Chelsea: Maurizio Sarri wholly uninterested in developing Blues’ youth

Maurizio Sarri has no idea where top players come from and how they develop. You can support Chelsea’s youth or you can support Maurizio Sarri. You cannot support both.

Someone needs to pull Maurizio Sarri aside and have “the talk.” You know, that awkward “birds and bees” talk that your father is supposed to have with you but most people just end up figuring it out on their own. Because right now, Sarri has no idea where top footballers come from. He probably thinks a stork leaves them fully-formed in a basket on the doorstep of a club’s training ground.

Sarri reiterated his cluelessness about football development with another set of comments on Callum Hudson-Odoi at his press conference ahead of Chelsea’s game against Dynamo Kyiv. He somehow thinks that by not playing Hudson-Odoi, he is taking the pressure off him so that in 3-4 years, Hudson-Odoi will blossom ex nihilo into one of the best players in the world.

For good measure, Sarri even shifted the blame onto “you” – whoever you may be – for putting too much pressure on young players.

"Callum is always in my mind for every match. I don’t know if tomorrow he will be on the pitch or not. I think also you have to put less pressure to young English players… Callum as all other young players in England, needs to improve, it is important for him to improve. He will then be at the top at 22,23, without pressure. – via Nizaar Kinsella"

These statements are just another example of Maurizio Sarri’s lack of intellectual curiosity and any interest in expanding upon his narrow range of experience. Because he has never been developed any young players himself, he has apparently never given any thought to how young players develop into top players. If he had – if he had asked around other coaches or even his own players – he would learn one thing: they may learn in training, but they develop by playing.

Sarri’s own players could tell him how they had what he is denying Chelsea’s youth. Dries Mertens, one of Sarri’s favourites at Napoli, has played no less than 29 first-team games in every season since he was 20 years old. He played 38 senior games as a 20-year old in Belgium’s second division. Two years later he played 34 senior games in the Eredivisie.

Marek Hamsik, another Sarri regular at Napoli, played 37 league games in his first season at Napoli, age 20. The previous two seasons saw 40 and 24 appearances in Serie B (plus cup games).

Gonzalo Higuain played 19, 25 and 34 league games for Real Madrid in his first three seasons. That brought him up to age 21.

We’re just taking names out of thin air here, but the story would be much the same for anyone Sarri worked with at Napoli or Chelsea. One more: Cesar Azpilicueta had 29 and 36 La Liga appearances in his first two seasons at Osasuna. Then he turned 20.

Sarri enjoys working with players like these but apparently never thought to ask or research how they reached that point, how it is they went from being a bunch of kids to his regulars at Napoli or Chelsea.

Of course, maybe Sarri does know. Perhaps he knows that a young player needs to play at these critical ages in order to be a top player in his mid-20s.

What then? We know he likes self-fulfilling prophecies. Maybe he figures if he doesn’t play a young player on the grounds that the player’s not ready, then the player plateaus or fizzles out, Sarri will say he was right and knew it all along, and hope no one questions whether the lack of playing time caused that outcome.

Or he could think there is little need to develop a player when you can always just buy a player. What’s the point of growing your own crops when there’s a supermarket two blocks away?

Third, this could be another of Sarri’s self-preservation instincts. He does not want to run the risk of playing a young player because he does not want the added risk that they will make the mistakes that young players make. So instead he plays, um, David Luiz. Additionally, if he works to develop a young player and things don’t go well for that player, he may not want that blame on his record.

Clearly, we’re speculating on the root causes here. But what is inescapable from today’s and many other comments is that Sarri is uninterested in developing young players. He either doesn’t know how, doesn’t know why or doesn’t care to do it. Because if he was interested, he would satisfy the one necessary condition for Chelsea’s youth that all successful players in any sport have in common: playing time.

The way a player gets to where he can play at Napoli or Chelsea from his mid-20s onward is to start playing regular first-team games by age 20 at the latest. This is why Chelsea lost players like Jonathan Panzo and Harvey St. Clair last summer for lower-quality teams, and why they will continue to lose more like them.

Someone needs to explain to Sarri how this all works. Maybe Gianfranco Zola can come by his office, maybe Sarri’s idol Pep Guardiola can bring it up over a bottle of wine, maybe Marcelo Bielsa could put together a PowerPoint to explain thing in dry detail.

Or he could learn about it in the raw dirty way kids figure such things out these days: go to YouTube and watch a video. He’ll find plenty of Vinicius, Jr., Jadon Sancho, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Kylian Mbappe, Gianluigi Donnarumma.

By next year at this time, there will be plenty of vids of Callum Hudson-Odoi at Bayern Munich.