The Athletic: Chelsea handed another crushing reminder of how far they are off the elite | Man City lined up at Chelsea with two January signings, Antoine Semenyo and Marc Guehi, whom Chelsea ruled out trying to sign on salary grounds.
by Kygoche
The Athletic: Chelsea handed another crushing reminder of how far they are off the elite | Man City lined up at Chelsea with two January signings, Antoine Semenyo and Marc Guehi, whom Chelsea ruled out trying to sign on salary grounds.
by Kygoche
28 Comments
Mid player who get mid salary will give u a mid result
– The bitter irony is that Chelsea have consciously tried to mould themselves on City in many crucial ways under BlueCo’s ownership, spending millions on City academy graduates
– City are a bigger, stronger team than Chelsea in almost every position, and those advantages manifested clearly in Nico O’Reilly swatting Andrey Santos aside to nod in their first goal and Jeremy Doku bustling Moises Caicedo off the ball to run through and smash in their third.
– The third is a philosophical distinction. City lined up at Stamford Bridge with two January signings, Antoine Semenyo and Marc Guehi, whom Chelsea ruled out trying to sign on salary grounds.
– Their wage bill is markedly lower than City’s — more than €100million lower
– but just as important is that more of City’s football investment is directed at building the best possible football team right now
– BlueCo may point to a recent CIES Football Observatory report that identified Chelsea as having the most valuable squad in world football (€1.73billion)
– It has certainly put them in a strong position to trade footballers, which they do on an unrivalled scale.
– But the staggering amount of money poured into this club by BlueCo over the past three years drowns out all attempts at mitigation and erases all excuses
– Another fan protest against BlueCo, led by NotAProjectCFC in partnership with Strasbourg ultra groups, is set to take place before Chelsea take on Manchester United at Stamford Bridge next weekend.
We as a fanbase need to accept that under this ownership this is our level, it’ll be wonderkids and a profit portfolio.
Established name players won’t be signed.
Nothing wrong with trying to keep salaries down but maybe it is time to supplement it with players who can command big salaries without raising questions? If Messi rocked up in June 2022 and earned 400K a week, I doubt they would be demanding to be paid anything close to it.
We knew this well before the match
Sums it right up.
I’m fine with having a pay structure. Ours just needs to be more. We don’t need to give people 350k/week and if they fail we’re stuck. But both of those players (Cherki too) would have elevated us.
I mean they wouldn’t come to us if city were interested anyway.
And you think we can seriously compete with City for these players when push comes to shove? Why would they choose a perpetual top 4/5 contender over a club who have proven to win the league almost every season with a world class coach?
We have been a delusional fanbase under this ownership. Hard pill to swallow, but we are becoming less and less attractive as the years go on under this new ownership. Even under Roman we lost out on the likes of Van Dijk due to stability, and it’s far worse now.
Good, honest article.
Beyond just the title, we’re trying to emulate City but:
1) We don’t have Pep.
2) We don’t have a physical enough team, something that other PL teams ensure they do have. Points to O’Reilly Vs Santos and Doku Vs Caicedo as examples of them scoring twice purely based on being bigger than us.
3) Different philosophy when building a team. We both needed improvements in Jan, they paid up and we said they were too expensive. They started them yesterday and they made a massive difference to the result. We’re saving money on wages at the expense of being shit on the field.
Also, another protest lined up for the United game.
We won’t compete, unless a big part of the squad take a massive step forward.
At our current trajectory, Palmer won’t be long following Enzo out the door – once one Domino falls it won’t take long.
We’re going to be out of Europe, with a relative novice manager and a squad of even more albeit talented youth arriving. This won’t change anytime soon, you can’t build a team without a leader.
What’s even stupider is that our wage payroll isn’t even that low anyway, it’s just the sheer amount of contracts we have that make up our wage expenses. In other words, BlueCo are literally prioritising quantity over quality
I’m not defending the owners at all because they need to go but you can’t really complain about not competing with City when it’s well known that City are perfectly capable and happy to break most spending rules going with dodgy sponsors and under the table payments. There is a clear reason why players like Semenyo, Guehi and most other signings they’ve made would choose them over nearly any other club in the world.
We shouldn’t be trying to emulate 115 fc in any way, especially not the dodgy payments they make to attract the best players in the world. At the end of the day we weren’t the only other team interested in the players mentioned in the article. Nearly every top prem team wanted to sign them.
One of the only good things the owners have done is get the wage bill under control. There are so many things to criticise them for and this really isn’t one of them.
