Chelsea do not need the best players available on the transfer market and they certainly don’t need the most expensive ones. They need the right players, and those are not found by scanning the headlines.
The end of the transfer ban has led to the end of all restraint in the speculation over who Chelsea might sign. At least when the ban was in place, the fact that the first signing was at least seven months away limited the exaggerated sense of urgency and allowed for some consideration about who would be the best players for the Blues to pursue given the make-up of the squad, the adjustments in personnel and tactics yet to come from Frank Lampard and the proper consideration of price, availability and risk.
Looking at most articles and conversations around the Chelsea-sphere this week, potential transfers only fit into two buckets: world-class and banter. Players in the latter category are rarely identified by name: Chelsea are merely excoriated to avoid “the next Zappacosta / Papy / Baba / etc.”
Those in the former are an even more curious group. None of them are actually world-class by any reasonably agreeable definition. At best, Jadon Sancho, Ben Chilwell, Erling Haaland and Timo Werner are showing the early signs of some day being world-class. But they are not there yet. Which means there is the risk that they will be purchased from the former category but will be remembered to history among the latter.
Like most dichotomies, this one is as false as it – like most articles and conversations around the Chelsea-sphere this and all other weeks – is dumb.
Rather than debate which player is or is more likely to be in one category or the other, the question for any potential transfer is whether they are right for the team, independent of their fee and – at a surface level – of their past performances.
To the extent that any of us follow other teams or leagues as closely as we follow Chelsea (did you even watch Napoli last season, or the season before?), we haven’t seen enough of any of these players to judge adequately if they are truly world-class or merely stars in their context; if they have the underlying skills necessary for success in multiple leagues; if they are on a trajectory of continued growth, or if they are already leveling out and will be on a physical or technical plateau before or shortly after arriving at Stamford Bridge.
More importantly, though, we don’t know the plan. A player may, in fact, be absolutely perfect for Chelsea this season starting next month. He may be a perfect complement to Frank Lampard’s six or seven core players, lending the precise strengths to cover the XI’s obvious deficiencies. But next season or the season after, given how the rest of the Chelsea’s young squad develops and who is coming up from the youth team and back from loans and how the rest of the league continues to evolve and what Lampard wants to do as he evolves as a manager and as Chelsea’s manager, that player could be as out of place as Rebekah Vardy at the Rooney family Christmas party.
High-price, high-hype transfers do not “flop” because they are poor players. It’s because they are poor fits, either for the team or for the league.
A truly world-class player transcends those boundaries. He succeeds in different leagues (at the very least one “big five” domestic league and the Champions League) over multiple years and, many times, across managers and tactical systems. That’s the necessary proof, and those players mooted as “world-class” for the upcoming transfer window have not yet done it. The course of a single season could be enough to switch their category from “world-class” to “banter,” even though they are essentially the same player on the bench for the last day of the season as they were when they were sung into the stadium on the first day.
The obsession with signing exclusively “world-class” players and doing so in bulk is yet another way the Pep Guardiola phenomenon has damaged football fan culture. Both of our loyal readers may recall that last season, one of the few times I kinda sorta defended Maurizio Sarri (“It’s true.” – Kurt Angle) was to draw the contrast between him and Guardiola on the issue of needing “world-class” players.
Pep Guardiola’s philosophy, systems and success are brittlely dependent on having world-class players. It’s the only way he’s ever managed, and it’s the only thing he knows. Good work if you can find it, but it’s hardly a model worth importing to your club.
Maurizio Sarri is equally dependent on world-class players for his success, but only to the extent they discard his system when the time comes for them to be world-class (see, e.g.: Hazard, Eden; Ronaldo, Cristiano). His beloved system, though, depends on the right players. Many times, those players are not world-class because no world-class player would want to be constrained by Sarri’s rigid methods and circuits.
We can debate how high “pure Sarriball’s” ceiling was in the Premier League and whether Sarri ever had his priorities straight between his system and the results. But in his mind – which ironically is the hive-mind basecamp of those demanding only the best “world-class” players – the right player was preferable to the best player.
Frank Lampard learned from managers like Jose Mourinho and Carlo Ancelotti, not Guardiola and Sarri. Mourinho and Ancelotti did not demand Chelsea buy the “best” players in some global sense. They did the best with the players they had, and they wanted the best players that would improve their team in its holistic context: the league, the time, the opponent, the teammates and the system that was shaped around all of it.
This is how Chelsea can best support Lampard: buy the players he needs, not the ones who are rated or priced the highest.
That will make the difference between Chelsea being truly world-class and supposedly “world-class” players ending up in the next “banter XI.”