Latest news with #Meditations
Daily Record
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
Mum faces family backlash over daughter's unique name inspired by Roman emperor
Her family said it was "too hard to pronounce" and "didn't match" their other children's names. Choosing a name for your child is a deeply personal decision, with parents drawing inspiration from various sources such as baby name books, websites, family traditions, and even pop culture. Yet, one mum who opted for a historical figure as her daughter's namesake has faced severe backlash from her relatives. The baby's grandmother has been "deliberately stubborn", even pretending she "can't remember the name" to avoid using it. In a candid Reddit post, the mum revealed that she named her newborn Aurelia - inspired by the ancient Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius. She shared: "My family is very critical of my newborn daughter's name - Aurelia. My mom says it sounds too modern and 'made up', and it's way too hard to pronounce. My husband and I explained that it's an ancient Roman name, and we were inspired to name her after Marcus Aurelius when we read his Meditations while I was pregnant." Marcus Aurelius wrote Meditations in Greek as a source for his own guidance and self-improvement. The work continues to sell and be read by people all around the world to this day. Marcus Aurelius' works garnered him the reputation of the 'philosopher king'. The mother further explained that she and her husband say their daughter's name as "Aw-ree-lee-uh", which might be the root of the confusion. Other commenters noted that the more common pronunciation is "Aw-ray-lee-uh", reports the Mirror. She added: "We pronounce her name Aw-ree-lee-uh, because that's the pronunciation that makes the most sense to us due to her namesake. "I feel like she is being deliberately stubborn by saying she can't remember the name, even though she has had two weeks of hearing us say it." At the end of her post, she queried if Aurelia was "too out-there" as a name, and noted some family members have also criticised it for not "matching" her other children's names - Evangeline, Eliza, and Clara. Commenters on the post largely reassured the mum that she should use the name if she loves it. They recognised there's nothing wrong with the name itself, though quite a few did mention potential issues with its pronunciation. One individual remarked: "This sounds like a mum issue rather than a name issue. 'Modern and made up' about a name that has literally 1000s of years of history. Aurelia is a lovely name. Wait it out, I am sure your mum will come around eventually." Another pitched in: "Definitely an established name, but I have never heard that pronunciation before. Is it a legitimate pronunciation of the name? I've always heard it as being 'uh-RELL-ee-uh' or 'uh-RAY-lee-uh'." A third contributed: "I think it goes great with her sisters' names! It's a very pretty name. If you and your husband love it, that's what matters most. Others will figure out how to say it."
Daily Mirror
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
'I named daughter after ancient Roman icon – my family hate it but I don't care'
A mum who named her daughter after a former Roman emperor has said she won't consider changing it even though her family hate it - and online commenters are split too Choosing a name for your child is often a deeply personal decision. Parents can take inspiration for their child's name from a variety of different places, including baby name books and websites, family members, and even pop culture references from films, books, or music. However, one mum who took inspiration from history for her daughter's name has been met with harsh criticism from her family, who have urged her to change the moniker. The mum said the baby's grandmother has even gone as far as being "deliberately stubborn" and claiming she "can't remember the name" so she doesn't have to use it. In a post on Reddit, the mum said she chose to name her newborn daughter Aurelia, inspired by the former Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius. She wrote: "My family is very critical of my newborn daughter's name - Aurelia. My mom says it sounds too modern and 'made up', and it's way too hard to pronounce. My husband and I explained that it's an ancient Roman name, and we were inspired to name her after Marcus Aurelius when we read his Meditations while I was pregnant." The mum went on to say she and her husband pronounce their daughter's name as "Aw-ree-lee-uh", which is potentially causing the confusion. Commenters on the post pointed out the name is most commonly pronounced "Aw-ray-lee-uh". She added: "We pronounce her name Aw-ree-lee-uh, because that's the pronunciation that makes the most sense to us due to her namesake. "I feel like she is being deliberately stubborn by saying she can't remember the name, even though she has had two weeks of hearing us say it." At the end of her post, she asked people if they thought Aurelia was "too out-there" as a name, and said some of her family have also criticised it for not "matching" their other kids' names - Evangeline, Eliza, and Clara. Commenters on the post largely told the mum she should keep using the name if she loves it. They noted that there was nothing wrong with the moniker itself, but many did point out the issues with the pronunciation. One person said: "This sounds like a mum issue rather than a name issue. 'Modern and made up' about a name that has literally 1000s of years of history. Aurelia is a lovely name. Wait it out, I am sure your mum will come around eventually." Another added: "Definitely an established name, but I have never heard that pronunciation before. Is it a legitimate pronunciation of the name? I've always heard it as being 'uh-RELL-ee-uh' or 'uh-RAY-lee-uh'." A third posted: "I think it goes great with her sisters' names! It's a very pretty name. If you and your husband love it, that's what matters most. Others will figure out how to say it."
