Fankaty Dabo had to leave behind the glamour of Chelsea – but the Raith Rovers new boy reckons the London club’s football education will last a lifetime.
Dabo came through the ranks with the Premier League giants and rubbed shoulders with some future stars along the way.
He can credit the likes of Mason Mount, Trevoh Chalobah, Kurt Zouma, Dominic Solanke, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Marc Guéhi and Billy Gilmour amongst his former team-mates at The Blues.
The full-back finally called time on his 12 years at Stamford Bridge when he left for Coventry City in 2019.
However, the 28-year-old believes the benefits are everlasting.
“There’s loads of players I played with who have done quite well in their careers,” he told Courier Sport. “There are too many to name.
“The academy was just pumping out talent and the coaches were amazing.
“I was almost lucky to be there and lucky to rub shoulders with players in a group where we all pushed each other to be the best versions of ourselves.
“When you go out on loan or leave the club that education stays with you.
“And people realise it, when you just do little things.
“Even when I went out to Holland, if it wasn’t for Chelsea I would have found it very difficult to adapt to the technical side of the game.
“Chelsea is always good for a player’s career.”
The first time Dabo realised how good a thing he had at Chelsea was when he left the club to go on loan.
The full-back joined Swindon Town and then spread his wings with two stints in the Netherlands with Vitesse and then Sparta Rotterdam.
“Holland was different,” he added. “At that age, you don’t want to go, you don’t want to leave the country, you want to stay in England.
“But, in hindsight, it’s probably one of the best things I’ve ever done.
“It was good for more than just the football; just to learn a new culture and a new language and meet new people was good.
“At that point, my thought was always to be a professional footballer.
“At Chelsea, at that point in time, it was very difficult to actually break into the first-team because of the amount of top, top players who were there.
“So, you actually had to be exceptional – and when you went on loan you had to be exceptional to actually have a little bit of a chance of going back and breaking in.
“But I can’t fault them or have any bad words to say about Chelsea.”
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