Chelsea’s AI loan-bot: Reece James to Wigan, Trevoh Chalobah to Ipswich

Reece James learned to do the Cobham two-step on Wednesday. Sign a contract extension with Chelsea in the morning, arrive at your loan destination by the afternoon.

Chelsea may not have a first-team coach, technical director or owner in the country, but the loan machine rolls on. Trevoh Chalobah left for Ipswich Town on Monday, and Reece James departed for Wigan on Wednesday after signing a new deal through 2022. Both loan clubs are in the Championship, with Wigan returning after a brief spell in League One.

Given the age of the players and their destinations in the English second tier, these are reasonable loans. Both will learn decent – if not high quality, technically astute – football that will be applicable to their future at Chelsea (or, realistically, elsewhere). They will also be able to get a strong start on their 150 senior-level game minimum for consideration by the Blues’ first team. Chalobah and James should each be able to accumulate at least 25 appearances – with many starts – barring injury, managerial turnover or shocking performance.

While these loans do not give much to quibble about, they do raise questions over who is calling the shots and, more importantly, who is charting the future.

In the ideal scenario, the technical director, youth coaches and first-team coach would make these decisions as a group. The youth coaches would give their insight and opinion on the players’ qualities, potential, readiness, maturity and the rest. They would also talk about their ability to field a competitive team in the youth tournaments. They would balance the ambitions of the academy as a youth program against the ambitions of the academy as a school for first-team talent.

The first-team coach would talk about his needs for the current season and his vision for the team going forward. Remember, this is an ideal scenario where the head coach plans on staying for several years rather than keeping a bag packed by the door. If he had any plans for using a young player as depth for the domestic cups or as a member of the training squad, those could weigh in favour of keeping the player at the club. Otherwise, he would lead the conversation about what the youth player needs to become one of his players in the first-team over some timeline.

The technical director would keep all the pieces together and settle any disputes. He would make the plan “anti-fragile,” that is, even if the coaching staff were sacked the big picture would stay intact. His signature would seal the consensus. Everyone would know the player and the club were on a path to somewhere good.

But Chelsea, obviously, lack two legs of this three-legged stool. And the remaining leg is a bit short right now, as Jody Morris left the academy to join Frank Lampard at Derby County. The club are without the over-arching strategic vision of the technical director and the tactical system of a head coach. They have only a portion of the personal knowledge of their youth coaches.

The club cannot be completely stagnant over the summer. They need to bring players in, and they need to send players out – both on transfers and on loans. But they are currently doing so without any of the pieces necessary for long-term success for any parties involved. Neither the club, the first-team, the youth teams nor the players benefit when decisions are made by… well, who is making these decisions? And on what basis and for what purpose?

Chelsea may just be rubber-stamping any requests that come in the door. They may just be sending out mass e-mails to the Football League distro with a list of available players. Perhaps someone built an AI bot that scraped everything it could off of TransferMarkt and machine learned itself to answer the question “What would Michael Emenalo do?”

Chelsea are making significant decisions without the necessary decision-makers in place. Simply talking about this in terms of “Chelsea” elides the question of “Who?” Who will take the blame or the credit? Who has the authority? Who has the knowledge, the plan and the lines of communication? Your guess might just be as good as the bot’s.

Next: Eden Hazard close to breaking through his plateau

Author’s note: As I was wrapping this up, the club announced Dujon Sterling’s loan to Coventry City.