Now that the period of reactions, overreactions and mourning seems to have passed, it’s time to dissect the defeat to Bayern Munich rationally. There’s a lot to learn and reflect upon what brought Chelsea to Tuesday night.
On paper, a 3-0 loss at home for a club like Chelsea would seem like a humiliating result. Fans certainly have done their part to make it seem like this was one of the worst displays that Stamford Bridge has ever seen. Digging deeper than bias, propaganda and unrealistic expectations and taking a basic understanding of football can help everybody surprised by this result understand how unsurprising, almost logical, it truly was.
1. A result years in the making
The night of 19 May 2012 in Munich was absolutely glorious for one club and gut-wrenchingly sorrowful for another. For nine years after, one of them would go from strength to strength, success to success and become one of the most dominant clubs in the world. The other would go from manager to manager, instability to instability, from fleeting moments of success to downright mediocrity.
No brownie points for guessing the clubs here.
For nine years, Bayern Munich has executed carefully laid out transfer plans, been a regular contender at the Champions League and utterly dominated the Bundesliga. By contrast, Chelsea hurried from manager to manager in the hope of instant success while rarely backing those managers adequately and lost their status as an elite club.
This season, both these clubs have shared a similar narrative: transition. In the circumstances where the clubs are in need of a rebuild and have to rely on the squad they have accumulated over a decade, the cultures of the club have made all the differences; Bayern Munich, time and again, went for players like Robert Lewandowski while Chelsea almost always settled for a Michy Batshuayi.
Even in an underperforming season, this Bayern Munich team is capable of beating any team in the world, while this Chelsea squad cannot guarantee a win against a side like Bournemouth.
It was therefore futile for anyone to expect this gap made over nine years to be covered in nine months under Lampard. It was a result years in the making.