Chelsea Tactics and Transfers: Looking to the summer and £375 million

As Chelsea start preparing for the Champions League next season, here is an ambitious plan to spend £375 million over the summer to get up to speed.

Recent Chelsea matches have shown a lot about what the future of this current Chelsea team is as it stands. They’re talented on their day, but clearly limited and not always better than their opponents. This season has, to this point, been a revelation. The time off from the Champions League has been helpful regardless of what people say. Chelsea have not outclassed their opponents the entire season. They have simply outworked them and shown the benefit of classic Italian coaching.

Antonio Conte is a classic coach and his theories mirror those of one of his early mentors at Juventus, Marcello Lippi. It is about teamwork and selflessness. What is more important, Lippi says in his autobiography Il Gioco delle Idee: Pensieri e Passioni da Bordo Campo (A Game of Ideas: Thoughts and Passions from the Sidelines) that the plan or formation is one that allows each player to maximize his utility for his teammates and the express his full potential.

Conte mirrors this tenfold and in perhaps a slightly more angry sense than Lippi ever did. This sort of coaching has brought Chelsea to the pinnacle of English football this season, but the next frontier will be far more difficult.

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In the Champions League, Chelsea will face teams who are all well disciplined enough to know the importance of selflessness and team-work. It’s built into the fabric of perennial challengers Bayern Munich, Barcelona, Juventus and Real Madrid.

Those clubs also have squads vastly more talented than Chelsea’s. One of Chelsea’s major issues in recent years has been the dominance of player power over proper footballing principles.

It can work for a year, two, even maybe three but it always crashes eventually. It is good that Chelsea spent a year out of the Champions League embarrassed and cold if they learned the right lesson. Team spirit wins honors while individual interests win individual trophies.

AC Milan was the glamor club with the superstars for years, but they have won only two league titles since the turn of the millennium. Meanwhile, Juventus, with a polar opposite strategy, are conceivably on their way to the Champions League final and a 6^th title in a row. Player power can work but its success is always short lived. Decades of dominance are built on the backs of hardworking team-players not individual showboats.

Hopefully, during this season and with the success of Conte’s change in philosophy Chelsea have learnt this lesson and one painful year out of the Champions League will make it stick. The first thing that Chelsea should do in the summer is draw a line in the sand. Those players who believe and are committed should stay, even be given contracts reflecting it, and those whose hearts aren’t in it can be sold.

Diego Costa must make a decision. If he wants out of London then get out. China is waiting. The same goes for Eden Hazard and Thibaut Courtois. Waking up to see your star players have no interest in playing with you breaks the spirit of a team.

Believing the rumours doing the rounds, Chelsea could sell Costa for £90 million, Eden Hazard for £95-100 million (it would have to be record-breaking) and Courtois for £50 million. That makes some £240 million of spending money in one transfer window. If the Oscar money is added that’s almost £300 million and then Chelsea can add the usual 50-75 the club spends in a summer.