Chelsea have wrapped themselves up in unnecessary (and very expensive) knots

With three straight wins followed by a bit of a break, Chelsea should have been primed and ready to return... shouldn't they?

There was a time when Chelsea Football Club was something different to what it is today, but surveying the wreckage of their season so far, it’s difficult not to conclude that it’s starting to feel a little bit like history. It’s now been almost seven years since they last won the Premier League, and they haven’t really challenged for it since. They’ve finished as high as third twice, but the first time this happened they finished 28 points short of the champions, and the second time the gap was 19.

Sure enough, there was a Champions League win, but there were only 14,000 there to see it in Lisbon and few could travel out there for the day and the experience; the building blocks of communal experience upon which the very game itself is built. It all goes in the record books, but the actual experience wasn’t the same, because it couldn’t be the same. Liverpool experienced the same thing a year earlier, when winning the Premier League. These were, of course, circumstances beyond their control, but that didn’t make it feel any less different.

And in those intervening years, something has changed. There used to be a fear about going to Stamford Bridge. There isn’t any more, and nowhere could have been seen more keenly than in their home defeat to Wolverhampton Wanderers. It might not matter than much in the top half of the Premier League, but the feeling that the gap between the wealthiest and the rest is now so great that to see one of them finally dragged into the bottom half of the table felt like a moment. Wolves played without fear and revelled in their win. Chelsea looked like what the Premier League table now tells us they are.

Chelsea aren’t going to get relegated this season. They have 31 points already. It would take this downturn to become an avalanche for their Premier League status to fall into serious peril. But there is a sense that the club has become demoored, detethered from what we might consider to be their fundamental ‘Chelseaness’. For all the arguments about what might or might not constitute that ‘Chelseaness’, how it manifests itself, and whether this is a good thing or not, there doesn’t seem to be much debate that itself that this feeling of drift is taking place.

The irony of their latest downturn is that it came off the back of a feeling that the tides might be starting to change. Chelsea won three straight Premier League matches for the first time this season, got to the League Cup final, and negotiated their way comfortably through the FA Cup Third Round. Add a mid-season Premier League break to this, and they should have been ready to start showing at least some sort of return on their assembly assembled gaggle of starlets, shouldn’t they?

But instead, nothing. Losing 4-1 to Liverpool is understandable. When they’re on their game, Liverpool can do that to just about any team in the Premier League. But losing 4-2 at home to Wolves is a different kettle of fish, especially when it coincides with the being leapfrogged into the bottom half of the table at a considerably more consequential point of the season than the last time it happened.

Furthermore, that run was hardly spectacular, even when it was happening. Chelsea may have put six goals past Middlesbrough in the second leg of the semi-final, but this came after losing the first leg 1-0. Their three straight league wins were all by an odd goal against moderate opposition, in the form of Luton Town, Crystal Palance and Fulham. They travel to Aston Villa for an FA Cup replay after being held to a goalless draw at home in their Fourth Round match.

And the schadenfreude being enjoyed by the supporters of other clubs is only further fuelled by the fact that this is, from their perspective, entirely self-inflicted. When Roman Abramovich was forced to offload Chelsea in the spring of 2022, their future was up in the air. And when the ownership situation landed on Clearlake, who promptly went barmy in the transfer market at the first possible opportunity and did so for the next two as well, it was tempting to think that there was some sort of method behind what looked on the surface like madness. Boehly the Interruptor, suggesting all-star matches while stuffing the Chelsea squad with elite young talent on disruptively lengthy contracts. Yee-haw!

But four transfer windows on, with more than one billion pounds having been spent and the team still finding fresh ways to play as though they’ve only just been introduced to each other, it’s tempting to start wondering whether there ever was any method, or whether it was just madness all along. Ten months on, things certainly don’t seem to be any better than they were under Graham Potter. And that’s despite even more money being spent on players and a supposed ‘elite level’ head coach having been installed, rather than someeone ‘untried at that level’.

There are mitigations. They have had a lot of injuries. Financial spending rules have put a bit of a muzzle on what the club can spend, while the lengthy player contract thing quickly came to be seen as loophole which needed to be closed. But then again, injuries have happened to other clubs as well, and as for financial rules… well, suffice to say that Chelsea’s recent spending would hardly seem to support the idea that owners should be just able to ‘spend what they like’. It’s difficult for them to claim that guidelines are unfair on them while, say, Everton exist.

And it doesn’t stop there. Chelsea, it might well be argued, had every advantage with their sudden clean sheet in the spring of 2022. The new owners were minted and wanted to throw money around. They had a Champions League winning manager (and a place in the Champions League), a London location, and a big fan base. Everything should have been teed up perfectly.

