Expectation management: the Subbuteo Final awaits

Subbuteo.com

The last time I blogged about Chelsea it was in the immediate aftermath of sanctions being imposed on Roman Abramovich following Russia’s abhorrent invasion of Ukraine, and the existential threat the UK government’s action posed to the club. Now that a consortium led by LA Dodgers owner Todd Boehly has agreed to takeover the club - still subject to government approval - scrutiny will turn to what happens next in terms of Chelsea’s evolution.

It is believed that the Boehly takeover will pay £2.5 billion for the actual club, with a further £1.75 billion committed to the club’s development, with that investment going on [hopefully] the rebuild of Stamford Bridge, as well as support for the much-vaunted Academy, and to the EWL champions Women’s team and their Kingsmeadow stadium, a mile or so up the road from where I live. What’s not clear, however, is what will be spent on new players for the men’s first team, the side going into the 150th FA Cup Final today for their only chance of silverware this season. That, in itself, is quite a statement for a club that has won five Premier League titles, the Champions League twice, five FA Cups and three League Cups, two Community Shields, the Europa League twice and the Super Cup once, and most recently the FIFA Club World Cup - all in the Abramovich era. Compare that with what came before: until the FA Cup win over Middlesbrough in 1997 there hadn’t been anything for over 25 years.

The conventional wisdom (i.e. what pub experts and the back pages perpetuate), then, is that Abramovich started the arms race that football's elite has either actively joined or aspires to. Thus, since the sanctions were imposed on the Russian, and tightly restricted the club’s expenditure to clear the path for a takeover by someone without ties to the Kremlin, visiting fans to Stamford Bridge have sung themselves giddy with choruses of “Where’s your money gone?” and “Just like the old days - there's nobody here”. This has been a gleeful baiting of the West London club‘s supporters with all the compassion you’d expect from football’s arch tribalism. Don’t worry, we reason with ourselves in the home stands, we’d be doing exactly the same if it was the other club under sanction. Harsh, but those are the rules of the football jungle.

For the last 19 years the pervading narrative is that Abramovich’s largesse has funded a conveyor belt of silverware, sanctioning the purchase of marquee signings to win them and charging successive managers with making those players work. Which hasn’t always gone to plan: Fernando Torres, Andriy Shevchenko, Adrian Mutu, Alexei Smertin, Juan Sebastián Verón, Mateja Kežman, Tiemoue Bakayoko, Danny Drinkwater, Ross Barkley are just some of the names on the list of expensive flops, which could easily populate a complete XI plus a subs’ bench. The jury is still out, too, on the £97.5 million spent last summer on Romelu Lukaku. And, of course, for each of these disappointments there has been a head coach fired for not getting the best out of them. Even club legend Frank Lampard, who ended up swimming against the tide amid rumoured player agitation behind his back. Another is Carlo Ancelotti, arguably one of the greatest club managers in the history of the sport, who was the model Abramovich coveted for the club he’d just acquired in 2003, but ended up firing for the crime of only achieving runners-up place in the Premier League in his second season, having won it in his first (along with the FA Cup).

Picture: Facebook/Chelsea FC

Thomas Tuchel is, therefore, likely to be the first Chelsea manager to outlast Abramovich. It’s too soon, of course, to say whether he’ll stay at the club after the Boehly takeover completes - it’s possible that he might want a change, likewise, the new owners might want someone new. But it would be fair to say that things are likely to be a lot different in the new era. Last Saturday, at his first home game, Boehly would have seen the best and the worst of his new purchase. Lukaku somewhat justified his price tag with a goal from open play and a decisive penalty in the space of three minutes, demonstrating the muscular heft it was hoped the Belgian would bring to the conventional centre forward’s position. But then, in the final fifteen minutes, Boehly would have also seen a ridiculous collapse as Wolves cheaply clawed two back, the latter of which in the 97th minute. Although some normality would have been restored a few days later with a 3-0 away win at Leeds, you could have benevolently given Boehly some right to express buyer’s remorse at Stamford Bridge last Saturday. 

