Maurizio Sarri has repeatedly done the near-impossible in his first season at Chelsea, and not usually in good ways. The defining moment of his second season could be a showdown over N’Golo Kante.
Between his footballing and his personality, N’Golo Kante is almost fully immune to controversy or conflict. We’d say he is like Kryptonite to any such things, but even that seems too confrontational. However, just because he does not get involved directly and publicly, he could still be the focus of a conflict at Chelsea FC.
N’Golo Kante has several times been the subject of pointed, public, by-name criticism from Maurizio Sarri. Chelsea responded to one of Sarri’s most stunning salvos by finalizing Kante’s contract extension in the days following the November loss to Tottenham. Sarri has not changed his tune on Kante’s supposed technical deficiencies, has (obviously) shown no signs of changing his formation to better suit one of his two world-class players and – against Watford – inexcusably risked and lost Kante to injury after 10 minutes (Twitter thread here, after you finish this article).
Maurizio Sarri does not much care where Kante’s ceiling is. Sarri has done nothing to let Kante be 100% Kante, as Claudio Ranieri, Antonio Conte and Didier Deschamps did en route to Premier League and World Cup titles. Sarri’s concern is only how well Kante can approximate “the Allan role” at box-to-box midfield.
Fortunately for Chelsea, he approximates that role quite well. Kante has four goals and four assists in the Premier League, the former setting and the latter matching his career-best in England. And fortunately for Sarri, Kante is still doing plenty of Kante things in the midfield, winning back possession, making tackles, releasing quick passes upon recovering the ball and covering Jorginho defensively.
But Kante is still not what Sarri wants in any of his midfield positions. And if he is, Sarri sure has an odd way of showing his appreciation.
With Champions League qualification secure, only one more piece needs to fall into place to ensure Maurizio Sarri’s return. If the transfer ban is suspended and the Blues can do business this summer, Sarri will stay and he will be in the driver’s seat.
The club’s top priority will likely be buying full-backs and a striker. Cesar Azpilicueta needs support on the right, and the situation on the left is too uncertain for another year, let alone one in the Champions League. With Sarri in charge, there is little chance of Reece James or Tammy Abraham coming into the squad on any meaningful basis; and Ola Aina is a question mark on the left vis-a-vis Sarri.
Sarri will also likely push for a more technical midfielder, someone who can play box-to-box and deputize Jorginho. Sarri has had the same criticism of N’Golo Kante for the entire season, which suggests he does not think Kante is any closer to meeting his (ahem) standards for the role than he was in August. If Sarri believes a player like Nicolo Barrella is available, having convinced Chelsea to pay £52 million for Jorginho, he will drive Chelsea to make Cagliari an offer they will have to accept.
With Barrella or someone like him in the side, what then for N’Golo Kante? Sarri showed this season how he will treat players he deems unsatisfactory. No amount of talent, accomplishment or service seems sufficient to protect a player if Sarri has someone who fits his roles better. The idea of N’Golo Kante starting more games on the bench than on the pitch seems ludicrous, but after 2018/19, the realm of the possible is far too expansive.
If Kante is not a regular in the starting XI, Chelsea will have a line out the door of teams making close to nine-figure offers. They will also have a fan base more acrimoniously divided – with some apathetic – than they do now. And they may find themselves standing on footballing principle against the manager they just backed for a high-spending transfer window.
The board obviously knows what a rare talent and person they have in N’Golo Kante, and the timing of his contract extension in November was far too meaningful to be a coincidence. Chelsea FC put their support behind Kante in that moment just as they put their support behind Sarri last summer, in January and will this summer if they can do business. But if Sarri puts Kante on the sidelines, the board will have to choose a side.
Some form of pressure caused Maurizio Sarri to bring Callum Hudson-Odoi into the squad in January, when Bayern Munich were pursuing the winger. Perhaps the board gave Sarri a direct order, or perhaps Sarri – ever the pragmatic survivalist – threw the fans a bone to get them off his (and the board’s) back. If this scenario plays out next year, such a token gesture will not suffice. As much as fans love and the game highly rates Callum Hudson-Odoi, he is not a two-time Premier League and World Cup winner, and he is not worth a potential world-record fee.
If Sarri bent a bit in response to £30-40 million offers from Bayern Munich, the club will break under £80+ million offers from Paris Saint-Germain and anyone else who could get in on the action. And there would be others. No compromise arrangement would suffice: either Kante would have to go or Sarri.
Like so much else around Chelsea FC, this is an absolutely absurd prospect that would have been unthinkable one year ago. We saw a lot coming, but not this.
But one year ago we would not have expected to hear the Chelsea coach repeatedly talk about Kante’s “technical” deficiencies, persist in playing Kante in a sub-optimal position or hear the coach’s water-carriers start numerous diatribes with “Well ACKSHUALLY Kante never was a defensive midfielder, so this is the best he can do in Sarriball.”
N’Golo Kante will not cause a stir over whatever may happen to him under Maurizio Sarri. But he won’t have to. Many other teams will force Chelsea to confront the situation, and Chelsea may even know the right thing to do before being told.
Then we’ll just have to wait for the revisionist history over who really wanted Kante to leave (cf: Costa, Diego.