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
How Organ Meat Got Into Smoothies
In the video, the man and his burgundy slab of beef liver are best friends. Their bond is revealed in a series of vignettes: The man ties a dog leash around the meat lump and lugs it behind him on a skateboard (afternoon stroll). The man dresses it in sunglasses and a necktie and positions it with a copy of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations (reading date). The man pulls back his bedsheets to reveal that the liver is his new pillow (slumber party!). It's a joke, clearly, but the video's caption, posted by the nutrition influencer known by the pseudonym Carnivore Aurelius, is earnest: He hopes it inspires his 1 million Instagram followers to eat more beef liver. 'If nutrition were a Roman coliseum, kale would be the defeated gladiator,' he wrote, 'and beef liver would be the lion tearing him to shreds.' This extravagant devotion to organ meats has become common within online wellness communities promoting 'ancestral' diets—a relative of the paleo diet, which endorses the consumption of whole, unprocessed foods. On TikTok, tradwives, carnivore bros and girlies, and holistic wellness influencers tout the benefits of eating organ meat, mostly from cows. Some of them eat it raw; others eat it cooked. The enthusiasm has spawned an industry that turns offal—a catchall term for an animal's nonmuscular parts—into pill or powdered form. 'Sneaking in' organ meats is a recurring theme: Some clips show moms blending beef-liver powder into their toddlers' orange juice and smoothies; one shows a man dropping offal chunks into his partner's ground beef. [Read: America is done pretending about meat] All of this social-media attention has been translating into people's actual eating habits, Victoria Fitzgerald, who oversees Whole Foods Market's meat merchandising, told me. In 2020, the grocery-store chain introduced frozen organ-meat blends into its stores, and every year since, the products have seen triple-digit growth in sales. In some stores in Miami and Austin, Whole Foods' most popular organ-meat product—Force of Nature's 'grass fed beef ancestral blend,' a ground mix that includes beef liver and heart—sells at 15 times the rate of other frozen meat items. The buzzy Los Angeles supermarket Erewhon also got in on the offal hype, selling a $19 'raw animal' smoothie last year made with freeze-dried beef organs. And, like Whole Foods, Natural Grocers, a supermarket chain with stores west of the Mississippi River, named organ-meat products a top trend for 2025. In the United States, this latest revival is particularly striking given how unpopular offal has been with Americans in recent history. Here, organ meats have been regarded with something of a 'yuck factor,' Mark McWilliams, a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy and the editor of Offal: Rejected and Reclaimed Food, told me. Many Americans view them as 'forbidden and unfamiliar,' he said. And the more unfamiliar a food is, the grosser it might seem to some people to eat. Yet today's fanfare isn't because of a sudden switch-up in Americans' tastes. Rather, the influencers who extol offal's virtues seem to do so on the basis of its nutrient density. Organ meats appear to be viewed less as meals and more as supplements: something to be consumed not primarily for flavor but in pursuit of the influencers' vision of optimal health. For as long as humans have eaten animals, they've eaten offal. The first humans ate the whole animal when they hunted, starting with the heart and brains, according to the chef Jennifer McLagan's book Odd Bits: How to Cook the Rest of the Animal. Ancient Romans feasted on goose-feet stew; Greeks ate splanchna, or bowels; Elizabethans nibbled on bird tongues. Organ meats played a key role in the Navajo Nation's traditional diet—and people all over the world continue to eat the whole animal today. Sometime in the late 18th century, though, offal started suffering from an image problem, viewed by some people to be an affordable but second-rate food. McLagan traces this shift in reputation to the rise of slaughterhouses in England, which led to a greater availability of meat as well as an oversupply of perishable, hard-to-ship offal. Instead of tossing these cuts, the slaughterhouses would offer them to poor people who lived nearby. 