Chelsea is setting up a staff full of former players and legends. Group think will happen but it can be healthy for the club (but only for a season).
Frank Lampard’s staff is made up of many coaches he worked with at Derby County, including Jody Morris who followed him to the Championship side and now (back) to Chelsea. Lampard did not deny that Didier Drogba and Claude Makelele would be returning either, raising questions of “an old boys’ club”.
Lampard was quick to say it was not about being formerly or presently at Chelsea, but having talent and a desire to work hard. And while it can be because of both Chelsea connections and talent, there will also be a concern that all their ideas will be too similar.
This is known as group think. When a group comes together to make decisions, especially if the group is all cut from the same cloth, then there can be a blind spot for certain issues. But a little bit of group think could be helpful for Chelsea this season. Long term that will not be the case, but short term it can work.
The club wants to use its own this season. Regardless of whether they wanted to or not, they would have to thanks to the transfer ban. The pipeline from the academy has been absent and Lampard was adamant that it would be there if the players proved themselves. He wants it, his coaching staff including Morris and Joe Edwards want it, and the board surely wants it as well.
But there is a straw man argument whenever youth are brought up that “the whole XI will be kids”. That is not true, but it does shine light on a particular issue. If the group think is that the kids need to play more, what happens if a kid starts in a big game over a more experienced player and it goes poorly? The group think is to trust their own, but what happens if that goes too far?
Another issue is challenging Lampard. If Lampard is wrong or is not thinking outside of the box enough, then there needs to be someone there to challenge him or raise a new idea he would not have thought of. With friends and teammates in his staff, who is there to do that?
But group think does make sense for this season because Chelsea has no direction. The club ran on the culture that Jose Mourinho built for a long time after he left, but all those players carrying the torch are gone now. Antonio Conte did not establish his own culture before leaving and Maurizio Sarri tried to reverse any remaining trace of what Mourinho had left behind. “The Chelsea Way” is an absent as it has ever been.
Having a direction and a culture is more needed now than ever at Chelsea and there is no better way to establish it than with the group think of all the former players. They understood what Chelsea used to be and how it got that way. They can reestablish that now while bringing in a new set of young players who also understand it. This season is less about what happens on the pitch and more about what happens off it. And what must happen off of it is a new “Chelsea Way” has to be formed.
But after this season, there will be a need for fresh voices and ideas from the outside. Once the baseline is set, the fine tuning has to be done by fresh eyes as well as the ones that laid the initial foundation. Sir Alex Ferguson went through a new coaching staff every few seasons, not because he was impossible to work with, but because he had laid the foundation and he needed a fresh set of eyes to tell him where the cracks were.
This season is about the foundation. The future needs to be about the fine tuning and Lampard cannot do that with a staff of friends and former teammates. A little be of group think will be good for Chelsea this year, but going forward outsiders will need to be let in to offer fresh takes and challenges before things go stale.