As Nicolas Jackson’s lunging finish looped almost impossibly over the crossbar in the 83rd minute, the raucous Nottingham Forest supporters in Stamford Bridge’s Shed End burnished their gleeful jeer with the chant that had become the soundtrack to a deeply frustrating afternoon for Chelsea.
“What a waste of money.”
The boos that rippled around the home support at the final whistle when Forest’s 1-0 victory was confirmed were an understandable response to a performance that echoed Chelsea’s worst travails at home last season: slow possession stifled by a deep-lying opponent following a smart but simple plan, rare good chances wasted and an unforced error ruthlessly punished to turn a draw into a defeat.
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Forest did nothing unexpected to claim their first win at Stamford Bridge since 1995, but the fact that they succeeded should reinforce what might be an uncomfortable truth for those in charge of Chelsea’s insatiable recruitment operation: outspending everyone else in the transfer market offers absolutely zero guarantees of winning consistently in the Premier League, at least in the short term.
Lost amid the fanfare that surrounds massive transfer fees, hijacked deals and glitzy social media announcements is the reality that, with the exception of one or two promoted clubs, the talent advantage enjoyed by the richest Premier League clubs over the rest in England’s top flight is actually pretty marginal.
(Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)There was compelling evidence of this across the pitch on Saturday at Stamford Bridge. Chelsea academy graduate Ola Aina, now 26, has never commanded an eight-figure transfer fee in his professional career. But he is an excellent one-v-one defender, more than capable of shutting down Raheem Sterling when mentally locked in.
Catch him on the right day and Anthony Elanga, the product of another elite Premier League academy (Manchester United) and with Champions League goals to his name, has more than enough ability to have a greater impact in the final third than Noni Madueke and Mykhailo Mudryk.
It also manifests in other ways. Brighton and Hove Albion had eight players at the last World Cup. West Ham had starters for England, Brazil, Germany and surprise semi-finalists Morocco. One day after completing a £30million deal for Ibrahim Sangare, a key midfielder from last season’s Eredivisie runners-up PSV, Forest were able to withdraw the tiring Aina and Serge Aurier in the second half at Stamford Bridge and introduce Gonzalo Montiel, the man who scored the winning penalty in the final shootout in Qatar.
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Premier League clubs committed more than double the sums spent on transfer fees by the PIF-bankrolled Saudi Pro League in England’s summer transfer window. This competition is by far the closest thing football has to a Super League, and the talent level across the board has never been higher.
Beneath the headlines that Chelsea seized when breaking the British transfer record twice in consecutive windows to acquire Enzo Fernandez and Moises Caicedo, all they were really buying on an individual level was a relatively marginal talent edge over most of their direct opponents on a weekly basis.
That alone does not yield much of a margin for error. Caicedo’s loose touch that initiated the sequence directly leading to Elanga’s winner was not befitting of a £115million midfielder, because £115m is an arbitrary price that Chelsea decided to pay in order to avoid losing him to Liverpool. It provides very little by way of insurance against a moment of hesitation or misreading of Conor Gallagher’s intentions, particularly when the two have been team-mates for less than three weeks.
Only when these highly skilled individuals are put together in a stable environment and coherent system that maximises their best qualities is a gulf created with rival sides that delivers consistent results. This is why Manchester City and Liverpool have been the gold standard for the last five years and it is why every top modern coach, Mauricio Pochettino included, is so fond of talking about ‘processes’.
No amount of transfer spending can skip the time needed for coaching, adaptation and development to run their course. This is not the Premier League of 2003, when Roman Abramovich’s deep pockets elevated Chelsea to perennial contender status almost overnight. Progress is a slower burn now, even more so when your recruitment strategy consists of assembling the youngest squad in the division.
(David Rogers/Getty Images)Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital believe youth is underrated in football, but it is also by nature relatively untested. Jackson, despite frequently flashing elite talent, is not currently displaying the composure in front of goal that he will likely find with greater experience. Caicedo has the look of a superb midfielder feeling his way in a new team while saddled with a huge price tag.
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The scale of Chelsea’s transfer spending over the past year has created external expectations that are impossible for this squad to meet right now, and the prevailing “£1billion spent” narrative cares nothing for the context of almost £300m raised through player sales, or the fact that most of the new signings are players aged 23 or younger regarded internally as investments rather than costs.
West Ham and Forest have already beaten Chelsea in familiar fashion. There will be more days like these, more symposiums of schadenfreude on social media, more gleeful chants of wasted money on miserable matchdays, as Pochettino’s shiny new team learns through its growing pains. The key question is whether the outside noise will be allowed to cause internal strife.
Boehly and Clearlake have utterly remade every aspect of Chelsea in the space of a little more than a year, driving a squad overhaul unprecedented in its speed and spend. For the last three months in particular, the club has been a transaction machine, buying and selling at a bewildering rate.
That is over now.
For the next four months, Chelsea have to become a football team that maximises the talent they have amassed, a cohesive squad of footballers as well as a human investment portfolio. That path will be far from painless, because winning in the Premier League is much more difficult than winning in the transfer market.
(Photo: Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images)
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