Mourinho confident Lukaku and De Bruyne will compete for starting roles

Jose Mourinho

Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho is confident Romelu Lukaku and Kevin De Bruyne will compete for the first-team after they completed their loans spells successfully at West Brom and Werder Bremen respectively.

Mourinho considers the Belgian duo as an important part of his squad and he considers them to be ready for action next season.Mourinho told the club’s official website: “‘They are good players with a very good value in the market and we have these players this season for free, after an investment that the club did before.

“After the development of the players on loan it is the right moment for them to be back. They are very young with space to develop, they will be better year after year and I can imagine in five years they are much better than today – but what they have today is more than enough to belong to this squad.

“So we are a very young squad. We have an average age of 26.3 and that includes Schwarzer who is 40 years old and JT, Cech and Lampard in their 30s, so if we don’t involve these players we drop to almost an Under-21 team.

‘We have a team to develop, we have a team to work. Of course we know there are expectations already and we want to create expectations for ourselves, we don’t need other people to create them – but the reality is the best period of this team has yet to arrive because they are very young and in five, six, seven years’ time is when this team will be in the best moment of their careers.’

Both Lukaku and De Bruyne were being linked with various clubs for another loan spell but all the speculation has come to rest following the Special One’s announcement.