Chelsea had 36 points after 16 games in 2021 – the season before Todd Boehly arrived – just as Arsenal do in 2023. Who’s to blame for the Stamford Bridge sh*tshow, you ask? Whoever spent ONE BILLION POUNDS on nothing, probably.
After a record spend of £1bn on 29 players in Todd Boehly’s disastrous 18-month reign, Mauricio Pochettino reached the only logical conclusion in a bid to close the gap between “expectation” and “reality” at Stamford Bridge: Chelsea need to spend more money in January.
It’s nauseating when you take a step back to consider just how much money a billion pounds is. It’s a thousand bloody million. Chelsea have spent a thousand bloody million pounds on football players in 18 months. Seriously, ONE THOUSAND MILLION POUNDS. This might help to convey the magnitude: a million seconds is 12 days; a billion seconds is 31 years. It’s a mad amount of money.
The most sickening thing is Pochettino’s not wrong. The fact that Chelsea have already spent so much money on that squad doesn’t change the fact that there are still gaping holes in it. And possibly even worse than still desperately needing a £100m goalscorer is Pochettino’s more general claim that the squad lacks ‘aggression and height’. Meaning that short of signing an 8ft-tall serial killer to lead the line in the hope of allaying those two concerns in one fell swoop, those inadequacies will need to be assuaged across a number of new additions.
Having the Premier League’s shortest squad isn’t something that should creep up on you, even given the sweeping transfer changes at Chelsea. And yet it doesn’t take all that much to imagine Boehly and the various directors turning up at Cobham and dwarfing the first-team players they assume to be the U15s in training. Paul Winstanley and Laurence Stewart – the supposed best in the directorship biz – don’t appear to have a f***ing clue how to build a football team.
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Boehly’s even more culpable than that pair of brainiacs, with the American owner acting as sporting director when the first big wedge of cash was spent, before presumably insisting the new transfer chiefs focused on getting children to commit their lives to Chelsea.
While the armchair football managers claiming ‘I could get a better tune out of this crop of England players than Gareth Southgate’ are clearly wide of the mark, and 20-stone alcoholics who haven’t seen their feet for ten years probably wouldn’t have ‘smashed that chance Darwin Nunez fluffed into the top corner’, there will be a fair few people reading this – just as I do as I write it – who believe they could get a team that finished third in the Premier League to win the title within two seasons and be absolutely right. In fact, scrap that, it would be f***ing easy. It’s ONE THOUSAND MILLION POUNDS, FFS!
Chelsea finished third under Thomas Tuchel and were technically the best club in the world in the season before Boehly arrived. Obviously not actually, as the Club World Cup is a load of hokum, but it at least serves as a reminder that they won the Champions League the season before that. Chelsea have lost seven Premier League games already under Pochettino and lost just six in Tuchel’s last season, when they were very much in the title race before the turn of the year.
Thomas Tuchel won the Champions League for Chelsea in 2021.
After 16 games in the 2021/22 season Chelsea had 36 points, as Arsenal currently do. Can you imagine giving Edu and Mikel Arteta £1bn to spend at the end of this season? A scary thought for their Premier League rivals, at it would have been for Chelsea’s had they known at the time.
The fans still complained, about Romelu Lukaku mainly, because he was supposed to be the final piece of the puzzle that pushed them to the title but turned out to be (for the lack of a clever puzzle-based metaphor) a bit of a pr*ck. But the vast majority remained on Tuchel’s side throughout and would have assumed that three or four smart summer additions in 2022 could indeed see them usurp City to win the Premier League.
A striker to score 20-plus Premier League goals and a world-class goalkeeper. Absolute must haves for title winners, right? Got to build a solid spine. First on the to do list with that £1bn. What else do we need? Top young talent – good, done. But obviously we need experience too. Well…. do we though? Yes, yes we f***ing well do.
It just wouldn’t be that difficult, would it? Getting the third-best team in the Premier League to win it with £1bn.
Two players that the manager wants for every position in the formation the manager favours, which is admittedly difficult when you keep sacking the managers (though there’s a fairly obvious solution to that). And a blend of youth and experience, both in terms of European and Premier League football, with space in the squad reserved for the excellent (and undervalued) academy products to retain and maintain the club values.
There we go – done. There is no f***ing way Chelsea wouldn’t currently be challenging for the title had they stuck to that transfer blueprint with Tuchel still in charge. They may well already have another title in the trophy cabinet. And it’s not as though it’s some genius plan, because it doesn’t have to be. It’s ONE BILLION POUNDS!
Chelsea were a frustrating football club under Roman Abramovich, for their fans who yearned for a bit of consistency, but mainly for their rivals, who couldn’t work out how they kept winning major trophies given the revolving managerial door. Boehly is desperate to distinguish himself from the previous regime but has managed to mimic his predecessor in the main way he hoped to avoid – the manager sackings – while differing in the one aspect which made Chelsea, Chelsea – winning all the bloody time.
When you’re next sitting watching Chelsea lose (at home to Sheffield United on Saturday, probably) and wondering who is to blame for this unholy mess, ask yourself whether you could provide a defensive screen better than Moises Caicedo, drill the counter-press better than Pochettino or whether it would in fact be easier to spend ONE BILLION POUNDS on footballers and avoid turning a European giant into a Premier League also-ran. Any idiot could do that.
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