 |
| Picture: Chelsea FC |
It still strikes me as absurd that the new Premier League season is almost a month old and yet, even as late as last night, teams were still doing business before the transfer window shut. This summer’s spend has exceeded £2 billion, and it doesn’t fill me with that much pride that my own club has contributed significantly to that outlay.
Since the Boehly-Clearlake consortium took over Chelsea last summer, it has spent around a billion pounds on new players, some of whom haven’t even made it to a second season, drawing question marks over the scattergun strategy of purchases that certainly marked the 2022 summer window, and continued in January this year.
With Mauricio Pochettino taking over as head coach in July (having been closely consulted in the weeks leading up to him starting work), Chelsea’s summer transfer activity has, at first glance, looked more purposeful, with many of the badly needed positions filled. Looked at from a higher level – with 10 players coming in, and 21 senior squad members offloaded, the club has undergone a complete oil change, to the extent that the only players remaining from the pre-takeover Abramovich era are Thiago Silva, Ben Chilwell, newly installed club captain Reece James, Trevoh Chalobah and reserve goalkeeper Marcus Bettinelli. Oh, and Malang Sarr who, embarrassingly, Pochettino didn’t seem to be aware of when asked about by journalists this week.
If it wasn’t clear before, it should be abundantly apparent now that the player transfusion has been deliberate: capitalise on the net-loss sale of homegrown players like Mason Mount, Ruben Loftus-Cheek and, last night, Callum Hudson-Odoi, and focus on rebuilding around youth – on which Pochettino’s reputation has been built – with players signed for six, seven and even eight-year contracts, with the costs amortised over those periods to lower Financial Fair Play exposure as rules currently apply.
That, though, is the positive spin: the negative is that somehow Boehly’s spending – which in buying Enzo Fernández and Moisés Caicedo has twice broken British transfer records – Chelsea’s seemingly limitless spree on the brightest young talents around has seen little limit.
 |
| Moisés Caicedo Picture: Chelsea FC |
Whether it has been to any good remains to be seen: since 12 August, Chelsea have won one, drawn one and lost one in the Premier League with their expensively assembled squad, while at the same time seen their injury list pile up to 11 – effectively a complete team – with the need for further reinforcements as a result. The latest is 21-year-old Cole Palmer from Manchester City, something of a fringe player under Pep Guardiola but seemingly highly regarded by Chelsea’s talent acquisition experts looking to augment Pochettino’s attacking options further.
The logic to most of the acquisitions is not in doubt, nor the decision to part company with academy-developed and therefore marketable players. Getting rid of ineffective and expensive overheads like Kai Havertz, Romelu Lukaku, Hakim Zyech and Christian Pulisic will have lowered the wage bill, allowing the club to bring in players in their late teens and early twenties on smaller salaries, their exorbitant transfer fees spread over the longer period of their extended contracts.
 |
| Graphic: Sky Sports |
Whether, though, this approach will keep Premier League and UEFA investigators happy is another matter entirely. In the aftermath of Roman Abramovich’s sanctioning there was a very real chance that Chelsea could have folded, especially as negotiations between the Government and the consortium ran into issues at the 11th hour. The Fair Play aspect does mean that the £1 billion spend since is a calculated risk by Todd Boehly and his partners.
Some will say the risk is worth it, given how phase two of the “project” – this summer’s clearout and subsequent refresh – has brought in players like Caicedo and Romeo Lavia, Christopher Nkunku and Nicolas Jackson. Pochettino’s new broom approach has also appeared to restore last summer’s marquee signing Raheem Sterling to his best, with Caicedo’s arrival freeing up Fernández to look more like the £107 million he was bought for.
With no European football this season and expectations around a largely entirely new squad taking time to bed in alleviating some of the pressure on Pochettino, he has a unique platform on which to build. It’s hard to judge which has been the more beneficial development – new blood or the expulsion of those whose number had grown to create a bloated and largely unresponsive squad under Thomas Tuchel, Graham Potter and Frank Lampard last season.
Of course, with the visit today of Nottingham Forest, Poch will only have four competitive games behind him – three in the league and a narrow, blush-sparing win over Wimbledon in the Carabao Cup on Wednesday night – which means judgement must be reserved in the short-term. But if the club line that this is a long-term project is to be believed, questions will be asked on what measure of success will be an acceptable return for the eye-watering outlay.
Is, even, a cup this season ambitious for a club that has this year spent £222 million on two midfielders alone? Is a European finish to be expected and if so, are we talking about a Top Four place next May, or a Europa League or even a Europa Conference League place? Note, no one is talking about Chelsea challenging for the Premier League title itself this season, but surely the target must be to match or get close to Manchester City amid renewed challenges from Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United, Newcastle and Tottenham.
Nothing is guaranteed, and as Pochettino’s injury woes have piled up, the rug has, if not been pulled from beneath him, certainly shown signs of slipping. On paper he has a wealth of talent at his disposal, but on paper is never a guarantee, as Mykhailo Mudryk has demonstrated following his £88.5 million transfer from Shakhtar Donetsk and a decidedly unimpressive opening spell in the Premier League, which is now curtailed by injury. As we’ve seen so often in football, the heavier the price tag the heavier the weight of expectation, and that may well have been the cause of the young Ukrainian’s decidedly underwhelming displays so far. He, perhaps more than any other squad player, will be Pochettino’s primary target for improvement.
While the astronomical amount of money Chelsea has spent over the last three windows will always be a lighting rod for critics and rival fans alike, the harsh reality is that if it doesn’t result in sustained success, it will only be seen as one of the most profligate billionaire’s folly in football’s most recent history of inflationary excess.
“We need to be careful with the young guys because they need time to settle,” Pochettino said during his press conference yesterday ahead of today’s home fixture against Forest. “We need to settle all the players who have arrived late, create spaces and build a solid structure to perform after.”
 |
| Cole Palmer Picture: Chelsea FC |
“He fits the project and he is a young and talented player. Of course, he also decided to come because he expected to play more and be important here. That’s not the most important thing, the most important thing is that he wanted to come because he sees Chelsea as a project for him to improve his game and to maybe be more involved in every single game. But, yes, I think the quality is there. He has great potential.”
Pochettino appeared to suggest that with Palmer his 13th new player this summer the spree will slow down. “We need to explain the reality in the same way - we sign players, we sell players. It is more about net spending than really the money you spend because that’s the balance the club is now trying to get.” Crucially he addded: “This is a very special situation for the club from the beginning but, for sure, the club won’t keep doing for years what they have done in the past.”
For me, the summer transfer window is usually a time of excitement. At Chelsea in the modern era, it’s been one long Christmas Day, lasting from June to September each year. This time around, following the randomness of the Boehly-Clearlake spree last summer and again this January, it’s easy to feel brittle if, for nothing else, the risk to pride if the influx of new players goes tits up.
Just once it would be nice for Chelsea to be the club people don’t talk about until they’ve achieved something. Tribality normally prevents that, as the barely-acknowledged successes in the Abramovich era serve testament to (amid the near universal deification of the two Manchesters). But the club doesn’t help itself. I’ve always bridled at the suggestion that Chelsea has, for the last 20 years, bought success, as almost every club at the top of the pyramid is guilty of the very same. I just hope that the price tags we’ve seen this summer can be justified on the pitch, and the new intake give us up in the stands something to be genuinely excited about.
No comments:
Post a Comment