Chelsea’s project, and the sporing directors who are making it happen, have started to see praise trickling in for their work over the last few weeks.
The tide has turned and the widespread derision which accompanied all of their work for the last couple of years has faded away. Jacob Steinberg’s piece in the Guardian earlier this week was a perfect demonstration. A writer who had previously been critical of the new Chelsea ownership’s attempts to revolutionise football suddenly had inside sources explaining what they had done right:
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“There is praise from within for [sporting directors] Stewart and Winstanley,” Steinberg wrote.
“They took the controversial decision to move on from Pochettino after judging the campaign as a whole. They have had their critics but the sense is that Chelsea are getting more right than wrong now. Every manager depends on their players and Maresca has, in the words of one ally, inherited a “bloody good squad”.
Success is relative – and Chelsea haven’t managed much yet
That theme has been continued today by Richard Jolly in the Independent, who wrote that “there is a slightly facetious argument that, by the law of averages, Chelsea were bound to have a spectacular success: sign enough players and one had to come good.”
We’re not sure how facetious it has to be, however. The club have spent £1.3bn in less than 3 years. Getting into the Champions League places shouldn’t be celebrated as a victory, it should be seen as a minimum.
So while we should all be delighted that things are looking up, we should probably reserve our praise for the sporting directors who have turned mid table clubs into top teams on a limited budget, not the ones who have yet to crack the top 4 despite an effectively unlimited spending power.