For a new broom it was certainly an ideal position, a chance to get their feet under the desk and rebuild the club from the ground up in their own image. But instead, they fell out with Thomas Tuchel, and while Graham Potter was a bold appointment, he was also a risky one. The Potter effect was marked. All conversation became about his shortcomings when things didn’t improve, when it might have been more fruitful for greater attention to have been paid to the second part of the disruptor’s mantra, “move fast and break things”.

Even when things started to go wrong last season, the consolation was that the long-term goal justified a transitional season, that it would take time for the new owners to stamp their identity properly onto the club. Without the endless churn of midweek fixtures that come with the group stages of European competition, they’d get more rest than those who would have to go through that whole rigmarole, wouldn’t they?

Chelsea have arguably seen the benefits of this in the League Cup this season, where they’ve had a run to the final. Would beating Liverpool in the final make everything alright? It might, if it proved to be the start of an upswing on the pitch in the league, and European football next season would certainly be welcome. But you only get one transitional season and patience, it rather feels, is now running extremely low.

In this particular case, the lack of European football has acted more like a magnifying glass on the squad’s shortcomings in the Premier League than anything else. Talking about the ‘ridiculous fixture schedule’ isn’t a line that you can realistically pull out when your opponents have already played at least six more competitive matches (and when you spent the best part of a fortnight during the summer jetting around the USA, though that’s another story). And the fewer deflection shields there are in place, the more that ire will come to be aimed towards the players, the manager and the owners.

There’s been little vilification of individual players. There’s no Chelsea equivalent to Harry Maguire, Andre Onana or Mason Mount, no players not fit to wear the shirt. Not yet. At Chelsea, there seems to be recognition of the fact that these are young players who’ve been thrown into a situation that is very much not of their creation. It’s not their fault that the squad is so unbalanced. It’s not their fault that the changes made have been so sudden and all-encompassing that the squad has been denuded of precisely the sort of senior players that younger players need to stabilise the dressing room mood and act as role models. Of those who might fit that bill there’s only really Thiago Silva left and, well.

As for the manager, well, the club seem pretty intent on continuing with the line that nothing will happen before the end of the season. This feels like a rare case of common sense breaking out over the club. After all, they got rid of Graham Potter with ten games of last season left to play and how many of those last ten did they win? One. They could scarcely have done worse with Potter in charge. But if they decide that Mauricio Pochettino isn’t working out, come the end of the season… then what? There are no guarantees that they get the calibre of manager they’d expect, if they can’t guarantee European football of any form for a second season in a row.

It’s as old as the hills, to leap upon the manager as being the root cause of on-pitch woes, and Chelsea have a reputation of being among the less patient clubs when it comes to expecting them to deliver. But in this particular case at this particular time, it seems worthwhile to listen to the complaints of supporters. Because this certainly doesn’t feel as though it’s entirely about ‘not winning enough’.

It’s easy to characterise Chelsea’s fan base as being a thousands-strong collection of Augustus Gloops, entitled to exactly what they want, when they want it. But while that is true of a proportion (and let’s be reasonable for a moment here; that sort of person will be attracted only to clubs who seem likely to come good on that sort of promise), you don’t have to be that old to remember a time when Chelsea’s fortunes were very different. There remain plenty of middle-aged people who will be able to remember this—the 26 years between 1971 and 1997 in particular—and for whom this isn’t really about instant gratification.

It’s a matter of identity, as much as anything else. For better or for worse, at least under Abramovich (and particularly under Abramovich and Jose Mourinho), Chelsea were something. It’s now coming up to two years since Abramovich was suddenly shunted out of the picture, and what has replaced it? If there is a post-Abramovich identity to be found at Stamford Bridge, it’s in young, home-grown players such as Connor Gallagher and Reece James, but for how long are they going to stay around without European football?

The matter might not even be in their hands. With all due warnings about the source of the rumours, the very fact that one could start that James and Gallagher might have to be offloaded says something about their spending. And the outside perception of the club is the new owners spend three transfer windows acting as though the financial regulations wouldn’t apply to them, only to find that they do after all. It is clear that spending couldn’t continue at the levels it had been. The justification for it was that it was a one-off expense to build a team that would grow together for years, or be sold at a considerable profit, preferably both. The money hasn’t ‘dried up’, but Chelsea’s capacity to spend is doing so, and at the exact time of writing they seem to have very little to show for it.

That’s the perfect storm. It’s a matter of the hard-headed transactional nature of modern football, when everything has to be assetised and monetised. But it’s also a matter of something more atavistic than this. The Chelsea of Roman Abramovich has gone, and singing his name isn’t going to bring him back. No small part of the problem for the club’s support at the moment is that this Chelsea doesn’t seem to have been replaced with anything much beyond the some incredible-looking jigsaw pieces that don’t really fit together, a manager who doesn’t seem to have many answers, and owners who have, if anything, even fewer.