'The result of this generosity,' McLagan writes, was that organ meats' 'prestige fell.' Around the same time in the United States, offal developed a reputation in some quarters as a food eaten mostly by people of low social status; according to some scholars, enslaved people in the antebellum South were often given the parts of livestock considered less desirable, such as pig's feet, jowls, and small intestines (chitterlings). Even so, into the early 20th century, enough Americans were apparently still eating offal that Irma Rombauer included recipes for liver, brains, and kidneys in her wildly popular 1931 cookbook, Joy of Cooking. But by the 1940s and '50s, organ-meat consumption had begun to taper off. Family farms and butcher shops were giving way to factories and supermarkets. Muscle meats, such as chicken breast and sirloin, became cheaper. 'People forget chicken used to be a very special dish—a roast chicken was something you had on Sundays,' McLagan told me. When eating muscle meat daily became a possibility, many people opted out of offal. (By the time the 1953 edition of Joy of Cooking came out, Rombauer felt the need to add a coy introduction to her organ-meat recipes: 'The following is a hush-hush section, 'just between us girls,'' she wrote.) Since then, organ meats produced in the United States have largely been exported, made into pet food, or simply thrown in the trash. [Read: The WWII campaign to bring organ meats to the dinner table] Many people have tried to rebrand organ meats for wider consumption, to little lasting effect. During World War II, meat rationing led to a government campaign encouraging families to eat offal, which was renamed 'variety meats.' This effort led to a brief boost in popularity, though by the war's end, organ meats were once again mostly abandoned. In the 1990s, the British chef Fergus Henderson popularized the 'nose-to-tail' movement, which primarily focused on animal rights and sustainability and aimed to use as much of the animal as possible. 'If you're going to knock it on the head,' Henderson said, 'it seems only polite to eat the whole thing.' That ethos gained popularity with some Americans too: In 2004, Henderson's cookbook, full of highbrow recipes such as deviled kidneys and potato-stuffed pig's foot, was released in the United States with a glowing introduction by the food celebrity Anthony Bourdain, who called the roast bone marrow at Henderson's restaurant St. John his 'death row meal.' When McLagan released Odd Bits in 2011, she, too, was hopeful that organ meats were on a fast track to the mainstream. Yet the nose-to-tail movement, appealing mostly to fringe foodies, never made a big dent on eating habits. 'I thought that I would change the world with the book,' McLagan told me. 'Of course, I didn't.' The newest organ-meat revival doesn't bother as much with time-intensive recipes—it's far more focused on convenience. Besides ground-meat blends and supplement pills, offal is being sold as salted crisps, chocolate-almond-flavored protein bars, vinegary meat sticks, and freeze-dried powder toppings to be sprinkled on dishes like pizza or steak. Whole Foods is planning to expand its offal selection, Fitzgerald told me; easy-to-cook options such as premade organ-meat burgers and meatballs should soon be available. Today's offal movement is, in part, an offshoot of the carnivore diet—a meat-heavy approach to eating that, despite copious warnings from nutritionists, rose to prominence online beginning around 2018. Controversial influencers such as Paul Saladino, Brian 'Liver King' Johnson, and Joe Rogan all helped popularize the trend. Many influencers have painted organ meats as a miracle food, claiming that eating them had improved ailments such as fatigue, anemia, and hives; in one 2020 podcast, Rogan suggested that eating offal and other types of meat could possibly cure autoimmune disorders. 'Don't believe anything that is too good to be true,' Melissa Fernandez, a professor at the University of Ottawa who studies nutrition influencers and misinformation, told me. Some influencers, she noted, are entrepreneurs whose businesses may benefit from their own nutritional advice. Saladino and Johnson, for instance, each own organ-meat-supplement companies. (Saladino has denied any conflict of interest, saying that organs 'are some of the most nutrient-rich foods on the planet.') [Read: The Jordan Peterson all-meat diet] Despite the scant scientific support for influencers' more extreme health claims, in recent years the offal hype has also extended past carnivore-diet enthusiasts to include a broader, omnivorous group of nutrition-focused eaters. The refrain 'Mother Nature's multivitamin' is fairly ubiquitous on organ-meat social-media posts, where influencers typically list off an alphabet soup of nutrients, among them vitamin A, B12, and iron. Organ meats are also portrayed like munchable fountains of youth: Beef liver has been deemed, at once, 'nature's botox,' 'edible retinol,' and the 'one supplement to make you hotter.' Offal does indeed have lots of nutrients—but like influencers' health assertions, most of these beauty claims have little evidence to support them, Pieter Cohen, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and the leader of Cambridge Health Alliance's Supplement Research Program, told me. 