Chelsea Tactics and Transfers: Transfer ban could teach the club how to spend

Chelsea are rumored to be in the running for one of UEFA’s increasingly regular slap-on-the-wrist transfer bans for their behavior in acquiring youth talent from countries outside the UK. If the club learns something from it, it could be a gain for the club.

The potential transfer ban Chelsea are dealing with is peculiar for many reasons. One of the most ironic and silly ones is that Chelsea will be banned from buying players because of their recruitment of youth players they never play. Their pursuit of players they waste and misuse will somehow finally lead the club to justice by stopping them from pursuing business as they traditionally do. The irony of alone should sting the club deeply.

The ban could mean very little to the club, and yet become something that is incredibly difficult for the club to overcome in the short term. Chelsea in recent years have been so poor in their purchases that the best players on the team are players who have been there for upwards of three seasons.

Other than N’Golo Kante in 2016 and Jorginho this year there haven’t been many unmitigated success stories in the transfer market. For each success, there’s usually multiple Tiemoue Bakayoko’s and Alvaro Morata’s. Those sort of costly failures have been defining Chelsea’s transfer business for a long time.

The west London club are not fantastic when it comes to the transfer market. One can easily cite Hernan Crespo, Andriy Shevchenko, Fernando Torres, Juan Sebastian Veron, Mateja Kezman and Adrian Mutu of examples of just how truly terrible signings have been at Chelsea for a long time.

That is why I worry so much when I hear stories of Chelsea preparing a £200-300 million war chest if they are hit with a transfer ban. They’re not exactly a wonderfully successful team of investors. Spending that much money with the added pressure of doing it quickly to squeeze it in before a ban wouldn’t help things.

If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a million times: Chelsea don’t need that much help and spending that much money just for the sake of it would be stupid.

There are not enough necessary players available to spend that much money. Doing so would be just overpaying for the sake of it. The Blues are near the top of the league and playing excellent football at the moment. There’s not £200-300 million worth of problems. It is not as if suddenly spending that money unequivocally makes the squad better. You need to make sure you spend it correctly and in the right way.

For instance, the rumour of Chelsea trying (again) to buy Alex Sandro despite one of the best players in the team being Marcos Alonso is absurd. If anything, a right-back to push Cesar Azpilicueta to improve is more necessary than that. But £100 million worth of left-backs in a squad is one of the more inane and ridiculous things I’ve had to sit through. Sandro is a phenomenal player. There’s no doubting that. But in terms of the club’s needs he is beyond the realm of the realistic.

A forward and a right winger are the only true needs Chelsea have, and there’s no one out there good enough to justify a total outlay of more than £150 million between the two of them.

Chelsea would be better off making sure they fix the few holes they have and then integrating youth to offset the aging players in the squad. They could do with investing the rest of that money in finding a way to squeeze another 5,000-10,000 seats into Stamford Bridge or to improve the training ground. They could even improve the gameday experience for the fans.

A transfer ban might even be a good thing in a way. It would force Chelsea to realize they are going to have to fix more issues internally going forward. With Financial Fair Play coming into the game Chelsea are no longer the financial powerhouse they were at the beginning of the millennium. They can’t remedy all their issues with money anymore. Chelsea are smaller and they need to be smarter. Chelsea cannot and should not imitate Manchester United’s spend-money-for-every-problem approach.

If Chelsea learn they need to build a long-term internal club culture of self-improvement, dedication and sacrifice like Juventus or Bayern Munich they would be in a much better place two years from now when the ban is off. It’s the sort of thing that simply needs to happen at some point for the club to keep growing the way they should.

If it takes a transfer ban to show them then, finally, maybe, they’ll turn the corner anyway.