first loan at the time with Schalke, that setback began his fall in the Stamford Bridge pecking order, as then-head coach Antonio Conte already had reservations about the full-back’s natural inclination to go forward.
In fairness, this seems odd, in hindsight given the Italian eventually switched to a 3-4-3 with Alonso on the left and Victor Moses, a converted winger, at right wing-back.
However, that injury suffered at Afcon 2017 meant Baba wasn’t considered for a return to Conte’s side to challenge the former Bolton Wanderers and Sunderland full-back.
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His luck took a turn for the worse when, in September 2017, another long-term injury struck, ruling him out for the rest of the season.
The side from Gelsenkirchen had renewed his loan deal for the campaign but he only featured in their final day encounter with Eintracht Frankfurt, coming on in the last 33 minutes.
The full-back’s fitness seemed to hold for another year or so, despite falling out of favour with the Royal Blues.
The German outfit cut short his loan spell in January last year, which led to another spell away from London at Stade Reims in Ligue 1.
Baba featured in 11 of a possible 16 league games, starting all of those games and completing 90 minutes unscathed on 10 occasions. He signed off with a remarkable performance against dominant champions Paris Saint-Germain, scoring and assisting as Reims stunned Thomas Tuchel’s side 3-1 in gameweek 38.
Indeed, it seemed like the Ghanaian was back on track...but misfortune struck early on in his current loan spell at Mallorca.
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The defender picked up a serious knee injury in Los Bermellones’ 4-2 defeat by Getafe in September, which has restricted him to just two La Liga appearances this season.
It looked like the 25-year-old wouldn’t play again this season, but the coronavirus pandemic which put a halt to football across Europe has given him a chance of featuring before the expiration of the year-long loan.
The relegation-threatened side host leaders Barcelona on Saturday seeking to claim a huge scalp and continue a run of form that saw them win two in four pre-pandemic.
While the game against Lionel Messi and co. may come too soon for Baba, he’ll probably get games in the closing weeks of the season given the jam-packed calendar to complete the final 11 gameweeks.
The full-back’s future, after that, remains uncertain.
