Chelsea: Conte needs the right players, not just any player with a pulse
By George Perry
Among the tropes and takes coming out of Chelsea’s loss to Arsenal is the one saying Antonio Conte has no right to complain about transfers and squad depth, since he oversaw several key exits and loans. This reduces the idea of building a title-challenging team to stocking the side with any available warm body.
Antonio Conte reiterated his minimal involvement with Chelsea’s transfer activity in his post-match interviews on Wednesday. This prompted a few dozen hot takes of the “well, actually” variety. Conte, as the story goes, had a significant involvement in some off-season exits, both permanent and temporary. Diego Costa, Nathaniel Chalobah, Tammy Abraham and Ruben Loftus-Cheek all left Stamford Bridge with Conte’s approval.
Therefore, they say, he has limited ground to complain he is not part of the transfer business. He is very involved in the outgoing players. And if he is so concerned about the low volume of incoming players, perhaps he should not be so quick to cast off these others.
Well. That Diego Costa comes up in the conversation shows the selective memory (if not willful ignorance) at work. Costa wanted to return to Atletico Madrid before Antonio Conte arrived. The clash of personalities catalyzed the process. In the end, everyone had what they wanted. The idea Antonio Conte and Diego Costa could have had any working relationship together for another season – let alone a productive one that did not poison the entire team – is fanciful.
The other players mentioned dredge up the persistent issue of Antonio Conte and Chelsea’s youth. If Conte had not moved out Chalobah, Abraham and Loftus-Cheek, not only would he have enough players to satisfy him but he would be doing the right thing by The Youth.
First, as Travis Tyler exhaustively demonstrated earlier this week, Antonio Conte has given more minutes to youth players than any manager since Carlo Ancelotti. You can argue Chelsea in the Roman Abramovich era have neglected their academy-to-first-team pipeline. But to say Conte is no better than is predecessors is demonstrably false.
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Second, those youth players would contribute little to Chelsea compared to their replacements in the squad. None of them are ready to be impact players. To whatever extent Antonio Conte would have used them, they would simply end up as homegrown scapegoats at times like these.
Ruben Loftus-Cheek played 1,331 Premier League minutes at Crystal Palace this season. That is far more – and far better for his career – than anything he could have expected at Chelsea. But alas, the Glass Midfielder is now injured. He very well could be on the injured list at Chelsea, too, particularly given Chelsea’s more demanding schedule. He would be another gap in the lineup, rather than solving all the problems in midfield.
Tammy Abraham is having either a sophomore slump or a more difficult time adapting to the Premier League. He has only four goals in 20 Premier League appearances, including 14 starts. Swansea City fans are no happier with him than certain segments of Chelsea fans are with Alvaro Morata.
The idea that Antonio Conte brought these issues upon himself reduces personnel management and team strategy to a question of numbers, not quality or suitability. Conte does not need players. He has players. Chelsea has players. Luton Town has players. Antonio Conte needs the right players.
Clearly, if Antonio Conte simply needed to fill out a roster he could bring up any number of academy players or sign a few free transfers over the summer. Those players will not help Chelsea win games or play the beautiful, sexy football Conte can deliver. But that is no longer the issue when you say “But what about Costa? What about Loftus-Cheek?”
What about them? They are not the right players for Antonio Conte, which means they are not the right players for Chelsea. The frustration around Chelsea’s transfer activity – both incoming and outgoing – is Chelsea are replacing one batch of wrong players with another. As Barrett Rouen amply argued, the Blues have become specialists in settling for second-best in the transfer market. Conte then takes the blame for their easily foreseeable under-performance and – more importantly – unsuitability to his system.
Must Read: Chelsea must stop settling for second-best (or worse) in the transfer market
So yes, if the board bring in a player Antonio Conte does not want, why not just keep an academy graduate Conte does not want? The result in four competitions will be about the same. There is no magic alchemy making a wrong player from the academy better than a wrong player from Serie A.
Perhaps Antonio Conte is suffering under the expectations he created last year, not just in winning the Premier League but in making Marcos Alonso, Victor Moses and Gary Cahill look nearly world-class. People expect Antonio Conte to achieve the same outcome with any footballer dropped off on the Cobham doorstep.
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Rather than appreciate his genius and give him some 9.5’s he can turn into 10’s, Chelsea are asking him to take a bunch of 6’s and make them 9.5’s. And then the fans slate him for only bringing them up to 8.