The great Chelsea experiment: Will their transfer splurge pay off?

I know what you are thinking, how can you answer that question already and when will we definitively know the answer? The question of “Will this transfer splurge pay off?” is a loaded one indeed. But since the question must be answered the verdict is NO. 

Todd Boehly, Behdad Eghbali, and Clearlake Capital bought Chelsea in May 2022, since then except for their first transfer window, the policy has been ABUNDANTLY CLEAR. Sign very young/inexperienced players to long-term contracts for overpriced wages. This summer that strategy has remained mostly the same, with a few exceptions. So far the Blues have signed nine players, and have had ten departures. 

The nine players they signed were Pedro Neto from Wolverhampton Wanderers for £54m, Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall from Leicester City for £35.40m, Filip Jørgensen from Villareal for £24.5m, Omari Kellyman from Aston Villa for £22.5m, Aaron Anselmino from Boca Juniors for £16.5m, Renato Veiga from Basel for £14m, Caleb Wiley from Atlanta United for £10.10m, Marc Guiu from F.C. Barcelona for £6m, and Tosin Adarabaiyo from Fulham on a free transfer. If you put all of those deals together it adds up to £183m. 

Remember that they might not be done signing players, as the transfer window for the Premier League doesn’t end until Friday, August 30th. According to Fabrizio Romano, CFC is interested in a return for João Félix, who played for the club for half of the 2022-23 season and was rather unimpressive scoring four goals in 16 EPL games. If you want to know why this potential move doesn’t make sense read my colleague Olaoluwa Nwobodo’s article about him. 

When you look at it like that, it seems like Chelsea was modest considering that last summer they spent £440.5m on 12 players. Sometimes the Blues transfer strategy is comparable to the expression of “throwing something against the wall until it sticks.” Let’s look at some of these most recent signings, and see if they will work out long-term. 

Dewsbury-Hall from Leicester who excelled under Maresca’s management last season scored 12 goals with 14 assists in 44 Championship matches. At face value, those are pretty good numbers, and if Dewbury-Hall plays as an attacking midfielder, he could be quite successful, and the price of his deal seems relatively reasonable. However, there are some concerns, when the Foxes were still in the EPL Dewsbury-Hall played in 59 matches across two seasons from 2021-23 he mustered up three goals and four assists. He’s already 25 which isn’t old but for the Blues it is, and you wonder why he hasn’t developed or had more success in lower levels. 

The signing of Neto from Wolves is one hard to make sense of. He’s a winger who primarily plays on the right which is the position Cole Palmer and Noni Madueke play, he doesn’t score many goals, never scoring more than five in a season for Wolves, and the biggest problem of all… he is hurt ALL THE TIME! Last season the Portuguese winger missed 23 games with multiple hamstring injuries, in the 2022-23 season he missed 27 games with an ankle injury, and in the 2020-21 season he missed a whopping 52 games because of a knee injury. Regardless of how talented Neto is signing someone for over 50 million euros to a seven-year contract is a HUGE RISK. 

Jørgensen the Danish goalkeeper signed from Villareal is certainly an interesting choice. This is the third goalkeeper Chelsea has signed in the last year, the other two being Robert Sanchez and Đorđe Petrović. All reports indicate that Maresca doesn’t favor Petrović, because he isn’t great with his feet, as he thinks Sanchez and the former Villareal man do that better. But here’s the problem they spent £63.5m on three average goalkeepers when they should’ve tried to spend that amount of money on one elite goalkeeper. Last year the Danish international gave up 63 goals in 36 La Liga games, which is okay, certainly not great. But the Blues new Italian manager believes that a goalkeeper who is good at playing out from the back and is good with his feet. Will he work out? Maybe, and the biggest question is how soon will he start? 

Circling back to this window, the biggest reason why one might say it won’t work is, to look back at recent history, how have those many other moves worked out so far? CFC has signed an abundance of players under Boehly with his co-sporting directors Laurence Stewart and Paul Winstanley in charge of recruitment, what have those results shown us? 

That their fail rate is much higher than the success rate, who have been the signings so far that you think have been a success? Cole Palmer, Nicolas Jackson, Malo Gusto, Axel Disasi, and maybe Moises Caicedo? But part of the problem is it’s too early to tell because most of these players are so new and young. However, their are some examples of guys that haven’t really worked when you consider the price tag, Enzo Fernandez, Mykhailo Murdryk, Kalidou Koulibaly, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Wesley Fofana, and more, the miss rate is too high!

Hopefully Maresca, these new signings, the current players in the squad can prove the doubters (like myself) wrong and have a season where the team makes a noticeable improvement. If not, the morale of the fan base will sour even more.