Chelsea tactics and transfers: The poor state of affairs

A damning result against Arsenal showed how poor Chelsea really are. Unfortunately, the Blues deserve no better at this point in time.

Chelsea are exactly where they deserve to be. Chelsea aren’t a good team. Barely beating West Ham and Watford and tying with Swansea does not a champion make. Sadly, this has been a long time coming and everybody associated with the club, be they in management or support, needs to acknowledge this. Chelsea have for too long papered over cracks in the foundations and made moves with an eye on the short term without having a single hand on the rudder of the club’s long term future.

Chelsea’s loss to Arsenal was a lot of things. It was embarrassing, definitive and, most importantly, it was deserved. The Blues played without heart and looked weak throughout the entirety of the match. It was the looks of the team that finished 10th last season. The question here though is why? How have Chelsea fallen so far so quickly? The truth is that it begins at home.

The most successful club in English football history is Manchester United. They have an identity and everybody who supports the club and plays for it, or even works in the parking lot as an attendant, knows what that identity is. It’s excellence.

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Chelsea have lost their identity and that is the biggest problem. As soon as the old heads of Didier Drogba, Frank Lampard and Petr Cech left the club only John Terry was left to communicate the club’s values. That simply is not enough.

The rest of the squad, made up of international buys and career club changers, don’t view Chelsea as a club they love but as a stepping-stone to other things. The success of the club as an institution doesn’t really matter to them beyond whether or not their cheques clear every week.

That brings us to how identity gets transferred from the club’s ideals onto the pitch. It’s with homegrown players. Players who are steeped in the club’s history and view it is as more than just a professional union but also a part of their own lives.

That is what makes football so magnificent. The tribal aspect of it. You don’t simply pick your team. It picks you, where you’re from, how you grew up and what the people in your community think and do. That’s why the passion is so important, like Antonio Conte often says. Passion for your club matters.

The dominant Barcelona, Juventus and Bayern Munich teams all have homegrown leaders who will be a part of the club forever. They grow up within it, they play for it and many of them stay on as coaches, scouts and board members.

Manchester United for 75 years straight had at least one homegrown player on the field in every match. A player who genuinely felt Manchester United in his veins. That streak was broken in 2011 and not soon after so did Manchester United’s vice-like grip on the throne of English football.

Chelsea have no identity because they lack homegrown players. That’s why in matches like the recent Arsenal game, Chelsea simply stopped fighting. The team is full of players like Thibaut Courtois and Eden Hazard who view games indifferently. The result does not matter to them beyond the vague sense of professionalism that it is better to win than lose matches.

They don’t go home to households for whom winning and losing is more than a scoreline. They are too easily able to dissociate themselves from whether the team won or not. Chelsea have too many players now for whom the things that belong to them matter more than to those things to which they belong. That is the biggest issue.

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Now, Chelsea only have John Terry – a man on the wane. Without homegrown players and leaders there is no-one to look almost certain defeat in the face and say “not today”. There is no-one for whom undying resilience in the face of grave uncertainty is a matter of pride.

Speaking as a fan, I am genuinely embarrassed by the attitude of this current Chelsea team and feel actual resentment towards several players. Many of my friends and family would identify Chelsea as one of the things that matters to me most. I’ve had a girlfriend comment that our weekends are “always better if Chelsea wins”. I’m not saying that’s right but it’s the truth. Some of these current players don’t deserve to represent our tribe. With every snot-nosed spoiled comment they make in the press my blood boils and I feel sick in my stomach.

Simply put, this Chelsea team have no identity. The famous “bus parking” teams had an identity. It was a great one: “No matter what you do we will not be beaten”. Sure, other fans hated us for it but that’s a good thing. No-one hates a loser.

Chelsea have fired too many coaches in recent times for an identity to grow. What that has done is quietly taken away any authority from the manager, the one person who needs it. When the players know that the coach will be fired within a couple months there is no reason to take him seriously. No-one can hold the players accountable for their effort and attitude.

A club needs to be familial and have a distinct chain of command with the manager at the top of every single thing that relates to the product on the pitch.

At Manchester United, players knew if they didn’t sort out their issues with Sir Alex Ferguson then they were going to be the one sacked, not him. It was the same with Pep Guardiola at Barcelona and Giovanni Trapattoni at Juventus.

In American sports the best example is Jerry Sloan with the Utah Jazz who won more games than anybody else in his career. On the first day of training camp every summer the owner would stand beside Sloan and say “he’ll be here next year, the question is whether or not you will” and then leave. I hunger for the day that Roman Abramovich does that.

The sad truth is Chelsea are a long way from being a great club again. Antonio Conte is the right man to take them back up the ladder but it will take a while and a lot needs to change.

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Chelsea’s transfer business this summer was awful. They bought David Luiz to help with the defensive issue even though all of his qualities are offensive. David Luiz fans are the sort who will watch Chelsea win a match 5-4 with David Luiz scoring the winning goal. Let’s get this straight, in a game where your club concede four goals every defender was poor.

Then Chelsea bought Marcos Alonso. He is a decent player but by no means one of the best five options in the world. N’Golo Kante looks to have been a good buy but he on his own won’t be able to last an entire season in a position that is entirely based on grit. He already looked tired against Arsenal. At least at Leicester he had Danny Drinkwater.

As for Eduardo, there’s no reason that spot could not be taken by a youngster. In Michy Batshuayi’s case, I was wrong here. I wasn’t fond of this in the beginning but now I don’t understand why he isn’t a regular starter. Great talent, great attitude and always driving the team forward.

Chelsea’s Italian head coach Antonio Conte watches from the touchline during the English Premier League football match between Arsenal and Chelsea at the Emirates Stadium in London on September 24, 2016. / AFP / Ben STANSALL / RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE. No use with unauthorized audio, video, data, fixture lists, club/league logos or ‘live’ services. Online in-match use limited to 75 images, no video emulation. No use in betting, games or single club/league/player publications. / (Photo credit should read BEN STANSALL/AFP/Getty Images) /

So without an identity and with another transfer window of subpar business Chelsea are exactly where they should be right now. Everybody got ahead of themselves, myself included, in thinking that things would be different. Chelsea are in 8th place and tied for 7th on points. That is where the club deserves to be.

Manchester City, Tottenham, Arsenal and Liverpool should all be ahead of them while Everton have quietly been one of the better run clubs in England for a decade. Finally, Manchester United are in 6th and they have far more talent than the Blues.

After years the chickens have come home to roost. Chelsea will have to decide what they stand for moving forward because this from the top down simply isn’t good enough.

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