Interesting that these four players were important once they left, but at best it's questionable they were
Gil - never got a chance to play in his natural position, to the point we changed our formation when Son was injured instead of giving Gil a shot
Ndombele - nuked his bridges from orbit
Lo Celso - lacking fitness, yet only getting short cameos off the bench
Dele - a shell of the player he was pre-injury bug (but let's just lazily blame his Twitch career...)
Clearly there's no issue with Ndombele and Dele leaving in January for reasons that are opposite sides of the same coin, the former needing to get out of the club if it meant feet first and the latter needing a change of scenery for the good of getting his career back on track, on the other hand Bryan is one of those aggravating moved because the second he gets some games in his natural position at Valencia he shows what he can do which he never did when playing as a RW or AM under both Nuno and Conte
When it comes to Lo Celso, there's the ever-growing feeling that we need to play 352 but allowing Lo Celso and Ndombele to go out on loan has prevented effectively boxed us in to playing 343 even in games where we need an extra body in midfield because if we played 352 that would basically be Bentancur, Skipp and Hojbjerg with Winks in reserve - and after that it's Harvey White and Alfie Devine, both players we can believe could be parachuted into a team in the League One playoff spots and fit right in, but they're raw talents yet both are a knock or a suspension away from having to play
This is where loaning out both Ndombele and Lo Celso does look odd, because while Ndombele's walking papers were signed when he dawdled off against Morecambe, there's no reason to not keep Lo Celso around as not only would that be giving him half a season to play his way into fitness and, more importantly, Conte's plans - something he could do without Ndombele in the way playing in the similar role - so there wouldn't be the niggling sense of dread that Skipp or Hojbjerg could be out for a few weeks every time they're limping after a rough challenge as we could say that we're not going to rely on an U23 player or just throw our hands up and speculate what Pape Matar Sarr will be like based on the 16 minutes of the AFCoN he played