'Do I know of any research that has proven that eating organ meat—the food—improves skin, improves mood, or improves the quality of your hair?' Cohen said. 'No.' Consuming organ meats as supplements could actually be harmful to people's health, Cohen and Fernandez said. The supplement industry has little government oversight and is known to be rife with ingredients that are either ineffective or, worse, dangerous. 'I have huge, huge concerns over their safety,' Fernandez said of these new organ-meat supplements. Given organ meats' nutrient density, eating liver every day in any form—whether as a capsule or sautéed with onions—may be hazardous. Fernandez flagged that people could end up consuming too much vitamin A; this is especially notable for pregnant women, who risk the possibility of birth defects through overconsumption, she told me. 'There's actual danger there in toxicity.' (Johnson's Ancestral Supplements and Saladino's Heart & Soil—which the Liver King also co-owns—have both dismissed concerns about vitamin A toxicity, suggesting that their products fall within a safe daily dosage.) That's not to say people should steer clear of organ meats. The nutrition experts I spoke with just advised treating them as actual food instead of supplements, and not eating them every day. Fernandez suggested seeking pleasure in offal, such as by cooking a new dish. And although offal may never become as ubiquitous as muscle meat in American diets, more people eating organ meats could come with some positives. In McWilliams's and McLagan's view, offal provides a real way to combat the moral quandary of meat eating. 'If you're someone who wants to eat meat but is conscious of the problems of industrial food production,' McWilliams told me, 'eating the whole animal is one way out.' Beef liver may not be a gladiator-crushing lion ready to dethrone kale in some fictive nutritional coliseum. But, at the very least, it doesn't need to go in the trash. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
How Organ Meat Got Into Smoothies
In the video, the man and his burgundy slab of beef liver are best friends. Their bond is revealed in a series of vignettes: The man ties a dog leash around the meat lump and lugs it behind him on a skateboard (afternoon stroll). The man dresses it in sunglasses and a necktie and positions it with a copy of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations (reading date). The man pulls back his bedsheets to reveal that the liver is his new pillow (slumber party!). It's a joke, clearly, but the video's caption, posted by the nutrition influencer known by the pseudonym Carnivore Aurelius, is earnest: He hopes it inspires his 1 million Instagram followers to eat more beef liver. 'If nutrition were a Roman coliseum, kale would be the defeated gladiator,' he wrote, 'and beef liver would be the lion tearing him to shreds.' This extravagant devotion to organ meats has become common within online wellness communities promoting 'ancestral' diets—a relative of the paleo diet, which endorses the consumption of whole, unprocessed foods. On TikTok, tradwives, carnivore bros and girlies, and holistic wellness influencers tout the benefits of eating organ meat, mostly from cows. Some of them eat it raw; others eat it cooked. The enthusiasm has spawned an industry that turns offal—a catchall term for an animal's nonmuscular parts—into pill or powdered form. 'Sneaking in' organ meats is a recurring theme: Some clips show moms blending beef-liver powder into their toddlers' orange juice and smoothies; one shows a man dropping offal chunks into his partner's ground beef. All of this social-media attention has been translating into people's actual eating habits, Victoria Fitzgerald, who oversees Whole Foods Market's meat merchandising, told me. In 2020, the grocery-store chain introduced frozen organ-meat blends into its stores, and every year since, the products have seen triple-digit growth in sales. In some stores in Miami and Austin, Whole Foods' most popular organ-meat product—Force of Nature's 'grass fed beef ancestral blend,' a ground mix that includes beef liver and heart—sells at 15 times the rate of other frozen meat items. The buzzy