By sticking Conor Gallagher in the 'bomb squad', Chelsea have utterly humiliated a player who has been with them since age eight. It's nasty, grubby and utterly classless, writes IAN HERBERT

Conor Gallagher was sitting in a Madrid hotel room on Tuesday morning, waiting for a flight back to London to train with Chelsea’s ‘bomb squad’ — their Under 21s and discards — three days out from the start of the season.

It’s not how he imagined it would be when the club’s fans unfurled a banner of him at the end of last season, in recognition of his contribution as stand-in captain and relentless ball- winner. Nor when he lifted the Premier League Under 21s trophy in 2018, a year before he was named academy player of the year. He’s been with the club since he was eight years old.

Chelsea are a different kind of club now. A club, under the ownership of Clearlake Capital, who have engaged in two years of maniacal spending: £1.5billion splashed, and they still want two more in this summer.

A club for which ‘future potential’ is, for reasons known only to their car-crash owners, deemed more important than finding competent players to face Manchester City at home on Sunday.

Perhaps you haven’t heard of Samu Omorodion, the Atletico Madrid player Chelsea have wanted to sign for £36m. That would be because he’s never actually played for Atletico Madrid and spent last season scoring eight goals in 35 games on loan at Alaves. He only cost Atletico £5m one year ago.

Now there’s a hitch to the Omorodion deal, so it’s off. Atletico are mortally offended because they rather fancied Chelsea handing them a £31m profit on an utterly unproven player.

They might still sell Chelsea Joao Felix, who spent half a season on loan at Stamford Bridge last year. That would be the same Joao Felix who was sent off after an hour of his first game at Fulham. And who, in 20 appearances, scored four times, against West Ham, Everton, Bournemouth and Manchester United. Chelsea are ready to pay £55m for him.

How do they pay for all this, fans of Premier League clubs struggling to comply with profit and sustainability rules are currently asking?

By selling homegrown players like Gallagher. Players who are cult heroes to local Chelsea fans — ‘one of our own’ — yet who to Clearlake are pawns. ‘Pure profit’ players, they’re called, because Chelsea, having developed them, can bank the entire transfer fee in their accounts, with no strings attached.

It’s when you get down into the weeds of Chelsea’s attempts to get Gallagher out the door that it gets nasty and grubby.

While other clubs have seen a value in him — Everton were ready to pay £45m 18 months ago and it was after a £51m deal with Tottenham broke down last summer that Mauricio Pochettino made him his captain — Chelsea want to cash in on his strong book value.

They want him tied to them contractually — otherwise he will leave on a free. But when Gallagher proved reluctant to leave this summer for either Aston Villa or, initially, Atletico, Chelsea called him in off his holiday to tell him that if he didn’t go or accept a new contract which was materially poorer than that of his contemporaries, he would be persona non grata, training with the ‘bomb squad’.

To marginalise and humiliate a player who has done no wrong and is in no breach of disciplinary rules — purely to break their resolve — is something of increasing concern to the PFA. There’s not yet been a test case where a player has claimed constructive dismissal under UK employment law but the union have worked with several players bombed out in this way.

Article 14 (2) of FIFA regulations on the ‘status and transfer of players’ states that marginalising may constitute ‘abusive conduct’. On a mere human level, such treatment of Gallagher — Chelsea man and boy — is utterly classless.

Chelsea’s hardball tactics worked. Gallagher last week accepted that a move to Atletico was the only way ahead. He flew to Madrid and was preparing for a future there until Clearlake’s transfer market wacky races began to unravel.

Atletico now feel that Chelsea halting the Omorodion deal has devalued one of their assets and, with relations strained, the Felix move is also in jeopardy.

Since Atletico need to shift Felix to buy Gallagher, they let it be known through Spanish media on Tuesday morning that they had suggested the 24-year-old returns to London.

Chelsea took exception to this and let it be known through social media that they were paying to bring their man back. Gallagher, who had arrived in Madrid in the early hours of Monday and followed the entire episode from a hotel room, re-packed his bags.

At almost any other Premier League club, he would be fundamental to preparations for a season-opener against the champions.

But with his future in limbo, Gallagher has trained neither in London nor Madrid and after that flight home at around 6.30pm on Tuesday night was anticipating being out on a training pitch among the kids and those deemed surplus to requirement today.

A symbol of the terribly diminished state to which modern Chelsea — a club whose production line gave us Jimmy Greaves, Peter Osgood, Ray Wilkins and John Terry — has been reduced.

Moyes is too talented to be out of work

The latest of Simon Jordan’s Up Front podcasts, with David Moyes, is a compelling listen and a reminder of how much Moyes came to love the club he took to a sixth-place finish and Europe.

For him, the West Ham he describes are still ‘we’. Moyes is generous towards the club’s owners, who have let him go twice, and reveals how, having been told his contract with the club would not be renewed after keeping them up in 2018, he travelled to Germany to be appointed Everton manager. Then Carlo Ancelotti was sacked by Napoli, so Farhad Moshiri approached him instead.

‘If you’d said to me after avoiding relegation, we were going to finish in Europe and sixth, I would have said, “No chance”,’ Moyes reflects of his second West Ham spell. He starts the new season out of work this weekend.

That hour or so of talk with Jordan serves as a reminder that he is too good for that.

The elite footballing world can learn from Paris Olympic athletes 

The final credits of the last BBC Olympics broadcast have become an art form — a piece of televisual beauty — and Sunday night’s were no different.

They were a reminder of how much we discovered about our Olympians as people, and for those of us reporting on them, their willingness to talk to us and give of themselves made their stories such a privilege and delight to tell.

When a colleague approached one of the men’s 4x200 metres freestyle relay team, Matt Richards, for some words in the aftermath of the team taking gold, one of the GB press team reminded the swimmer that his presence was awaited imminently in the press conference theatre.

‘Walk with me there and we can talk?’ Richards suggested and the interview, given on the hoof, provided more gold.

Perhaps it’s hard for Premier League footballers to conduct themselves this way, given the relentless scrutiny and demands.

But there is certainly something for the po-faced, buttoned-up elite football world, PR-d to death, to learn from those two golden weeks in Paris.