Chelsea 5-1 Ajax (Guiu 18′, Caicedo 27′, Fernandez pen 45′, Estevao pen 45+6, George 48′; Weghorst pen 33′)
STAMFORD BRIDGE — Ajax was once the proving ground of Europe’s finest youngsters, but that torch has been emphatically passed to Chelsea.
And not even the Ajax team that lifted the Champions League in 1995, winning goal scored by an 18-year-old Patrick Kluivert, managed to get three different teenagers on the scoresheet in the same night.
Yet that is what the Blues achieved on Wednesday, Marc Guiu, Estevao and Tyrique George all grabbing their first Champions League goals, during a 5-1 rout of the once-great Ajax, to make history as the first side to record such a feat
It is not an accident. It is now Chelsea’s entire business model. The seven-year contracts, the inflated squad, the transforming of Strasbourg into a de facto Chelsea B: it looked completely bonkers. Yet it is hard to deny that it is starting to work.
"We're all young having fun!"
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Tyrique George speaks on scoring his first UCL goal as three teenagers were on the scoresheet for Chelsea@tntsports & @discoveryplusUK pic.twitter.com/z1QxCGLx8n
The new Champions league format helps: with more games in the gruelling pre-Christmas schedule than ever before, Enzo Maresca can make 10 changes – as he did this week – and not fear criticism. Heavy rotation is now just part and parcel of top-level management, which is handy with such a large first-team squad.
And first or second string, Maresca’s teams are young. He has picked seven of the 10 youngest starting XIs in the Premier League this season, and the team that faced Ajax was younger still at an average of 22 years and 163 days, yet did not include a single Chelsea academy graduate.
This is how BlueCo, Chelsea’s ownership group, believe football business is best done. Strasbourg, their sister club in France, have a squad with an average of under 21, the youngest of any in Europe’s top five leagues, a table in which Chelsea are third.
With long contracts and their careers ahead of them, these talented youngsters represent a safer bet than a similar, older talent in their “prime“: the young players either end up in the first team and realise their value now, or they can be sold on as a talent with room to grow.
Chelsea’s youngest Champions League goalscorers
- 1. Estevao (vs Ajax, 22 Oct 25) – 18 years, 5 months, 28 days
- 2. Tyrique George (vs Ajax, 22 Oct 25) – 19 years, 8 months, 18 days
- 3. Marc Guiu (vs Ajax, 22 Oct 25) – 19 years, 9 months, 18 days
- 4. Reece James (vs Ajax, 5 Nov 19) – 19 years, 10 months, 28 days
- 5. Callum Hudson-Odoi (vs Krasnodar, 28 Oct 20) – 19 years, 11 months, 21 days
Maresca has been smart about it too. Now the Blues are back in the Champions League, he can blend his lines, to borrow an ice hockey term, together. While the likes of Facundo Buonanotte, Jamie Gittens and Jorrel Hato are not regulars in the “first line”, Enzo Fernandez is vice-captain, Moises Caicedo is an important part of their best team and Estevao already looks worth every penny of the £55m (at most) Chelsea agreed to pay for him this summer. No team is complete without experienced heads and minds to guide the younger ones through.
It’s hard to look at any of the 21 players who have started for Chelsea in the last five days and think they do not have a future at the club, but it is inevitable that not all of them can. At some point, Todd Boehly et al will have to keep cashing in on talents to keep up with the pace of the PSR hamster wheel they have built for themselves, amortising large transfer fees over seven years to limit their short-term accounting impact. So far, they have not fallen off.
Chelsea fans, and even Maresca, will accept that approach if it brings success, even if watching brilliant players leave every summer will be hard to do, but Estevao might prove to be the exception to that rule. The 18-year-old is now Chelsea’s youngest ever goalscorer in the Champions League.
18-year-old Estêvão this season:
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Youngest Brazilian to score the winning goal in a Premier League game
Youngest goalscorer in Chelsea’s Champions League history pic.twitter.com/Y2B5302mfK
“I feel very lucky to be his manager, because it’s exciting,” said Maresca, who also sees the Brazilian’s future in a more central role when he fills out physically.
“You can enjoy it. The fans pay [for] the tickets to see players like Cole [Palmer], like Estevao. So it’s nice that we can have players like [them].”
And it’s not just what he can do on the ball.
“Most of the time, you are a little bit worried, because they [young players] play one game, two games, good game, they score, and they think that they are already top players,” Maresca added.
“The good thing about Estevao is that we don’t need to be worried about that, because he’s very humble and he’s very polite. He wants to work hard. He has a fantastic family. They are very close to him.
“And for me personally, it’s fantastic because he’s a special player.”
Chelsea are full of talented youngsters, many of whom are just balance sheet assets to the ownership, but he might be the one they build a team around.
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