Los Angeles supermarket Erewhon also got in on the offal hype, selling a $19 'raw animal' smoothie last year made with freeze-dried beef organs. And, like Whole Foods, Natural Grocers, a supermarket chain with stores west of the Mississippi River, named organ-meat products a top trend for 2025. In the United States, this latest revival is particularly striking given how unpopular offal has been with Americans in recent history. Here, organ meats have been regarded with something of a 'yuck factor,' Mark McWilliams, a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy and the editor of Offal: Rejected and Reclaimed Food, told me. Many Americans view them as 'forbidden and unfamiliar,' he said. And the more unfamiliar a food is, the grosser it might seem to some people to eat. Yet today's fanfare isn't because of a sudden switch-up in Americans' tastes. Rather, the influencers who extol offal's virtues seem to do so on the basis of its nutrient density. Organ meats appear to be viewed less as meals and more as supplements: something to be consumed not primarily for flavor but in pursuit of the influencers' vision of optimal health. For as long as humans have eaten animals, they've eaten offal. The first humans ate the whole animal when they hunted, starting with the heart and brains, according to the chef Jennifer McLagan's book Odd Bits: How to Cook the Rest of the Animal. Ancient Romans feasted on goose-feet stew; Greeks ate splanchna, or bowels; Elizabethans nibbled on bird tongues. Organ meats played a key role in the Navajo Nation's traditional diet—and people all over the world continue to eat the whole animal today. Sometime in the late 18th century, though, offal started suffering from an image problem, viewed by some people to be an affordable but second-rate food. McLagan traces this shift in reputation to the rise of slaughterhouses in England, which led to a greater availability of meat as well as an oversupply of perishable, hard-to-ship offal. Instead of tossing these cuts, the slaughterhouses would offer them to poor people who lived nearby. 'The result of this generosity,' McLagan writes, was that organ meats' 'prestige fell.' Around the same time in the United States, offal developed a reputation in some quarters as a food eaten mostly by people of low social status; according to some scholars, enslaved people in the antebellum South were often given the parts of livestock considered less desirable, such as pig's feet, jowls, and small intestines (chitterlings). Even so, into the early 20th century, enough Americans were apparently still eating offal that Irma Rombauer included recipes for liver, brains, and kidneys in her wildly popular 1931 cookbook, Joy of Cooking. But by the 1940s and '50s, organ-meat consumption had begun to taper off. Family farms and butcher shops were giving way to factories and supermarkets. Muscle meats, such as chicken breast and sirloin, became cheaper. 'People forget chicken used to be a very special dish—a roast chicken was something you had on Sundays,' McLagan told me. When eating muscle meat daily became a possibility, many people opted out of offal. (By the time the 1953 edition of Joy of Cooking came out, Rombauer felt the need to add a coy introduction to her organ-meat recipes: 'The following is a hush-hush section, 'just between us girls,'' she wrote.) Since then, organ meats produced in the United States have largely been exported, made into pet food, or simply thrown in the trash. Many people have tried to rebrand organ meats for wider consumption, to little lasting effect. During World War II, meat rationing led to a government campaign encouraging families to eat offal, which was renamed 'variety meats.' This effort led to a brief boost in popularity, though by the war's end, organ meats were once again mostly abandoned. In the 1990s, the British chef Fergus Henderson popularized the 'nose-to-tail' movement, which primarily focused on animal rights and sustainability and aimed to use as much of the animal as possible. 'If you're going to knock it on the head,' Henderson said, 'it seems only polite to eat the whole thing.' That ethos gained popularity with some Americans too: In 2004, Henderson's cookbook, full of highbrow recipes such as deviled kidneys and potato-stuffed pig's foot, was released in the United States with a glowing introduction by the food celebrity Anthony Bourdain, who called the roast bone marrow at Henderson's restaurant St. John his 'death row meal.' When McLagan released Odd Bits in 2011, she, too, was hopeful that organ meats were on a fast track to the mainstream. Yet the nose-to-tail movement, appealing mostly to fringe foodies, never made a big dent on eating habits. 