Chelsea’s tactics and transfers: Settling accounts from the transfer window
Chelsea supporters and critics reacted to this summer’s business with varying degrees of panic and criticism. In the fortnight since the end of the window, the Blues have plenty of room for optimism.
Chelsea brought in six senior players and two youth players (Ethan Ampadu and Kylian Hazard) in the summer transfer window. That is a significant amount of new faces and change in the dressing room. Regardless of whether or not they are star players who can immediately shake up the starting XI, simply integrating that many new talents, personalities and skills in the dressing room is a difficult task.
As a general rule, teams do not want to make more than 2-4 signings in the summer transfer window. They should avoid the January window altogether.
That said, Chelsea needed to do a fair bit of business during the summer. They sold a large number of squad players and had to deal with the losses of both Nemanja Matic and Diego Costa (more on that later).
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The youth and squad players are a sad loss – no two ways about it. Chelsea have at least learned from their mistakes and included buy-back clauses when they sold Nathan Ake and Bertrand Traore. In this way, they are not behaving any differently than Barcelona often do with players from La Masia academy.
The fault here is that Chelsea wait too long to make these decisions. Top players play top level football in their teens and – at the latest – by age 21. Chelsea do not give players enough opportunity at the top level early enough, which essentially places low ceilings on their once sky-high potential. Hopefully, the relatively early sale of Ake, Traore and Nathaniel Chalobah will bring them up to speed. And the buy-back clauses will ensure Chelsea do not get burned on making the sale.
Chelsea’s loans are somewhat less defensible. Kurt Zouma is every bit the defender that Antonio Rudiger is. He will one day be a titan in the Chelsea defense. He is a fantastic physical player and has already improved Stoke. Reuben Loftus-Cheek’s loan is understandable if overdue, as his childhood club have already mucked up his career so badly. At 22, he should have a minimum of 40 Premier League appearances if he is as good as he has been touted.
Eventually, Loftus-Cheek or Chalobah will return to Chelsea to replace Danny Drinkwater. Drinkwater was essentially a stop-gap to give Chelsea an experienced Premier League player while their youth gain such experience elsewhere.
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Tiemoue Bakayoko’s purchase was an interesting and revelatory move by Chelsea. He is similar to both Chalobah and Loftus-Cheek in terms of skill set or talent. However, he possesses a remarkable amount of top-level experience for a player his age. His Ligue 1 and Champions League experience far outweighs that of both Loftus-Cheek and Chalobah.
Now the debate over whether Chelsea should have ensured those two had that experience has been had and won. They should have, but they didn’t. Buying Bakayoko is, in a way, an acknowledgment.
The Blues will start involving their youth players more in the future. If not because it is simply the proper way to run a club but because of the broken transfer market. It simply is not possible to purchase an entire team for a reasonable sum of money (assuming these fees were ever reasonable). The market never really recovered from the Kaka-Ronaldo summer (2009) at Real Madrid, and the Neymar-Mbappe one (2017) is a genuine example of transfer fee inflation .
Teams simply will have no choice except to try and build teams out of youth, and then color them with purchases. This is the only recourse when the market dictates that players like Alex Sandro can not sell for less than £70 million. This is a player who, while good, is not even the starting left back for his national team. The market is so inflated that youth players will become a far more important part of a team’s structure than ever before.
The only youth career that Chelsea have perhaps not entirely ruined up until this point is Tammy Abraham’s. He is at the right age to be playing for a Premier League team that has lost its first choice center-forward. Abraham will play upwards of 30 matches this season. At 19 that is exactly what he needs to be doing. Abraham compares favorably with Harry Kane, and everyone knows the affection that Antonio Conte has for Harry Kane.
Chelsea’s transfer business this summer so far reflects this greater emphasis on youth. They purchased players (excluding Bakayoko) who will be replaced in time to come. Or they have left the team thin in certain areas (center-forward), rather than blocking the path for youth players to come through. If Chelsea had bought another striker this summer it would have been to the disadvantage of Abraham in the years to come.
Final word on Diego Costa
Nothing about the Diego Costa situation is ideal but the club have seemingly handled themselves well in the aftermath. In a report from Marca the reason why Chelsea have not sold Costa yet is because of his boycott. Chelsea director Marina Granovskaia is willing to meet his transfer demands but not until he fulfills his professional obligations at Stamford Bridge. She is doing the perfect thing in the face of what could have been a player power uproar.
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Costa looks more and more the petulant child because of the position Granovskaia and the board have taken. Chelsea agreed to a fee with Atletico, but Costa cannot have his way until he behaves like an adult. It is truly the perfect stance to take. Perhaps it signals a return to the well-oiled, disciplined mentality a team needs to have to succeed long term.