Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. This is club 76/92. The best way to follow his journey and read all of the previous pieces is by subscribing here
In February, Chelsea’s minority shareholder (and public face) Todd Boehly was speaking at The Financial Times’ annual Business of Football summit when he was asked about the club’s trajectory over the 20 months since his arrival.
“You’re trying to get on a plan, execute a plan, realise things aren’t linear and if you’re going in the right direction you feel better,” Boehly said. “The trend is in the right direction and that’s the thing that really matters.”
There’s a confidence in the way these people speak, an absence of self-doubt, that acts like mind control. He is Todd Boehly, the great disruptor. He has come in and broken s*** up. You end up questioning your own eyes, if only for a few moments. These guys are big business boys after all, so they obviously know what they’re doing.
For the record: When the BlueCo x Clearlake Capital deal was completed, Chelsea were the reigning European and world champions and were about to finish third in the Premier League having lost six league games all season.
Also for the record, if we’re counting: Chelsea have finished 12th and sixth in their two completed seasons since, are yet to win a trophy, are currently on a run of three points from their last eight away matches and may well tumble out of the Champions League places. Boehly is right – progress isn’t linear. We just disagree on the general direction.
Are Chelsea playing 4D chess, operating on a higher plane that mere mortals cannot understand? Or are they as they appear to the naked eye, a gold-plated circus wearing large bricks as necklaces and looking confused as to why they’re struggling to fly? Over the last 18 months, I’ve asked myself that question a lot.
Take last week, when Chelsea’s accounts confirmed that they recorded a profit of £198.7m “on disposal of subsidiaries”, a figure aided by the sale of the club’s women’s team to Blueco 22 Midco Ltd, a subsidiary of the club’s parent company, two days before the end of the last financial year. A masterstroke of course, other than that Chelsea may have broken Uefa’s regulations for competing in their competitions and the valuation of the deal has not yet been ratified by the Premier League.
Or the amortisation orgy, which had plenty of supporters nodding and smiling online like Jake Humphrey in that soul-crushing viral interview with Gordon Ramsay. The basic principle is that Chelsea could buy more players for high fees if they committed them to hyper-long contracts and thus spread the accounted cost over the extent of the deals. A faultless plan, barring the rare occurrence of any player not quite working out as you’d hoped. As it stands, Chelsea will be paying off Mykhailo Mudryk’s transfer fee until 2031.
The phrase “gross spend” is multifunctional. Last week, Chelsea completed the double signing of two more young players, Geovany Quenda and Dario Essugo, who will cost a combined £62m. This is the most expensively assembled squad in the history of the sport and it’s not even close. They have spent more than £10m on each of Filip Jorgensen, Mike Penders, Aaron Anselmino and Mathis Amougou this season. I consider myself as a football obsessive and I wouldn’t be able to pick any out of a line-up. This isn’t normal.
The point is to build for the future, of course. But since their takeover, Chelsea have subverted the buy low-develop-sell high model – they buy high, hope and loan out if those hopes are quickly dashed. If this all sounds a little harsh, know this: right now, the players currently on loan from Chelsea to other clubs alone were originally signed for transfer fees totalling around £350m.
One more example of the mania, if you’ll forgive it. Last week, The Telegraph reported that Chelsea are planning “a full assessment of their goalkeepers this summer”. Which is probably just as well, because they have Robert Sanchez. And Jorgensen. And Lucas Bergstrom. And Marcus Bettinelli. And Kepa Arrizabalaga, who is out on loan. And Djordje Petrovic, also out on loan. And Gabriel Slonina, back from his loan in January. And Ted Curd, England Under-19 goalkeeper. And Teddy Sharman-Lowe, on loan at Doncaster Rovers. And Penders, who will join for £17m this summer. It’s nice to stay busy during the off-season.
Estimates are understandably a little rough, but Chelsea spent around £1.5bn on transfer fees in the five years up to 2024. The most fascinating element of that spending? They still eternally look at least three players short of a title-challenging team. Chelsea have gone eight seasons without a top-two finish and that will continue into 2026.
All of this is overseen by Enzo Maresca, a coach whose managerial experience before Stamford Bridge consisted of 14 games at Parma in Italy’s second tier before being sacked and a promotion campaign at Leicester City with probably the best squad in the division. Chelsea took a chance on potential but the cost of falling short this season is extraordinary, given the money already committed.
If stability upstairs would help, that’s lacking too. Boehly and Behdad Eghbali, who has five times Boehly’s stake, have reportedly been in a low-key stalemate/rift for months, with the lingering potential for one party to buy out the other. Boehly backed Mauricio Pochettino; Eghbali and the sporting directors conducted the review that precipitated his departure. That’s before you get onto recruitment strategy, communication, Thomas Tuchel, the stadium and the general threat of a public power struggle.
Chelsea 1-0 Leicester City (Sunday 9 March)
- Game no.: 76/92
- Miles: 248
- Cumulative miles: 14,032
- Total goals seen: 198
- The one thing I’ll remember in May: The look on Enzo Maresca’s face when he realised his team were being booed off at half-time
I arrived at Stamford Bridge to watch Chelsea against Maresca’s old club Leicester City, who at least have the good grace to be awful for most of the game. Chelsea win the match 1-0 thanks to a less-than-half chance that Marc Cucurella drills from outside the area. The home team are booed off at half-time, provoking Maresca to accuse them of expecting “PlayStation football”.
At full-time, the reactive noise is a communal sighing harrumph. That noise becomes entirely justified by Chelsea’s next three league results: limp 1-0 defeat to Arsenal, limp 1-0 win over Tottenham, limp 0-0 draw against Brentford. You watch this team and want to scream at the top of your voice a reminder that Champions League football is on the line.
At first, walking back down the Fulham Road, I interpreted all this as a prelude to public mutiny. Those Boehly claims about progress were prompted by a protest of 200 people before a home league game against Southampton. It was met with surprise from those who walked past with blue shirts on, but it might be that the ennui is catching.
In fact, I think it’s something completely different: nobody knows how to react at all. Everybody here is relatively inexperienced: players, manager, owners. Anybody who can tell you with any certainty whether this is in the process of falling part or building into something meaningful is a liar.
Either Chelsea are dropping away in late season and will sack Maresca in the summer, or the youngest squad in the division will finish above three of the other Big Five. It’s April and everything is unknown. Make your own conclusions about whether that’s good enough after a £1.5bn spend on new players in half a decade. (Spoiler: it isn’t.)
The vast spending has brought a lot here, but it has also removed something. Once, Chelsea had an identity. Desperately trying to win trophies and sacking managers that didn’t do so (or even pretty quickly after they did) might not have been everyone’s cup of tea, but Chelsea supporters had grown to love it because the trophies continued to come.
Now, the opposite. The identity is not the end result (Chelsea winning big trophies), but the process itself (Chelsea in a period of eternal rebuilding so that they can win big trophies). The fascination lies in the intangibility of it all and the lingering suspicion that none of this really makes much sense.
Daniel Storey has set himself the goal of visiting all 92 grounds across the Premier League and EFL this season. You can follow his progress via our interactive map and find every article (so far) here
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