There will come a time when the spotlight is eventually turned on Chelsea but the reason their stuttering form is yet to hit the headlines isn’t entirely because there are bigger catastrophes and redemption arcs happening elsewhere.
The BlueCo project is by its nature frenetic and evasive, the transfer churn acting as both a distraction and as a form of distancing. Chelsea’s grand plan, if there is one, slips through the fingers, and the flurry of activity seems to hypnotise us into focusing only on the short-term; on how to find the best XI, how to bed-in new players.
Beneath all the bluster about gaming Profit & Sustainability Rules that’s the true genius of the strategy, because over three years into the BlueCo era Chelsea are further away from the elite than they were at the start – and not many people seem to have noticed.
Over £750 million net has been spent on new signings (and who knows how much more on signing-on bonuses and agent fees) since Todd Boehly’s Clearlake Capital acquired Chelsea in 2022. Thomas Tuchel’s points tally of 74 the season before they arrived is still higher than any under BlueCo, and yet despite Chelsea’s demonstrable move backwards there is little appetite to blame the owners.
Keep the money moving, keep hiring new managers and signing new young players, and the hurricane it creates leaves us all a bit dishevelled, dumbstruck, mute. But when exactly will this thing bear fruit?
Without a change in strategy, never. Enzo Maresca is yet to play a single player over the age of 30 and Chelsea’s average age of 24 years and 112 days makes them the youngest in the division. Exclusively buying young players whose value is expected to increase simply cannot be the basis of a title-winning team, and that’s before considering the huge disruption of changing half the squad every summer.
The final part of the ‘moneyball’ philosophy is often forgotten. Yes, use statistical modelling to find value and sell at a profit, but when an elite player becomes available at market value, pounce. That’s what Liverpool did to make the final step, spending huge sums on Virgil van Dijk, Alisson Becker, and Fabinho.
Chelsea have no appetite for that. Increasingly, we can’t say they have the appetite to even go for the title; profitable stasis might well be enough for the private equity firm behind BlueCo.
That would certainly explain the lack of urgency in filling key positions, namely upgrading the goalkeeper and signing a proven number nine, and the lack of focus in building a coherent squad, with every new signing appearing to arrive solely because of their resale value.
Maresca won’t survive beyond this season if he stays on the same trajectory, and yet it’s difficult to see how any manager could create something coherent out of the disparate parts, not when a new storm comes every July and every January.
One more cycle, with whoever follows Maresca, should be all it takes before the amorphous, elusive BlueCo are blamed for the limbo in which Chelsea currently find themselves in. It is self-made, predictable, and fixable. Boehly and the Chelsea board are running out of time to work that out.
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