Frank Leboeuf was on ESPN last night talking about Chelsea’s dreadful attempts to solve their goalscoring problems this summer.
He asked why they hadn’t signed Harry Kane or Aleksandr Mitrovic, or any one of a number of talented Ligue 1 forwards.
Now surely we never had a chance of landing Kane, and or course Mitrovic wouldn’t have fit into our rumoured “25 and under” transfer policy.
But as Leboeuf says, literally anyone with a decent goal record and a bit of experience would be getting starts right now, so there are 100 options across Europe you could point to and say “they would have done alright.”
You can see his analysis in the clip embedded here:
Let’s be honest here, Boehly & Co inherited a striker mess from Abramovich who oversaw a revolving door of failed #9s—including but not limited to Schevchenko, Torres, Morata, Higuain, and Werner. While Drogba and Costa were major successes, the mess the previous owners made of Lukaku is the steaming pile of excrement that they left for the new owners to clean up. And what a mess it is!
How do you manage to loan, sell, buy back (at an eye-watering sum) and then loan again a 212-goal striker so as to net yourself exactly EIGHT of those goals?!?!?! It’s criminally poor transfer management policy! We all get a cold shover when we think about KDB and Salah and “what might have been,” but what about Lukaku?
My point is this—Boehly & Co were left a a striker mess to clean up and it’s not at all fair to criticize their handling of it without at least acknowledging who created it (an owner who has largely gotten a pass now that he’s gone).