Chelsea Tactics and Transfers: End of transfer ban will be the real test

Chelsea will learn soon if their transfer ban will end in time for them to make signings in January. If it does, we’ll find out if they really mean everything this season has become.

What is interesting about the possibility of Chelsea winning their transfer ban appeal is that we will finally learn if Chelsea have actually, honestly, smartened up in terms of their recruitment strategy, or if the ban just provided us with a sort of misguided fever dream.

Worryingly, there have been many rumors around the players that Chelsea are likely to recruit should they be able to buy in January; and it would appear that many people think that nothing around the club has changed. That is why the end of the transfer ban – whenever it occurs – will be such a good test of the club’s new (if it is something new) mentality. Will they simply return to their old ways of buying needless and mediocre players for £35-45 million to play positions youth players could fill, or will they have learned to be patient and save their money for the one or two £90 million players who are worth positions in the table all on their own?

Only the latter gives any reason for hope.

One of the reasons for the eventual meltdown in Antonio Conte’s second year that continued into the sickening reign of Maurizio Sarri was the weakness of Chelsea’s recruitment policy.

It created a logjam of contractual issues, overspending and Financial Fair Play handcuffing that resulted in Chelsea surrendering their hard-won position in England’s pecking order first to Manchester City and then Liverpool. Within the boundaries of London, they even ceded ground to Tottenham.

For years Chelsea bought players like Tiemoue Bakayoko, Davide Zappacosta, Danny Drinkwater, Gonzalo Higuain, Alvaro Morata, and David Luiz when they had players like Ethan Ampadu, Reece James, Mason Mount, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Tammy Abraham, Fikayo Tomori and more. They wasted hundreds of millions of pounds and hamstrung themselves in the race for big transfers because they simply had no more money left to spend.

Would £140 million on Kylian Mbappe not have been better than Bakayoko, Zappacosta and Morata? Would Virgil Van Djik not have been better than David Luiz and Danny Drinkwater and an absurd loan fee for Higuain? Of course they would have been.

Chelsea spent so long wasting money on such an absurdly long list of inane, terrible transfers that it seemed it would never end. It was shocking and saddening, and caused your correspondent to wish that transfer windows would never happen.

We’d sit and watch clubs like Juventus move their way through windows with a deft and intelligent touch. They would improve their squad’s quality and chemistry, and then compete at the top of the table and in Europe all at once. Chelsea then would spring from 1st to 10th to somewhere in between, all while boasting of some sort of success like a drunkard in the street talking about the yesteryears.

Then the blessing of the transfer ban came. Chelsea were forced to look inward. They were forced to look at their own players and their own staff and find a way through. And now look at where they are! They are in third place in the most difficult division in the world, playing magnificent football and doing it the proper way.

Now I don’t expect everyone to be like me and idealize clubs like Athletic Bilbao in this. But I do truly believe that the best measure of a club as they’re meant to be is as a sporting community institution. You should coach your own players, you should have them hail from the area and you should be working at the grassroots level to teach and instill the values of your community in your footballing endeavors. Then when you compete you see how good you truly are.

When you sell a player, invest it in the training ground and in the players’ education. Use that money to subsidize ticket sales and let more people come to matches for less money. That would be the ideal.

A team of 11 homegrown players managed and coached in the area would be fantastic to see. I acknowledge, however, that it is unlikely.

But to suggest a club have a third of its squad be homegrown players and then spend the money that’s left over on genuine world-class players isn’t crazy. Chelsea should aim for that regardless of whether FIFA forces them to remember the roots of football.

It has been worrying to see the club linked with yet another list of mediocre players who fulfill no purpose except to inflate the wage bill, destroy the squad’s chemistry and alienate the support yet again.

I, for one, hope the transfer ban is extended past the summer. That being unlikely, we are forced to put our faith in Frank Lampard’s judgment and character. Not a bad place for our trust to be.

Hopefully, Chelsea do the right thing and manage the eventual end of the ban properly, because in this case there is an obvious right way to handle it and an obvious wrong way. They have a history of picking the wrong way.

Much has felt like it has changed. We’ll have to see how much actually has.