MOURINHO: SCHURRLE AND VAN GINKEL ARE READY FOR FIRST TEAM FOOTBALL

Chelsea boss Jose Mourinho believes new signings Andre Schurrle and Marco van Ginkel are ready to make an impact in the Blues first team, despite their tender ages.

The Portuguese, who is beginning his second stint at Stamford Bridge, is pleased with his early summer business as he sees Schurrle, 22, and van Ginkel, 20, as players for the present as well as the future.

"Andre Schurrle is still so young but he already has great history because he plays in his national team, he has played Champions League and he played three complete seasons for Bayer Leverkusen," Mourinho told the club’s official website.

"He is a player who is absolutely ready and he gives us more than one position in attack and adds quality. He will be important for us.

"Marco van Ginkel is one of the best prospects. He is not yet like Schurrle - close to being a finished product - but he is a player with great potential. Of course he needs to play and he will, because he is a player with great potential and physically he is more than ready. He is a natural athlete.

“By the technical and the tactical point of view of course he is a kid, he has to learn, but I think he is very open-minded and we analysed him for quite a long time. The Chelsea scouting department did it for quite a long time and I did it in the last five or six months, and we made a collective decision to bring the kid here."

Mourinho also highlighted Chelsea's other young starlets, including the returning trio of Romelu Lukaku, Kevin De Bruyne and Tomas Kalas, who he expects all have a role to play after developing well during their respective loan spells last season.

He added: "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.

"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.

"So we are a very young squad. We have an average age of 26.3 and the reality is the best period of this team has yet to arrive. In five, six, seven years’ time, this team will be in the best moment of their careers."