Watching Chelsea’s opening day slog at Stamford Bridge was to experience time stood still. The squad might change, but the football has not.
If there’s any comfort to be found in Enzo Maresca’s gruelling chess-ball it’s that he has essentially created an art installation satirising how Chelsea are quietly congealing under Blue Co’s private equity experiment.
The mad splurge of cash near the beginning pulled the wool over our eyes for a while there, but three years in, and following another summer of pointless churn, there is no longer any doubt Chelsea have been reduced to a club designed to function purely as a business enterprise.
Chelsea will not challenge for the Premier League title because there is nothing about their summer business that suggests the owners have any intention of doing so.
A transfer policy of exclusively signing young players whose value may grow is not conducive to anything more than stasis at Champions League level.
It’s moneyball without the crucial final step of using profits to sign top-tier players that get you over the line. It’s moneyball minus the actual desire to rise to the top.
Swap Noni Madueke for Jamie Gittens, Nicolas Jackson for Liam Delap, Christopher Nkunku for Joao Pedro, and what you get is more of the same. The deals are good, the money moves, and Chelsea stay where they are.
Chelsea’s average age in 2024/25 was 24 years and 36 days, a full two years younger than Arsenal or Liverpool. It leaves Maresca with an inexperienced squad prone to the slings and arrows, stuck in the tier below the title challengers, and destined to toil without purpose against the likes of Palace.
It leaves Chelsea looking like an unserious club, even if a single good performance against Paris Saint-Germain in the Club World Cup final briefly convinced supporters otherwise.
And it leaves them settling with Maresca, a Pep Guardiola protégé who at his worst seems to have ignored any Guardiola principles beyond his Barcelona team.
The football last Sunday was exactly the same as the football last season: dry and tired, centred on dominating possession and sticking to rigid positional instructions like table football players fastened by metal poles.
They are tactics from a different era, before the trend towards transitions and verticality that even Guardiola has now embraced.
Palace won’t be the last to stunt them, won’t be the last to trap Cole Palmer by surrounding him with midfielders or to sit back while Chelsea pass the ball endlessly from side to side, waiting for gaps that never appear.
They certainly weren’t the first. Last season games like Sunday’s became increasingly common the more Maresca’s ideas took hold.
Chelsea’s fourth-place finish in 2024/25 was built on a fast start: 34 points from the first 16 games - when Mauricio Pochettino’s football was still muscle memory - then just 35 from the next 22.
Once Maresca got into Chelsea’s veins the points-per-game dropped, Palmer drifted, and the goals dried up. Across those last 22 games, if we take out matches against the promoted (and subsequently relegated) clubs Chelsea scored 20 goals in 16 Premier League matches – and three of those were against Wolves, who finished 16th.
It’s a strategy poetically aligned with the Blue Co churn, but it cannot and will not see Chelsea challenge for the Premier League title.
In a summer of number nines, when Hugo Ekitike, Alexander Isak, Benjamin Sesko and Viktor Gyokeres are on the move, Chelsea bought Pedro and Delap, signed specifically because their market value is yet to peak.
The club will make a profit on both, but for whose benefit?
When Blue Co began their move-fast-and-break-things model at Chelsea it was widely assumed their plan would not work. As the financial stuff keeps ticking along, it’s starting to look like we were wrong.
The problem is, it’s not the plan we thought it was. It turns out Chelsea’s raison d'être is to play out an accountancy trick.
Success for their owners is all about the bottom line, and as we know by now, there’s plenty of money to be squeezed out of football without ever needing to challenge for the Premier League title.
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