'I thought that I would change the world with the book,' McLagan told me. 'Of course, I didn't.' The newest organ-meat revival doesn't bother as much with time-intensive recipes—it's far more focused on convenience. Besides ground-meat blends and supplement pills, offal is being sold as salted crisps, chocolate-almond-flavored protein bars, vinegary meat sticks, and freeze-dried powder toppings to be sprinkled on dishes like pizza or steak. Whole Foods is planning to expand its offal selection, Fitzgerald told me; easy-to-cook options such as premade organ-meat burgers and meatballs should soon be available. Today's offal movement is, in part, an offshoot of the carnivore diet—a meat-heavy approach to eating that, despite copious warnings from nutritionists, rose to prominence online beginning around 2018. Controversial influencers such as Paul Saladino, Brian 'Liver King' Johnson, and Joe Rogan all helped popularize the trend. Many influencers have painted organ meats as a miracle food, claiming that eating them had improved ailments such as fatigue, anemia, and hives; in one 2020 podcast, Rogan suggested that eating offal and other types of meat could possibly cure autoimmune disorders. 'Don't believe anything that is too good to be true,' Melissa Fernandez, a professor at the University of Ottawa who studies nutrition influencers and misinformation, told me. Some influencers, she noted, are entrepreneurs whose businesses may benefit from their own nutritional advice. Saladino and Johnson, for instance, each own organ-meat-supplement companies. (Saladino has denied any conflict of interest, saying that organs 'are some of the most nutrient-rich foods on the planet.') Despite the scant scientific support for influencers' more extreme health claims, in recent years the offal hype has also extended past carnivore-diet enthusiasts to include a broader, omnivorous group of nutrition-focused eaters. The refrain 'Mother Nature's multivitamin' is fairly ubiquitous on organ-meat social-media posts, where influencers typically list off an alphabet soup of nutrients, among them vitamin A, B12, and iron. Organ meats are also portrayed like munchable fountains of youth: Beef liver has been deemed, at once, ' nature's botox,' ' edible retinol,' and the ' one supplement to make you hotter.' Offal does indeed have lots of nutrients—but like influencers' health assertions, most of these beauty claims have little evidence to support them, Pieter Cohen, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and the leader of Cambridge Health Alliance's Supplement Research Program, told me. 'Do I know of any research that has proven that eating organ meat—the food—improves skin, improves mood, or improves the quality of your hair?' Cohen said. 'No.' Consuming organ meats as supplements could actually be harmful to people's health, Cohen and Fernandez said. The supplement industry has little government oversight and is known to be rife with ingredients that are either ineffective or, worse, dangerous. 'I have huge, huge concerns over their safety,' Fernandez said of these new organ-meat supplements. Given organ meats' nutrient density, eating liver every day in any form—whether as a capsule or sautéed with onions—may be hazardous. Fernandez flagged that people could end up consuming too much vitamin A; this is especially notable for pregnant women, who risk the possibility of birth defects through overconsumption, she told me. 'There's actual danger there in toxicity.' (Johnson's Ancestral Supplements and Saladino's Heart & Soil—which the Liver King also co-owns—have both dismissed concerns about vitamin A toxicity, suggesting that their products fall within a safe daily dosage.) That's not to say people should steer clear of organ meats. The nutrition experts I spoke with just advised treating them as actual food instead of supplements, and not eating them every day. Fernandez suggested seeking pleasure in offal, such as by cooking a new dish. And although offal may never become as ubiquitous as muscle meat in American diets, more people eating organ meats could come with some positives. In McWilliams's and McLagan's view, offal provides a real way to combat the moral quandary of meat eating. 'If you're someone who wants to eat meat but is conscious of the problems of industrial food production,' McWilliams told me, 'eating the whole animal is one way out.' Beef liver may not be a gladiator-crushing lion ready to dethrone kale in some fictive nutritional coliseum. But, at the very least, it doesn't need to go in the trash.
