Chelsea: Dries Mertens the sort of rumour that just doesn’t hold water anymore

Frank Lampard has not shown much interest in taking shortcuts for short-term gain this season. Chelsea would not get much out of a traditional “instant impact” January purchase.

Dries Mertens popped up in Chelsea’s transfer rumour mill this week. This one is pretty easy to figure out. Mertens’ contract is up at the end of the season, so his agent is probably doing what good agents certainly do and circulating rumours about how rich clubs with a tendency to overspend on post-prime players and have a tortured negotiation history with Napoli are prepared to overspend on his post-prime player at Napoli. If anyone bites on the rumour and makes a bid, Mertens will have better leverage for a contract extension or higher wages at his next club. Or he could have a new club by the end of the month.

Mertens very much fits the January transfer profile. He is 32 and heading into the last six months of his contract. He is a prolific goalscorer at a club that is always just short of reaching its ultimate goal. And his club is going through some managerial upheaval. He’s a shorter, less dashing Olivier Giroud.

In most other seasons, a rumour like this would not only be plausible but worthy of consideration, if not the fee.

Chelsea are in decent place relative to their goals for the season. They are in the knockout rounds of the Champions League, have a moderate buffer protecting their place in the top four and have another lower-tier opponent ahead in the FA Cup.

Mertens, with 15 goals and 11 assists in 32 career Champions League games, could push Chelsea to a better-than-even chance of overcoming Bayern Munich. He could be a useful addition to the FA Cup XI, in particular, since that would represent his best chance to lift his first trophy since 2015 (anyone know what happened to Napoli in 2015 that may have caused the trophies to dry up?).

But the success of an experienced “instant impact” January transfer depends on the manager being willing to use him as such. There is not a lot of time for the player to integrate himself deeply into the team’s tactics and systems.

If the manager wants a “plug and play” player, he needs to adopt plug-and-play tactics.

Frank Lampard has shown no inclination to do that this season. After some of the club’s difficult stretches, many people assumed Lampard would reset by implementing conventional, simple systems – either a 4-4-2 or the 3-4-3 that is so familiar to his youth players – and then building out from there. But he never took that approach. He stayed with the development program he had in place. When he has changed his system it’s been to counter the opponent or match the players who are able to play. He has not taken the pragmatic approach of “well let’s just do something to win and then we’ll go back to what I’ve had in mind.” Lampard is playing the long game without distraction.

That approach would leave any late-career “instant impact” transfer in the same spot as the one Chelsea already have: on the bench, hoping his agents can engineer a move to Inter Milan. Except Giroud had the chance to make that impact in 2017/18. Lampard does not seem interested in making such an allowance for anyone.

If Chelsea buy a player this month, it needs to be someone who can make an immediate impact on the club’s goals for the season: a top-four finish, reasonable progress in the Champions League and a deep run in the FA Cup. But that cannot be the pinnacle of his time in Blue. As my colleague Ashish Thomas wrote last month, Chelsea should only buy a player in January if his contributions to this season’s goals are significant but still a mere fraction of what he will do for the club over the next few years.

The only transfers who will have an impact on Chelsea for the second half of this season are those who will become increasingly important over the next 3-4 seasons. Those are the only players Frank Lampard is interested in using. That precludes the standard profile of a January transfer.

Not many of those long-term players are on the market, which is why Chelsea’s best and most likely move will be to wait for the real business to start in the summer.