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ILLUSTRATION — FLAGSIDE
Hakim Ziyech & João Félix: Chelsea's Odd Couple
Say Hakim Ziyech and you picture Ajax in full flow, that curling left foot bending in from the right. Say João Félix and you picture Atlético Madrid's record fee, a €126m teenager built to succeed Antoine Griezmann. Two players who belong to entirely different footballing worlds, yet for one Premier League season, they were teammates in the same blue shirt.
Two identities, one badge
Hakim Ziyech's story is written in Amsterdam. He arrived at Ajax in 2016 and by 2018-19 was producing numbers few Eredivisie players have matched, 16 goals and 13 assists in the league alone, 21 and 24 in all competitions. He won the Eredivisie, the KNVB Cup, was named in the Champions League Squad of the Season, and picked up the nickname "The Wizard" from Ajax's own supporters. That is the image of Ziyech most fans carry: a free-kick specialist and chance-creator who helped drag Ajax to a Champions League semi-final.
João Félix's formative years belong to Portugal and then to Spain. A Benfica academy graduate who won the league title in his only season as a first-team regular, he was sold to Atlético Madrid in 2019 for a club-record €126m, at the time the fourth-most expensive transfer in football history. He was meant to be Diego Simeone's next great forward, and in 2020-21 he did win La Liga with the club. Atlético, not Chelsea, is the shirt most associated with Félix's rise.
The crossing point: Chelsea, 2022-23
According to Flagside's own season records, both men were registered Chelsea players in 2022-23, Ziyech having joined in 2020-21 (a spell in which he won the Champions League, the UEFA Super Cup and the FIFA Club World Cup), and Félix arriving to overlap with him during that campaign. It is a pairing that reads oddly precisely because neither man's career is remembered through a Chelsea lens by most supporters. Ziyech's silverware at the club is real, but his identity was forged at Ajax; Félix's Chelsea time was a single chapter sandwiched between Atlético, a Barcelona loan, and a permanent Chelsea move a year later.
Where their paths diverged again
What makes the overlap feel so brief in retrospect is what came before and after. Ziyech's post-Ajax career took him from Chelsea silverware to Galatasaray, where he won back-to-back Süper Lig titles in 2023-24 and 2024-25, a very different stage from Stamford Bridge. Félix's road after that Chelsea season swung even further: a loan to Barcelona, a permanent return to Chelsea in 2024, a loan to AC Milan, and finally a move to Al-Nassr in 2025, where he was named Saudi Pro League Player of the Season in his first year.
Both players, in other words, are defined by clubs other than Chelsea, Ziyech by Ajax's Eredivisie-winning, Champions League run of 2018-19, Félix by Benfica's title-winning breakthrough and Atlético's record fee. Their Chelsea overlap sits almost as a footnote in both stories, which is exactly why it is worth pulling out: a Wizard from Amsterdam and a teenage prodigy from Viseu, sharing a dressing room during a season neither man's biography leans on to explain who they are.
Not a cautionary tale
Neither man's Chelsea stint should be read as a punchline. Ziyech left with Champions League and Club World Cup medals genuinely earned. Félix's Chelsea history includes a Conference League triumph in 2024-25. Both simply found their clearest footballing identity somewhere else, Ziyech in Amsterdam and Istanbul, Félix in Lisbon, Madrid and now Riyadh. For one season, though, west London held them both.
Sources2 sources
Wikipedia (en), Wikipedia (en), Wikipedia (en), Recent news coverage
Flagside's editors read every piece we publish. We work from the football press, write our own copy rather than reprinting anyone's, and check each article for accuracy and sourcing. Every outlet that fed into this piece is named under Sources.
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