This week Chelsea completed the signing of Mateo Kovacic and fielded offers from Everton for Kurt Zouma. It appears even with a transfer ban the club has no intention of calming down their finicking.
It seems Chelsea are always insistent on not doing things the right way, even despite FIFA giving them a transfer ban and essentially telling them they need to go back to basics and simplify how they do things. There was no need to make the sort of decisions they did in regard to youth signings, which is why and how they are in this current situation. It isn’t as if they found Lionel Messi Mach 2.0 or anything even close to the sort. Their best youth players are British players, yet they are where they are because of this seemingly insipid need to overcomplicate everything.
For the same underlying reasons the club constantly changes managers, have no true long-tenured players, have divided fans and have come to believe two good seasons in a row is as foreign as distant planets.
Chelsea FC for some reason choose not to learn their lessons. They continue to push themselves in the direction of the mistakes that brought them to exactly where they are.
This is not to say Mateo Kovacic isn’t a good player. He was unfairly judged last season in the midst of the madness that was Maurizio Sarri’s year at the helm. Kovacic made 51 appearances and never looked out of his depth.
Was he at times under utilized and his skillset really only truly recognized three-quarters of the way through the season? Yes, true. He is an excellent player both technically and in terms of his mentality, but this wasn’t a necessary move. That said, he will help the team.
It’s not even that bad that the club is discussing with Everton the sale of Kurt Zouma. But he should stay. He’s captain material.
Zouma has the right attitude and, for all Chelsea’s stockpiling of that new, stupid and remarkably ridiculously-termed group of players called “ball-playing center backs,” they have fairly few who could be termed “hard nosed, no nonsense, team on their back, winning comes first, trophies and results matter, character driven, would be generals, presidents or kings if they weren’t defenders” defenders. Zouma is one of the latter and, with Antonio Rudiger injured again, would be a likely starter.
But what is bad about allowing talks with Everton is that yet again, despite not having any football people in play for a significant amount of time to even advise on these sort of decisions, the club is moving forward with these decisions without having a manager in place.
Now, we recognize, of course, that perhaps the likely manager Frank Lampard could have said unofficially he was OK with both moves. But is he there to start planning? To start talking to people around the club and start building training regimes that work on their fitness as well as minds? No, he isn’t.
Chelsea are again forgetting the process with which things are supposed to be done. Get organized, find a philosophy, recognize the strong characters and the weak ones. Build around the former and rid yourself of the latter. Continue this, time and time again for a century. That is how you’re supposed to do things.
Hopefully Chelsea sign Frank Lampard soon and they can start to rectify this. I get the sense Chelsea do want to change. They want to start doing things the right way. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize the ship has gone off course in the past few years.
Sadly, it is now Manchester City who seem to have solidified their grasp on what was Chelsea’s glorious position as the big noisy neighbor to the boring traditional powers.
Chelsea had a 10-15 year head start on them, but have undone much of that good work in the last three to five.
Old habits do seem to die hard, and Chelsea’s well-meaning but perhaps simply too nervous and meddling board seem to be unable to drop their worst tendencies immediately. When Frank Lampard is appointed much of this can maybe change.
Many tactics can accommodate Mateo Kovacic and Kurt Zouma (or neither) as well as Chelsea’s youth (or none of them). We will have a grander and more specific view of what the future can hold only once Frank Lampard has taken charge of his first match.
Until then, things seem to be moving in the same direction and that must, above all, change. The club’s insistence on making both permanent and important decisions despite not having a manager in place does not bode well for a real future.