Chelsea: Young players in key roles should still be graded against their age

Chelsea have several very young players in leading roles across the pitch. They should still be assessed based on their age, and not their importance to the side.

Our friends at Training Ground Guru spotted the sort of 11-word certainty that can only find a home on Twitter: “Let’s be blunt and honest: Tahith Chong is not very good.” Well. There but for the grace of ESPN General Editor Alex Shaw goes Chelsea youth themselves.

To his credit, Shaw engaged with Training Ground Guru and talked himself into a more nuanced and less definitive statement provided by a different respondent: Chong is the least ready of Manchester United’s current crop of youth players playing with the first team. It may not have the snappy clickability of his first attempt, but the addition of one word makes a significant difference: ready.

Very few 19-year olds are ready to play with a top tier first team, and even fewer with a top-six first team. The fact that it attracts so much attention when a player under the age of 21 is a regular in the starting XI is evidence of how few players are, in fact, ready at that age. If Reece James or Callum Hudson-Odoi were 25, there would be a lot less interest in the impending battle with Cesar Azpilicueta or the bevy of transfer rumours and contract negotiations, respectively.

Frank Lampard has enough senior players available to him that he could field a much older starting XI. But even though Lampard has decided his young players should be starting over the more experienced ones does not mean they should be assessed on the same terms and against the same benchmarks as those older ones.

Yes, Lampard has to choose the best XI to earn a result in every game and progress towards the season’s goals. If a player is underperforming and costing the team on the pitch, the manager can justifiably bench him pending improvement via training and a progressive return to the side. But such underperformance is a day-to-day issue. It says little about their ceiling, their eventual importance to the team, even the position they might be playing when they finally break through.

While teams want and demands immediate results, when it comes to young players – particularly their own – focusing on the short-term is the pinnacle of short-sightedness. Comparing a younger player point-by-point to an experienced player neglects how that experienced player reached that point, and runs the risk of denying that developmental opportunity to the younger player.

Young players have more room to improve than older players simply as a function of experience and physical development.

A young player may be better tactically, technically or physically than an older player on the team who plays in the same position. But for the younger player that is a more fleeting judgment: if their development stalls or reverses for whatever reason, in a relatively short span of time they may find themselves behind the older player who never reach such peaks but maintained steady levels for years. Similarly, if that younger player does not continue to develop – whatever his precocious abilities were – he will soon find that his career fizzles out right around the time those players slagged off as laggards start to surpass him.

Training Ground Guru believes “only a few really really exceptional players, like [Steven] Gerrard and [Wayne] Rooney, truly hit the ground running in 1st teams of big clubs.” He notes that even Frank Lampard needed time at West Ham to grow towards the player he would become at Chelsea.

Chelsea are fortunate to have several players under the age of 23 who are ready to do the job their club is asking of them. But even if they are playing the parts of experienced senior players, they should not be judged as such.

Before making any sweeping judgments, good or bad, about any one of them we should consider how much room they have left to develop and what their progress will look like to get there. We shouldn’t want them to be as fully formed as the older players because that would mean they are already nearing their ceiling. Part of the excitement of youth players is the uncertainty built into potential.

That extends to young players who are not as highly rated. Before we write off any young player as “not very good,” we should ask how long and what kind of work he will need to be ready.

That – not revenue streams and Financial Fair Play compliance – is why teams have a loan pipeline and U23 teams: so teams can ensure all players hit their ceiling on their individual timeline, perhaps to the surprise and chagrin of those who turned their backs prematurely.