Chelsea’s owners are once again coming under scrutiny after another abysmal performance on the pitch in front of their own fans.
There was a glum atmosphere around Stamford Bridge again on Saturday afternoon, as I am told by many who were at the game. The toxicity directed towards the manager, the owners, and the sporting directors was rife once again, and there were boos sounding out at the end of the game, which is far from the first time this season. Chelsea fans have had enough.
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Drawing 2-2 at home against 10-man Burnley once again just bought out all the negative feelings and brushed aside any slight optimistic hopes.
George Simms of inews has just about summed it all up in his review of the game today.
He rightly says that Chelsea have been setup to fail by the owners and the squad builders, by signing young, unproven, raw, and inexperienced players to fill the squad rebuild.
Simms writres, ‘At any other club, inconsistency would be expected from a selection of teenagers and early 20-somethings, some of whom have played fewer than 100 league games in their career. Failure is the best way to learn, so young players are normally given support and a free reign to make mistakes in a controlled environment. Instead, Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali have dropped theirs into a bear pit dressed as deer and told them to survive or die.
‘Before this chaotic 2-2 draw with 19th-placed, 10-man Burnley, Mauricio Pochettino claimed only “small details” were the difference between his side being 11th and fourth. You don’t need a microscope to diagnose the problem still plaguing his squad, the difference between Champions League contenders and this amalgam of grand possibility.
‘Young players are almost invariably inconsistent in their decision-making. When you combine inconsistent players, you unsurprisingly end up with widespread inconsistency. Mudryk and Conor Gallagher may be making the right decisions in any given moment, but all it takes is Nicolas Jackson not to be for the whole house of cards to collapse.
‘They have since spent £1.19bn on players to make Chelsea demonstrably, unavoidably worse. It is mismanagement of one of the biggest football clubs in the world on a scale which has rarely been seen.
‘The grand plan to invest wildly and solely in youth was based on a pipe dream and financial model never previously seen in football, because anyone who understands the game knows it would be virtually impossible to pull off. Massive-scale change is not an excuse for underperformance when you’re the ones implementing that change.’
Simon, with all do respect, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Just because you’ve never witnessed a rebuild of this kind (because it’s not common business practice in the UK, as it is in America) doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
If you’d take half the the amount of time you spend badmouthing the owners and do some home work (i.e., look into how Boehly rebuilt the Los Angeles Dodgers) you’d understand that this period of inconsistency and, yes, frustratingly uneven improvement, is all par for the course, and that it DOES NOT MEAN the whole exercise is doomed to failure.
You reference supporter displeasure as if there is true “wisdom of the crowd,” when there’s absolutely nothing about the Chelsea supporters’ weekly temper tantrums that passes for wisdom, lol! Stop trying to pass off the consensus view as though it were gospel and do your homework! Rebuilds like the one in process at Chelsea can, and do, work routinely in American professional sports and I’m amazed that a bunch of Londoners could be so provincial as to think that just because it hasn’t happened in England before it can’t be done, lol!
There’s a massive difference between the controlled environment of American sport and English football. In American sport it doesn’t matter how bad you are, you still play in all the same competitions and therefore enjoy the spoils of those competitions. There are no big basketball, baseball, hockey or NFL sides in Mexico and Canada that are genuinely as big as your biggest teams waiting to attract your brightest and best. You can, in short, tank for a couple of seasons – there are even incentives in terms of draft picks etc for doing so – as part of your strategy and nothing bad happens. It’s always amazed me how Americans put up with such a quasi socialist approach to sport.
The downsides of tanking-based rebuilds in English football are much higher. There’s no safety net in either a sporting or financial sense. My own take is they don’t particularly care as i) they own, by dint of owning the club, a massive bit of prime real estate, and ii) they are taking costs out – both of which make it easier to sell for a profit in time.
Throwing a bunch of undercooked players together is not going to work. But I’m drawing the conclusion that that was never the genuine intention. It is more about reducing the wage bill than it is about a never-seen-before way of constructing a winning team.
The fact it hasn’t been done in England is the reason it’s a bit of a silly strategy without informing the fans of the blueprint and vision. Chelsea as a club is always successful and in the last 20yrs have won at least a trophy every season and have challenged for the title practically every season. What we have now is a total collapse of what we know to be our club and its depressing to watch. Boehly took over Chelsea as World Champions and he turned the club into a joke. Will the strategy work? Only time will tell but it is foolhardy to expect young players to perform without experienced players to guide them.
You talk about Bohely and the Dodgers, understand, this is football, not baseball.
You can’t justify the waste of £1 billion as if it is part of some masterplan because the owners are American. That’s absurd.
We are 11th despite the fact that we are playing in only three competitions this season and we will miss out on the Champions league for the second successive season.
We will not be able to attract elite players because we are out of the Champions league and who what top manager would want to coach us?
@ wyatt, u have no idea what u’re talking about. This is not LA Dodgers and this is not American football. Todd Boehly and his sporting directors don’t know what they’re doing. Chelsea is dead as a club, I don’t see any progress from them.
Wyatt_Earp74 what a load of rubbish. You talk about Boehly rebuilding the Dodgers but what you fail to mention is that there is no relegation in top US sports and also there is incentive to be crap in US sports because you get rewarded with the the best draft picks. For instance, San Antonio Spurs are going through a rebuild with all young players. They are the worst team in the western conference and third worst in the NBA. But due they have the #1 draft pick and future hall of famer (Wembanyama).
Point being, you can rebuild with young players in US sports but it is almost lethal to do it in European sports were you have relegation and disincentives to poor performance. What works in US sports may not work in European sports. To think the game is monolithic without consideration of the wider environment and context is ignorant.
I just read a whole lot of gibberish bullshit, arsenal and Liverpool went through worse periods, Manchester United has been on same rollercoaster of inconsistent performances with all their experienced players. I guess the difference makers at United for the past 2yrs plus has been their youths. Chelsea London fans and supporters have been a set of spoilt brats that always wants quick answers and solutions irrespective of the repercussions, and will still keep on mumbling and grumbling, pointing accusing fingers when the repercussions come knocking at our door. Most news I read from this blog has always been 95% negative talks about the owners, management and the players. If such energy can be positively channeled into praising and encouraging the players just for a month, there will be a positive impact on results and players performances.
the owners … it makes you wonder if they’ve enjoyed eating the hEArt of chelSEA …..
…………and how they had it cooked and served up ….. on golden plates …. with siver goblets and platinum cutlery ?
,,,, silly buggers