Chelsea: End of ban will also reveal who is in charge, and who knows it

“Whose idea was this?” was common question for nearly a decade of January’s and August’s around Chelsea FC. Once the transfer ban ends, the club should ensure everyone knows.

We don’t need to recount the signings that made no sense from an immediate, short-term, long-term, or needs or requests of the coach perspective. Only later, when Chelsea sold the player from the loan army for an exorbitant profit, could anyone retrospectively justify the purchase. Seriously, a nearly 300% up-sell on Papy Djilobodji? Dismay and admiration all at once.

Those are the purchases that make Chelsea fans wary about a return to normal transfer business after the ban. It’s not just about the risk of buying a player who will displace a Cobham graduate – it’s the risk of buying a player who will make our next update of deadline day flops and transfers that sounded like April Fool’s Day jokes.

As Barrett talks about in this week’s Tactics and Transfers column, the transfer ban has forced Chelsea into making the right decision vis-a-vis their youth while preventing them from making poor decisions with inbound transfers. Personnel is policy, the saying goes, but around Chelsea no one ever really knew who were the personnel setting the mangled policy.

Much of the frustration of those transfers was bound in how opaque they were. Was there really ever a plan for Djilobodji and the rest? Even now, is there a plan for my favourite totem, Lucas Piazon?

If they were simply just financial vehicles to use the loan army as a hedge against Financial Fair Play, would it really have been the worst thing if everyone knew about it up front? We could have spared Michael Emenalo and Marina Granovskaia the time and blushes of taking pictures in front of a Chelsea Football Club spread with a player who they knew – intended, even – would never play for the club.

For most of Emenalo’s tenure at technical director, we never really knew where, when and how much he was involved in transfer business. We knew he had a direct line to Roman Abramovich, and now with the passage of time we can see some shadings of his strategy in the loan and development pipeline. But we still don’t know what sort of communication took place between him, the managers and the board, who ultimately signed the checks and therefore had a say in the the biggest signings. Did he have final authority after taking inputs from everyone around him? Did he interpret final authority as sole authority? Was he hamstrung by the finance side of the house, or was he dismissive of the always-temporary first-team staff?

Many times it seemed like Emenalo and his superiors bought players and handed them to the manager to keep or reject, with the latter being the door to the loan army. If the managers had a voice, Tiemoue Bakayoko, Danny Drinkwater and Davide Zappacosta are some of the more recent pieces of evidence that Emenalo ignored that voice.

Was that actually the case? We don’t know, and that’s part of the issue.

The true test will only come once the Blues can do business. If Chelsea buy players who do not align with the obvious needs of the first-team, or who come at the expense of top-rated players in the academy, it will be a sign that that the policies have not changed even if many of the personnel have. By process of elimination, it will then be easier to determine who really are the decision-makers and who are the chair-warmers (figureheads, if you want to be nice).

Petr Cech is not quite the technical director, but his role seems like he is at least the bridge between the football operations and the business operations. His relationship with Frank Lampard and their regular attendance at academy games provide hope for a positive and integrated approach to the players who pass through the club.

Simply by not having the first team, academy and technical staff be three competing factions, the Blues have taken an important step towards transparency. Cech, Lampard, Jody Morris and Joe Edwards all have feet in multiple aspects of the club, which helps make it one unified club. That in itself will minimize the power cliques and back-dealing.

Of course, there’s still the board and the business side of things. Maurizio Sarri was supposedly a flashpoint between Marina Granovskaia and Bruce Buck. Granovskaia won the battle (she hired Sarri) but Buck won the war when Sarri quit. Starting with Sarri making his intentions known, Granovskaia has been on a remarkable winning streak with the club’s squad business, which again reinforces the hope that philosophy, personnel and policy are aligning.

It should be pretty obvious what direction the club are going in once the first few transfers come through, whether that is in January or the summer. Leading up to then, the most important thing the club can do is be transparent.

Football is obviously a rumour swamp, and there’s no better way to quell or pre-empt rumours than to be as open as good football and business sense allows.

On a related note, hopefully the Daily Mail’s story about Chelsea disciplining Jody Morris for his Jose Mourinho-related social media posts is just an emanation from the rumour swamp.

Aside from being top banter, Morris’ social media is the sort of openness, insight and relationship that allows you to carry the positivity from the good times through the inevitable difficulties. The more fans know about athletes, coaches and clubs, the more they can stick by them during downturns. Look at any athlete who has gone through a significant injury, drop in performance or even scandal. The ones who made the effort to build a relationship with their fans weather those incidents much better than those who didn’t. The latter had nothing to fall back on, so all anyone had in mind was the injury, drop in performance or scandal.

The same applies to business decisions. If fans know what’s going on they can trust what’s going on, and with that they forgive the occasional and inevitable missteps.

Chelsea have won over the fans and even a lot of neutrals with nearly every decision since appointing Frank Lampard. Their first transfers of the Lampard era will be a top-to-bottom test of this club.