Marcel Lewis left Chelsea for Belgian club Union last summer
(Picture: Getty Images)Former Chelsea youngster Marcel Lewis has opened up on his struggles since moving to Belgian high-fliers Union - but the midfielder has a belief that he'll soon turn his career around.
After success in the academy at Cobham, many predicted that his talent could dominate in the Belgian league when made the move from Chelsea in 2021.
However, due to a combination of difficulty adapting to football overseas during the Covid pandemic and Union having a spectacularly good season, the 20-year-old failed to break into the team. Union would go on to finish top of the Belgian first division but lost in the title play-off final to Club Brugge.
Lewis is happy to have called the likes of Mason Mount and Reece James team-mates and watch on as Tammy Abraham and Fikayo Tomori won trophies overseas last season. Yet he isn't feeling under pressure to immediately emulate what his peers have done.
“It wasn’t an easy decision to make but I felt like at this stage of my career that it was something I needed to do to gain experience,” Lewis tells Standard Sport about leaving Chelsea. “I had a good offer from Union. It was a good opportunity to play first-team football and start my journey again.
“They really wanted me and had a good plan for me. It hasn’t happened for me but I believe it will. It was difficult to leave Chelsea but in football, you sometimes have to take the risk.
“I joined a great team that finished high up the table and it is like a family. But it was difficult for me, especially at first, being away from home. It was difficult for me to settle. I had a few things going on both on and off the field that made it hard to settle in.
“I caught COVID a few times, and during the lockdowns, I couldn’t see my family because of the strict rules. It made it more difficult being away from home.
“It was a new language, different culture, different food, not knowing anyone over here. It was a challenge and when you’re not playing it is even more difficult because you can’t do anything to take your mind off it.”
Lewis adds: "When you see people you’ve played with doing well then you also want to do well. We all have different pathways. I don’t look at them and think they’re doing well and why am I not. We all have a different path so I just look at myself, keep grounded and work for it.”
Although connected to Chelsea, Lewis was bought from Cambridge United's academy and came from a Liverpool-supporting family. His idols were already those on Merseyside before he arrived at Cobham.
“I loved Steven Gerrard at Liverpool but growing up, I wanted to be like Ronaldinho the most, while really loving R9 Ronaldo, too,” he says. “These days, I like watching Thiago Alcantara and [Philippe] Coutinho from the modern day.
“But I have my own style which is a combination of creative and hard-working. I like the press, I like to link up, do skills, take set-pieces and score goals. I am a team player.”
After playing just 90 minutes in Belgium during the pandemic, Lewis took a loan spell at Accrington Stanley in League One for the second half of last season to get back on track.
This summer Lewis explains how he aims to ensure that he avoids another wasted season, with Union now ready to compete in Europe and growing in stature.
“I’ve been training during the majority of my time off, like five or six weeks,” he says. “I had to be ready. I thought the best way to do that is to continue to train in the off-season so that in pre-season I will have a better chance to impress.”
“I want to come here and show what I can do.”