The truth is that Chelsea had, in preceding games, been slipping back into the sort of defensive indifference that had done for Lampard. Stupid, lazy, careless mistakes that allowed less-fancied teams to sneak through. Tuchel’s first task, in January last year, was to rebuild Chelsea from the back, damming the leaks and instilling resilience. By last May, they’d become European champions. Those same mistakes have been largely at fault for their form since April, which has at times been explained as a combination of tiredness and the uncertainty surrounding the club. Those, I’m afraid are just excuses. Defeat away to Everton, a draw at Old Trafford, home losses to Arsenal and Brentford - all with discernible basic defensive errors.

Here, then, is the first challenge for Boehly. Antonio Rüdiger has already confirmed that he’ll be off, having called a halt on contract renewal talks, apparently because a wage of £230,000 a week wasn’t enough. This week it was revealed that he’ll play for Real Madrid for a rumoured £400,000. Next out the door will be Andreas Christensen, who is believed to have signed a pre-contractual agreement with Barcelona. Even captain César Azpiliqueta - a couple of months shy of his tenth anniversary at the club - has appeared to be stalling on a contract extension, with the Catalonians also looking to take him on, too. While Christensen and, increasingly, Azpiliqueta, have become somewhat expendable (they’ve hardly been Chelsea's most effective central defenders) Rüdiger will be emphatically irreplaceable. The loss of three central defenders, too, will only expose the scant options that remain, which include the not-yet mature Trevoh Chalobah, the largely unfit-for-purpose at this level Malang Sarr, and Thiago Silva, who turns 38 next season, and despite still being one of the most viable centre-halves in football, surely can't go on at this level forever, and certainly can’t be expected to play week-in, week-out. 

While there are reserve options - Emerson Palmieri was sent out on loan again, along with homegrown prospects Ethan Ampadu and Jake Clarke-Salter - Chelsea’s productive Academy might also have other gems to follow in the footsteps of Reece James. Inevitably the club is said to be looking outside for fresh talent, with Sevilla’s Jules Kounde a target. But while the core defenders are a cause for concern, there are doubts elsewhere. Marcos Alonso has only been getting games due to Ben Chillwell’s long-term absence, but surely the Englishman, when fit, will see the somewhat inflexible Spaniard (who is hopeless as a defending wing-back) move on? Alonso is also one of a number of players with the end of their contracts in sight, meaning that de facto chief executive Marina Granovskaia - the highly regarded Abramovich acolyte who has pulled off some impressive player sales as well as acquisitions - will need to step up deal-making.

At the beginning of the season Chelsea were tipped as one of the sides to contend for the Premier League title, but as Manchester City and Liverpool have accelerated away from Tuchel’s side, its deficiencies - and not just the defence - have been laid bare. Chelsea have become too predictable: moves begun by wingbacks have laboured in the final third, pitching crosses from the corners that have rarely found anything like a target. Lukaku will no doubt be the lightning rod for that criticism - and he hasn’t always helped his case - but there’s been too much lack of inventiveness at times across the entire attack. Timo Werner and Kai Havertz - bought at a combined cost of £115 million - haven’t produced the goods, despite a recent resurgence. Then there’s the American national captain, Christian Pulisic, who clearly has abilities but only seems to produce them on occasion. Mason Mount has probably been the most effective attacking player (and is currently tipped to be the next captain if Azpiliqueta moves on), but has too often lacked the supply from central midfield, as Jorginho, N’Golo Kanté and Mateo Kovačić have toiled in the engine room. Oh, for the addition of Mount’s bestie Declan Rice!

