Chelsea headline player of the year nominations with players they sold
By Travis Tyler
Chelsea lead the charge for player of the year with Mohamed Salah and Kevin De Bruyne. Except both are players the Blues gave up on.
Chelsea are in fifth place with slim chances of pulling up into the top four. The blues have an FA Cup final to look forward to. And they have two players leading the player of the year nominations.
Except, of course, Chelsea sold both of them. After a solid loan at Werder Bremen, Kevin De Bruyne failed to break through at Chelsea. Rather than wait through the slump, Chelsea sold him to Wolfsburg. There, he set Bundesliga records and took home player of the year awards. He was then sold to Manchester City for a massive fee and immediately set the Premier League alight.
The other nominee, and eventual winner of the PFA Player of the Year award has a similar Chelsea story. After wrecking Chelsea in the Europa League, Chelsea eventually bought Mohamed Salah. He failed to make his mark. He was loaned to Fiorentina and then (controversially) to Roma. Salah did well at both, but for whatever reason Chelsea refused to bring him back into the fold. Deemed not good enough for the Premier League, he was sold to Roma. Eventually, Liverpool bought him to some criticism. It is safe to say that Liverpool were correct.
Both of these players were promising young players brought in from other leagues who failed to break through immediately in the Premier League with Chelsea. Both were given up on, went elsewhere, found their way back to England, and are currently the league’s best two players. Who is to blame for this?
In short, pretty much everyone at Chelsea has a finger in the pie. Jose Mourinho is perhaps the largest part of the blame. As he often does, he trusted older, experienced, and expensive players over the young and unproven. This did not mesh well with technical director Michael Emenalo’s long term vision of the club. A technical director can only succeed if the manager buys into their long term vision. “Long term” and buying into someone else’s ideas have never and will never be traits of Mourinho.
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Of course, Roman Abramovich rehired Jose Mourinho and turned down Emenalo’s resignation despite the long term vision clashing with the current manager. Perhaps Abramovich was scared of taking a risk again after the failure of Andre Villas-Boas. Perhaps Abramovich felt the only way to build upon the Champions League success was to make up with the club’s most successful manager. Regardless, it was a mistake to have Emenalo’s vision clash with Mourinho’s reality.
And then there is the board who allowed the players to be sold. Chelsea have traditionally been kind to its players when they want to leave. De Bruyne felt like he had no choice and asked for a transfer. But the board could have made it a loan as they waited out Mourinho. They could have put a buy back or tried anything to insure that he did not become the maestro at Manchester City.
The board could have kept the buy option out of Salah’s contract. And the staff at Chelsea should have recognized what he was doing in Italy. Instead, they dismissed it with the usual “Serie A players struggle in the Premier League” garbage. Now Salah is reaching Lionel Messi levels in the Premier League (even if it is possibly only a one season outlier).
All at Chelsea failed when De Bruyne and Salah left. And now they are rightfully the league’s two best players. It is clear that Chelsea have the scouts to find the world’s best talent. But they do not have the infrastructure to recognize or trust a player through a slump.
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The Premier League is slowly filling with former Chelsea players that many fans would love back. And it is hard not to wonder who of the current Blues is set to depart and reach the levels expected of them next.