Hello, my name is Nicolas and I’m a striker. And I’m Robert, I joined this week and I play in goal. There has been a lot of first days at school at Chelsea these past 13 months, a period that has seen 24 players arrive at Stamford Bridge, and 29 depart. No 25 might yet be on his way should Chelsea win the hand of Moises Caicedo in the £111m tug-of-love with Liverpool.
What Nicolas Jackson, a £31.5m arrival from Villarreal, and Robert Sanchez, recruited from Brighton last weekend, might perform at their Chelsea initiations is not known. With nine summer signings to accommodate, and counting, Mauricio Pochettino would be wise to book out a conference room at the onsite Millennium Hotel to get all the new lads to perform on the same night.
He might even bang out an old standard or two himself by way of introduction, after all he was announced as the new manager only at the end of May.
Pochettino finds himself at a club no nearer a sense of itself than the one he left. He is at least familiar with the surroundings in a way he was not at Paris Saint-Germain, where his experience as a player in the days before Qatari state ownership was of little value in dealing with the degree of dysfunction he encountered.
Pochettino’s motif as a coach is his sensitivity to the differing needs of his players, a man-management style that relies on trust with a cohort of key players. Change is no friend to serenity. What Pochettino requires above all is a settled environment in which to work, to establish order and protocols. Yet what he is dealing with is chaos with no obvious end, a club unmoored.
Chelsea’s new ownership – a consortium of financial speculators put together by the Raine Group bank in the United States, headed by Todd Boehly, part-owner of baseball’s Los Angeles Dodgers, and including Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss and private equity firm Clearlake Capital – has no background in football and has burned through three managers already since shelling out £4.25bn to acquire the club from Roman Abramovich 15 months ago.
On top of that initial investment Boehly is running a transfer deficit of £442.65m across a total of 53 transactions thus far. Much of this transfer spend and the bulk of the club purchase price are spread over an extended period, eight years in the case of player purchases, 10 years for the institution. Presumably the idea is to generate a return on investment. For that to happen Chelsea can’t be finishing in the bottom half of the table as they did last season – with only West Ham, of the seven London clubs involved, beneath them.
Operating on a fraction of the budget, west London neighbours Brentford and Fulham finished 15 and eight points clear of Chelsea respectively last term. If we accept Arsene Wenger’s old paradigm of three new additions per season being optimal then it is clear Pochettino has not been helped by Boehly’s wildly experimental approach and has work to do to fashion a coherent whole out of the expensive fragments he has inherited.
He is perhaps fortunate that the opening fixture is against a Liverpool team undergoing their own transformation, if not quite on the same scale. Jurgen Klopp is blessed with the return of Luis Diaz to supplement an already lively attacking group.
Liverpool’s issue is in midfield. The departures of Roberto Firmino, Jordan Henderson, Fabinho, James Milner, Naby Keita and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain have left the Liverpool engine short of cylinders. Hence the manic bidding war with Chelsea to land Caicedo and the pursuit of Southampton’s to augment the additions of Dominik Szoboszlai and Alexis Mac Allister.
Both Chelsea and Liverpool are essentially responding to the state-backed excellence of Manchester City, which has placed a heavy burden on all the Premier League’s established houses. Arsenal have thrown £200m at the problem, adding Declan Rice, Kai Havertz and Jurrien Timber to an already impressive squad.
Manchester United have splurged £165m on Rasmus Hojlund, Mason Mount and Andre Onana. Liverpool were ready to double the outlay on Szoboszlai and Mac Allister with an insane £111m punt to trump Chelsea for Caicedo, a good player whose value has exploded commensurately with the desperation of others to lay a glove on City.
Pochettino has little idea of his best XI. His first-choice striker, new arrival Christopher Nkunku, is out until Christmas. He needs a settled partner for Thiago Silva in the centre of defence.
Enzo Fernandez picks himself in midfield but filling in around that axis is the issue. Klopp will be all over that with a selection designed to stretch Chelsea’s defensive structures.
At least the computer has been kinder to Pochettino thereafter with three of the next four fixtures against Luton Town, Nottingham Forest and Bournemouth. Indeed Chelsea don’t hit a wall until the end of October when Arsenal, Spurs, City, Newcastle and United will provide a rigorous test of Boehly’s outlandish scheme and, more significantly, Pochettino’s ability to make sense of it.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/jv4xeQ6
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