Chelsea: Maurizio Sarri not approaching youth like a coach at a top-six club

Maurizio Sarri’s unwillingness to play Chelsea’s youth looks increasingly like the product of his unwillingness or inability to understand player development. Neither his reasoning nor his decisions reflect well on Chelsea.

Callum Hudson-Odoi played the final 12 minutes against Dynamo Kyiv. To hear Maurizio Sarri tell it, Hudson-Odoi should be ecstatic to play that much yet relieved to play so little. While Hudson-Odoi used that time to dribble, charge, and nearly create Chelsea’s third goal before linking up with Ruben Loftus-Cheek to score Chelsea’s third goal, Sarri continues to hide behind some unknown idea of “pressure” to justify keeping Hudson-Odoi out of the game for so long.

Sarri offered the same tripe in his pre-match press conference, where he also repeated his laughable claim that top teams do not give teenagers substantial playing time. Not only is he wrong, he has it exactly backwards if he thinks the best teams lash their youth to the back of the line.

Every team in the Premier League’s top six has given 373 or more minutes to at least one player age 20 or younger this season. Somewhat surprisingly, Tottenham are at the bottom of the group, giving just that amount to Oliver Skipp. Chelsea have the second-fewest to their most-used U20, Callum Hudson-Odoi. His 717 minutes are a game’s worth or two short of what Phil Foden (18) or Diogo Dalot (19) have played for the Manchester clubs, but is several times less than Trent Alexander-Arnold (20) or Mateo Guenduozi (19).

The other end of the table reveals the other side of youth usage. Seven clubs have not given over 200 minutes to any player age 20 or younger. Those seven are all in the bottom half, and two are in the relegation zone. The only three clubs that have not given any minutes to any player 20 or younger are Leicester City (11th place), Newcastle (14th place) and Cardiff City (18th place).

The gradient of more youth minutes at the top to fewer youth minutes at the bottom makes sense from the perspectives of fixture congestion and the quality gap between the top clubs and their opponents in cups and Europe. Coaches in the top six recognize they cannot always play their best players, nor do they need to. They also know the importance of intrasquad competition and the importance of youth to a club identity.

However, some midtable teams (and one relegation-zone team) are, shall we say, putting the pressure on their youth. Everton, West Ham, Southampton, Fulham and Burnley all have a player 20 or younger with over 1,000 minutes. However, they are the outliers among the other 14 teams. And of those, only Burnley had European competition, albeit briefly and disastrously in the summer’s qualifying rounds.

So when Maurizio Sarri compares his usage of Callum Hudson-Odoi to the rest of the Premier League, he is either referring to the middle  or bottom of the table or Tottenham. That is the company Chelsea are keeping. Championship-bound teams, perpetual midtable denizens, Tottenham… and Chelsea.

Of course, this single-season view neglects Tottenham’s record of the past few years of bringing their youth up through the ranks into the first team. This season is the anomaly for Mauricio Pochettino, whereas it is as consistent with Maurizio Sarri’s past as everything else he ever does.

On the subject of the company Maurizio Sarri keeps, Chelsea’s youth and Tottenham, Sarri has yet to give any player his first team debut. The last season in which no one made their senior bow was 2011/12: the Andre-Villas Boas partial season. Just when you thought there couldn’t be any more parallels.

Obviously, Maurizio Sarri has already outlasted Villas-Boas, so he still has time. In the six years since, though, the Blues have had a debutante by this point in the season four times. Jake Clarke-Salter made his debut on April 2, 2016, and John Swift made his on May 11, 2014. Those were the latest points in which Chelsea had their first debut of a season.

Considering how Maurizio Sarri waited until the truly dead rubbers of the Europa League group stage before starting Callum Hudson-Odoi and Ethan Ampadu, he may just wait until a similar point in the Premier League season before calling someone up from Cobham. Then again, the top four could go all the way down to the final whistle of the season before counting up goal differential.

In that case, Chelsea and Maurizio Sarri will finish with a lot in common with Tottenham and Andre Villas-Boas. Wonder if he has as much of a problem with doing that as you do with reading it.