Enzo Fernandez, from Benfica to Chelsea: Is he finally justifying the £106m fee?

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Benfica are not rooting for Enzo Fernandez to become a world champion this time around.

Back in December 2022, the sight of Fernandez lifting the World Cup trophy in Qatar was celebrated vicariously in the red corner of Lisbon as it was in his home city of Buenos Aires.

He had come into the competition as a substitute and his elevation into Lionel Scaloni’s starting XI after scoring a spectacular goal off the bench in a 2-0 win against Mexico had changed the trajectory of Argentina’s tournament, rebalancing the midfield supply lines into Lionel Messi.

Fernandez had been a Benfica player for only six months then, but it was already clear the club would make a huge profit on the €10million (£8.5m; $12m at current rates) fee, plus €8million in add-ons, paid to acquire him from River Plate in the summer of 2022. The only question was when.

Roger Schmidt’s Benfica side had gone into the World Cup break leading the Primeira Liga by eight points and had topped their Champions League group above Paris Saint-Germain and Juventus. Fernandez had quickly established himself as the playmaking hub of a dominant midfield.

Fernandez tackling Neymar while playing for Benfica in 2022 (Franck Fife/AFP/Getty Images)

Despite Benfica’s determination to preserve the core of a potentially special team, Fernandez returned to Portugal with Chelsea hot in pursuit. He had to be convinced to play in a 3-0 loss to Braga, then jetted back to Argentina for New Year celebrations.

Having been dropped for the following league match against Portimonense, he returned and scored in a cup win against Varzim, celebrating by tapping the club badge on his shirt in a sign widely interpreted as affirming his desire to stay.

Three weeks later, he joined Chelsea.

“We lost a great player but I’m not going to cry for a player who doesn’t want to represent Benfica,” club president Rui Costa told BTV after reluctantly signing off the January deadline day deal, which valued Fernandez at his €121million release clause.

“He showed no commitment to Benfica. Here I thought he couldn’t play for Benfica anymore. As a fan, I didn’t want this player anymore, as a manager it wasn’t a solution either and he couldn’t enter the locker room again. That’s when I decided to let him go.”

Fernandez fought hard to get to Chelsea, at the cost of any lingering goodwill from Benfica, despite the huge financial windfall his sale delivered. The midfielder has arguably had to fight even harder to begin to justify the energy and expense required to bring him to Stamford Bridge two and a half years ago.

The version of Fernandez that will take to the field for the Club World Cup last-16 meeting between Chelsea and Benfica on Saturday has evolved considerably.

The notion of Fernandez as the positional and spiritual successor to Jorginho at the heart of Chelsea’s midfield is in the past. Mauricio Pochettino, Chelsea’s head coach at the time, privately questioned whether his countryman was defensively impactful enough to be deployed as a deep-lying ‘No 6’ or creative enough to be a more attack-minded ‘No 8’ in central midfield. More often, Pochettino cast him as the latter.

Pochettino’s successor, Enzo Maresca, has come up with a more nuanced solution. “When we have the ball, he is playing like an attacking midfielder and is dropping next to Moises Caicedo when we don’t have the ball to give us defensive balance,” the Italian said of Fernandez in October.

Fernandez lifting the World Cup in 2022 (Julian Finney/Getty Images)

It helps that Fernandez is now fit enough to go from box to box at Premier League intensity, which was not the case when he arrived from Benfica in the middle of the 2022-23 season.

“The first six months, the first year with Pochettino, was very difficult for me physically, but then I had to start training extra because what I did in the morning was not enough,” he said in an interview with Argentine journalist Gaston Edul at Chelsea’s Cobham HQ last month. “As time went by, I got the results and (now) I feel very good physically.”

The requirements of his role in Maresca’s system have significantly re-modelled Fernandez’s game. Last season, the 24-year-old recorded by far the fewest number of touches (67.6) and attempted passes (58.1) per 90 minutes of his career.

His influence on Chelsea’s sequences of possession is almost entirely focused on the left ‘pocket’ or half-space, operating alongside Cole Palmer as one of two advanced creators in a ‘box’ midfield.

Fernandez’s adaptation has been painful at times. In the first half of last season, it was reasonable to wonder if he had a logical position in Chelsea’s best XI. Maresca himself appeared to wrestle with that question, benching the Argentinian for four Premier League games in a row in October and admitting he preferred the “physicality” offered by Romeo Lavia’s midfield partnership with Caicedo.

But in recent months, Fernandez has demonstrated his value to Chelsea’s attack, creating chances more efficiently in the final third and offering an auxiliary goal threat. His arrival in the penalty area to convert Liam Delap’s cross against Los Angeles FC was not surprising — it mirrored the run he made to score a vital early winner against Liverpool in early May.

While the frequency of his shot attempts has actually dipped slightly relative to last season (1.6 per 90 minutes, down from 1.8), the average distance of his shots has shrunk over his Chelsea career (25.7 yards in 2022-23, 21.3 yards in 2023-24, 18.1 yards in 2024-25) and perhaps not coincidentally he is finishing more clinically.

Fernandez playing for Chelsea at the Club World Cup (Franck Fife/AFP/Getty Images)

Fernandez also credits the time he has spent with a sports psychologist for a mental breakthrough. “The first year and a half I was here wasn’t easy,” he said in his interview with Edul. “Moving countries — I had been in Lisbon before for six months — everything was new, a new language. Being with my family was also difficult. Here (in England), by 3 pm it was already night, and living day-to-day life was difficult until I got psychological help.

“I started to share what I felt and as time went by, I started feeling better. Then everything became much easier.”

Fernandez was directly involved in 13 goals in the Premier League (six goals and seven assists, his best attacking numbers in Europe) and scored and assisted in Chelsea’s comeback win over Real Betis in last month’s Conference League final, nodding in the equaliser from Palmer’s inviting cross.

He has carried that form to the United States, building on his goal against LAFC with a clever dinked pass to help Delap score his first goal for the club against ES Tunis. “He’s told me to run when he gets the ball,” Delap told reporters after the match.

Fernandez has already made more than double the number of appearances for Chelsea that he made for River and Benfica combined, and a significant number of them while wearing the captain’s armband. Maresca has always described him as a “reference” for his team on the pitch, but such status carries more credibility now that it appears there are no enduring dressing-room issues from the racist Argentina team bus song video that overshadowed last summer.

That seems to have been consigned to history, along with his all-too-brief stint in Lisbon. Benfica will only delight in this reunion if they win, but recent history suggests Fernandez could play a big part in sending them home.

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(Top photo: Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images)

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