New York Times
21-02-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
Chelsea's loan army: Who will challenge for a role at Stamford Bridge next season?
No help is coming. Well, not quite no help. Wesley Fofana and Romeo Lavia are nearing a return to fitness, and there is hope that Nicolas Jackson will be back in April. But if Chelsea are to halt the alarming slide that risks wrecking their season against Aston Villa on Saturday and Southampton on Tuesday, the same core of players who fell into this hole — winning just two of their last nine Premier League matches — will need to be the ones digging them out of it. Advertisement When he delivers his dressing-room team talk for the Villa game, Enzo Maresca might be tempted to quote full-time Roman emperor and part-time philosopher Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations: 'Get busy with life's purpose, toss aside empty hopes, get active in your own rescue — if you care for yourself at all — and do it while you can.' This summer will be a different story. Another transfer window affords a fresh opportunity for squad surgery, and Chelsea have already signalled that a striker and a winger will be pursued. That does not include the arrivals already locked in; Kendry Paez is acclimatising at Cobham, with Brazilian teenage sensation Estevao and giant Belgian goalkeeper Mike Penders due to follow at the end of the season. Nor does it account for the small army of returning loanees. With any transfer budget likely to be affected by whether or not Champions League qualification is achieved, some of those who spent the 2024-25 season plying their trade elsewhere could provide a considerably cheaper source of squad reinforcement or, at the very least, depth. What follows is a closer look at the loanees who are best positioned to help Chelsea next season. This is a primarily subjective ranking, but it is informed by the expectation that Todd Boehly/Clearlake Capital's commitment to Maresca's possession-focused, positional style of play and their own low-base salary, high-incentive pay structure will persist into the 2025-26 campaign. With all that in mind, let's begin… No surprises here. Santos has been arguably the standout performer in a fun young Strasbourg team who have pushed their way up to seventh in Ligue 1 under Liam Rosenior, regularly showcasing his ability to impact matches all over the pitch in impressively varied ways. His instincts for arriving in the opposition penalty area at the right moments have yielded seven goals from midfield in 21 league appearances, but not at the expense of his defensive contributions; his 3.6 tackles averaged per 90 minutes is more than any other player in the division. He is also solid and efficient in possession. 'I call him Dunga (after Brazil's 1994 World Cup-winning captain): he's Brazilian but he doesn't play like one,' Rosenior said of Santos, 20, in an interview with The Athletic last month. 'He's so smart and his stats are through the roof, in terms of scoring goals, winning duels. He's going to have an outstanding career.' Advertisement Santos' form understandably prompted calls from some supporters to see him recalled by Chelsea in January. Positionally he is not a natural alternative to Moises Caicedo or Romeo Lavia, but beyond his goal threat, he projects to provide some of the box-to-box physicality missing from this squad since the summer sale of Conor Gallagher. With another six months of professional seasoning in Ligue 1, he should be fully primed for a real role at Chelsea next season. Veiga's urgency to leave Chelsea on loan in January was something of a surprise given that he was signed last summer as a raw developmental project and was not even guaranteed a place in the first-team squad until Maresca took a closer look at him during the club's pre-season tour of the United States. But the keen interest of Champions League clubs such as Borussia Dortmund and Juventus can change a footballer's short-term outlook. So, too, can the sudden, unexpected opportunity to establish a regular presence and consistent role at international level. Veiga, 21, sees himself above all as a ball-playing centre-back, and so too does Portugal coach Roberto Martinez. That is also where Juventus coach Thiago Motta has deployed him in his first five appearances. 