The wage thing is so weird when you have 40+ players on your wage bill. Why not limit the amount of players to 25?
We need experience and age, we looked decent first half could of been winning with a slight bit of luck.
All our problems stem from the squad being too young:
-Injuries more prevalent
-Players not consistent enough because barely anyone is proven elite
-Always fade in second half regarldess if we’re losing or drawing a blank or winning, which is because lack of experience\leaders which only comes with maturity.
I remember bitching about Guehi on here and being told that he was not needed, despite the rumored low fee. Insanity.
There’s one thing that is so easily overlooked. We always go to the same place for the majority of our players. City, Brighton, Monaco. And even then, the ones who aren’t currently at said clubs are still linked to them in some form via the academy.
Our club is one big nepo network where the likes of Shields, Winstanley and Stewart are getting generational wealth by helping themselves and their mates out at Chelseas expense.
I hope more players put pressure on them like enzo and marc did.
Clearly it hurt them because of how enzo was dropped.
Blue co is a cancer to chelsea
You’ll still find the Blue Co apologists.
But it’s hard to hide the truth, the longer this ownership goes on.
Chelsea are so far off the level needed they are genuinely closer to being relegated next season, than winning a title.
Didn’t Abramovich spend nearly a billion pounds supporting Chelsea’s wages?
We have to accept that those days are over.
Athletic finally giving a critical report on Chelsea instead of tip toeing
Theres two aspects to this
I think fans would accept (or they should at least) if new owners came in and said look, the sugar daddy era is over and we have to be a normal club with a normal budget now.
Instead, we have owners that throw money around at the same, if not higher amounts as the sugar daddy era but by choice spending it on a europa level team at best in order the do their shitty hedge fund nonsense
So we are left in this limbo where we act like an elite club (and charge fans elite prices) but put out mid-table teams and results – and fans are left baffled what we are supposed to expect
It’s pretty hard to swallow. I’ve spent almost this whole time trying to be positive about the future prospects and the money we’ll make, the profits we’ll see. And then to have consistently average results while players we could have signed succeed, and we still lose billions…
Ofcourse when you get owners who are fixated on making stupid decisions this is what we get. We could’ve signed a lot of players with great value but we denied them.In the recent years Loads of good value players became available kavara,Donnarumma,Osimhen, guehi etc we weren’t in for most of them or wasted time trying to reduce salaries.
Now we are stuck with garnacho,Essugo,Badiashill, gittens etc . Honestly 7 players could be considered good players everyone else is absolute dross we are stuck with this shit.
I now believe the high point with this ownership was this past summer. It’s been downhill since, and it will only get worse. The only questions are: 1. What’s rock bottom for Chelsea?, and 2. How long will it take to get there?
I don’t necessarily hate a wage structure in principle, as paying like we had done before was never sustainable long-term.
But there has to be a bit of room with it, wages across the board are going up year by year. We need to malleable with that, and willing to raise them if the payers are worth it. Otherwise we’ll just keep slipping further behind.
Our “big club” mentality is what’s actually holding us back. The truth is , under FFP, we can’t compete. We have a stadium that barely holds 40-45k people and no front of shirt sponsor. One being the pitch owners fault and one being the managements fault, and we can’t fix one without the fixing the other.
Unlike most fans, I actually do think there’s merits with what the management is trying to do. However, the execution is really questionable.
Many are not wonderkids. They are punts, which also make little sense when we overpay for them (disasi/hato/neto) or when there’s clear evidence that they won’t be great (ganarcho). What kind of profit are you looking at for that kind of risk?
I don’t like neto, ganarcho, hato, lavia and even palmer. In neto and ganarcho case, they never had the consistently good performance to back the price, unlike say Semenyo who has been regularly playing well. Neto in particular was injury prone, same with lavia. Hato was an overpay for an obvious cucu backup.
For palmer, he didn’t have many minutes at city. Thank goodness he turned out good, but it was yet another unnecessary gamble.
Objectively, I like signings like gusto, essugo, Santos, badia, ugo etc. Not all worked or will work, but they were relatively cheap and would be good squad depth.
The biggest problem I’d say was blueco early signings that sort of bit us back. We did not get enough out of mudryk/nkunku/fofana/lavia/felix. 325m spent, 2 sold with 60m recovered. mudryk written off, and last 2 spent more time injured. 250m on proper ready signings could have laid a strong foundations for this project.
Over time the club’s pull to get players of that caliber will vanish. Then again it’s not like we’re actively looking to sign experienced players are we? Fucks sake.