Marcos Alonso is set to extend his contract at Chelsea through 2023, when he will be 32 years old. This is a significant departure from the norm, and the Blues chose the right player at the right time to do it.
Slowly – maddeningly, snail swimming through molasses slowly – Chelsea are negotiating contract extensions with key players. Don’t ask who is doing the negotiating from the club’s side (351 days without a technical director, 100 or so days since Roman Abramovich was permitted in the country), but at least among the players, Marcos Alonso is about to commit his next five years to being a Blue.
The length of Alonso’s contract gives him a two-year premium over many of his peers and predecessors. Chelsea normally aim for contracts to expire when a player is 30 years old – 31 at the latest – so they can then start the single-year renewals until it comes time to shuffle along. Alonso will be one day over 32.5 years old when this contract runs out.
Greater players – both in terms of talent and club status – than Alonso have not received such generous terms. If this indicates a new approach to securing futures, Chelsea have selected an appropriate player to signal it. Alonso represents the promise that a club and a coach can hold for otherwise unheralded players. He shows that Chelsea do not only buy proven stars on headline-making transfer fees. Despite being the third-generation of Spanish footbal nobility, Alonso is the everyman who traipses through Sunderland, Bolton and Fiorentina en route to a club like Chelsea.
If Alonso stays with the Blues for the duration of his contract, he will be one of the enduring legacies of Antonio Conte. Conte not only engineered Alonso’s rise from journeyman defender to world-class left wing-back, he made this shift in Chelsea’s perspective possible. He knew the role Alonso could play in his system, even if Conte’s original steps towards implementing his vision were tentative until the game at Arsenal.
Maurizio Sarri affirmed Conte’s vision by making Alonso his starting left-back, and underlined Alonso’s importance by calling him the best left-back in Europe. Sarri also extended Conte’s vision for Alonso by guiding him into his hybrid role as left-back-cum-shadow-foward. Although Alonso can take this role’s freedom too far at times, as he did against Manchester United, Sarri is giving him room to define the role over time. Eventually, it may even bear his name: the “Alonso role.”
Chelsea did the right thing at the right time for the right player. Marcos Alonso deserves another five years in Blue. Now if only they could finalize the same for Eden Hazard.