'With him, we play from the back and we don't need to drop the midfielders back,' Motta said of Veiga in a press conference before a 1-0 victory against Inter on Sunday. Veiga picked up a calf injury early in Juventus' 3-1 defeat against PSV on Wednesday, which could slow his progress, but the highly positive start to his loan spell raises interesting questions ahead of the summer. Could he be a more viable option in the eyes of Maresca by then? He still wants his long-term future to be at Stamford Bridge. As long as he is not sidelined for too long, Veiga appears on track to return to Cobham a more polished, valuable player than the version who departed last month. GO DEEPER How Juventus' centre-backs changed the game in the second half against Inter Light is finally beginning to creep into the end of the tunnel for Ugochukwu, who spent the final months of 2024 not being picked by manager Russell Martin for a Southampton team mounting a real challenge to finish as the worst side in Premier League history. Martin's successor, Ivan Juric, values him more highly and Ugochukwu has featured in all eight Premier League matches since Southampton made their coaching change last month, starting five times. Along the way, he has begun to flash the blend of technical, physical and athletic attributes that led Chelsea to pay £23.5million ($29.8m) to sign him from Rennes in July 2023. 'I don't know a word to describe him: he is a fantastic player,' Southampton striker Paul Onuachu said of Ugochukwu after the 20-year-old shone off the bench in a 3-2 defeat against Nottingham Forest. 'He was fantastic both defensively and driving with the ball.' Given that those are some of the qualities Chelsea most sorely lack during the frequent injury absences of Lavia, recalling Ugochukwu in January was a likelier prospect in January than bringing Santos back — but Southampton's decision to replace Martin with Juric shifted the dial in a positive direction for his development. Advertisement 'It's always good to have someone that believes in you,' Ugochukwu said pointedly in an interview for Southampton's match programme last month. 'I'm trying to be the type of player that people can rely on. I can bring a lot to the team, with my height, my long legs and my aggressiveness.' Those same attributes could make him useful to Chelsea next season. Nothing raises quite as many questions about Chelsea's recruitment strategy as the surreal journey Joao Felix has undertaken: from an unwanted financial millstone at Atletico Madrid to £44.5million signing of opportunity at Stamford Bridge to Milan's shiny new loan acquisition, all in the space of six months. The latter move was driven by the Portugal international's desire for more meaningful game time than he had received in the first half of this season under Maresca at Stamford Bridge, where he was only considered positionally suitable to serve as understudy to the undroppable Palmer. GO DEEPER Joao Felix has become football's Rorschach test - everyone sees something different In his time on the pitch, Joao Felix's second Chelsea stint had played out not too dissimilarly to his first spell on loan in 2023: some nice flashes of on-ball skill and some goals in relatively low-pressure situations against lesser opposition, but little by way of meaningful positive impact. There is very little evidence in an underwhelming career resume to suggest he will blossom into something greater at the age of 25, but in theory Joao Felix could provide reasonable squad cover for Cole Palmer if he resumes his Chelsea career at the end of his Milan loan. The problem is that he clearly regards himself as worthy of a bigger role than that. GO DEEPER Joao Felix has become football's Rorschach test - everyone sees something different If it were just a question of form, Petrovic would rank higher on this list. The Serbian has been one of the better goalkeepers in Ligue 1 this season and a key contributor to Strasbourg's rise under Rosenior, keeping five clean sheets and preventing 4.8 more goals than expected according to Advertisement 'We have seen huge progress from Petro,' Rosenior said of Petrovic after Strasbourg earned a 2-1 win over Lille last month. 'He is a world-class goalkeeper.' Such a characterisation will likely have many Chelsea supporters scratching their heads as to why Petrovic is having to earn his stripes elsewhere in the BlueCo family while Robert Sanchez, the man whose starting spot he took at Stamford Bridge last season, was granted another chance to be the No 1 under Maresca. Sanchez is back on the Chelsea bench again, this time with summer signing Filip Jorgensen the beneficiary, but this is unlikely to lead to an opportunity for Petrovic, 25, to re-establish himself at his parent club next season. He was loaned out because he is not regarded as being good enough with his feet to play in a progressive, possession-dominant team. Unless he changes that fundamental evaluation, Jorgensen, Sanchez and Penders are expected to be the three goalkeepers Chelsea plan around moving forward. Even with stylistic limitations, Petrovic would clearly be a highly capable backup, but he has also done enough as a starter since arriving in Europe to reasonably demand No 1 status somewhere else. (Top photos: Getty Images)