All of which brings me to today’s little shindig at Wembley. When I was growing up, Chelsea-v-Liverpool was more a romantic proposition than it was sport. It was the classic Subbuteo combination - the blues against the reds, but in the 1970s and 1980s, Liverpool were pre-eminent in domestic and European football. Chelsea, on the other hand, were the faded glamour boys of West London, having gone from star-studded fanbase in the Swinging Sixties to Second Division strugglers on the verge of financial collapse (when away fans sing “Where where you when you were shit?!”, I know exactly where in Stamford Bridge I was…). Times have changed. Chelsea’s record over the last two decades has been eminently better than Liverpool’s, a source of partisan pride amongst the Bridge faithful, but where these two teams are, now, at the end of this season, with Liverpool fighting for not one but four trophies, and Chelsea apparently flying on fumes, makes for a stressful afternoon today at Wembley.

You could say that Chelsea have, in the Abramovich era, rather become the darlings of the FA Cup, having appeared in eight finals since 2003, winning it five times. Four of those eight appearances have been in the last five finals, which have only produced the one win, against Manchester United in 2017 in a somewhat underwhelming game. Still, though, in attempting to break their frustrating recent record, it should still be acknowledged that reaching the final of arguably the world’s most prestigious club competition is something to be celebrated. It is, to some extent, the outcome of the win-at-all-costs culture Abramovich instilled at the club, where even the cream of European managerial talent was considered expendable in the face of expectation.

So what does that mean for today? There’s no denying that Liverpool, competing for a quadruple, are facing a febrile Chelsea. Of course, that requires the cliche about the underdog being under less pressure, but for Thomas Tuchel, a win over Liverpool will lift the shadow that has grown over his team since their memorable win in Porto last year as sloppiness has crept in over the last couple of months.

Brothers in arms - Christian Pulisic and Mason Mount
Picture: Facebook/Chelsea FC

Beyond today, and the remaining two league fixtures, a new tomorrow beckons for Chelsea Football Club. Boehly must stem the outflow of players who, as soon as the sanctions were imposed, would have been on the phone to their agents. He must immediately suppress any uncertainty. In particular, he must retain the services of Granovskaia but, moreover, ensure that the club’s top talent is tied down to new contracts before they creep into the expiry zone. A priority must be the anchoring of Mount and Reece James, whose contracts may have two and three years, respectively, to run, but are players who would be coveted by anyone. And Boehly must also hang on to Tuchel, who has largely carried the club through these last three months of crisis, being the only senior figure to speak to the press as Granovskaia, chairman Bruce Buck and even technical director and former Chelsea goalkeeper, Petr Čech, have remained out of sight. You could argue that Tuchel’s opposite number and compatriot today, Jürgen Klopp, is the blueprint. It’s taken Klopp seven years to get Liverpool to where they are today, during which time Chelsea have had six managers.

There are those yet to be fully convinced that Tuchel is ‘The One’, but after that many changes of head coach it’s hard to actually say who or what would make the job definitive. All that I’ll say is that since the end of February brought Chelsea to a state of actual jeopardy, a period of stability is needed to address these months of uncertainty. That also means that Tuchel needs to be backed in the transfer market, allowing the arrival of fresh talent to replace either the malcontents or the misfits, and perhaps more critically, be afforded the time and patience to rebuild Chelsea into sustainable domestic title contenders. If not, Tuchel will be snapped up by, you name it, any of the European behemoths.

The other item on Boehly’s to-do list will have to be Stamford Bridge. With a capacity of just under 42,000, it cannot compete with the mega-temples being built elsewhere. Abramovich came close to rebuilding the club’s home since 1905 but abandoned the plan when he ran into politically motivated visa issues with the British government. The idea was to effectively reconstruct the stadium from scratch, constructing a new complex upwards from a deep foundation on account of the fact the ground’s footprint is bordered by the Fulham Road, a railway line and the Brompton Cemetery, and can’t go anywhere else.

Of course, there is the small matter of the Boehly consortium’s takeover getting passed by the UK government. But the fact that Todd Boehly has done proper due diligence on the club and its footballing challenges (and this week spent two days at the Cobham training ground meeting both the men’s and women’s teams) provides hope that the new ownership is serious about maintaining Chelsea’s status within the European elite. A win today will be the perfect springboard for the new era at Chelsea to kick on with. It’s just a shame that it’s the current Liverpool that stands in its way.