Chelsea Football Club: A Youthful Experiment in Madness

I still remember vividly watching my first Chelsea match, as they romped to the tital in the 2005-06 season, defeating my father's beloved Manchester United 3-0 at home on the second last gameweek of the season. I was hooked, addicted, in love with the royal blue club and the barnstorming players and the funny, stylish, foreign manager. I tried countless times to recreate Joe Cole's skillful finish from that match when I played for Cabinteely F.C., but never to any avail.

The club has given me such joyous times and such heartbreaking ones as well. From crying when my dad and his team got revenge way past my bedtime in Moscow in 2008, to rejoicing alone as I isolated from COVID when we won the Champions League in 2021 against Man City. There was always something poetically and beautifully unpredictable about the club, bordering on the illogical. We would sack a successful manager, bring in a new one and win all the same. It defied all that I thought I knew about sports management, success and ownership.

And then the new Chelsea owners came in, ripped up the club's old rulebook and then reverted to it again by having four different managers in nine months. Most Chelsea fans had a particular affinity with Thomas Tuchel for he won us the Champions League, brought us to umpteen finals and passionately defended the club when Roman Abramovich was sanctioned. Losing him was tough. It was made even tougher by the results and style of football we played under Graham Potter and Frank Lampard.

Thomas Tuchel, the man who made me fall back in love with Chelsea but whose departure triggered things I never thought I'd see my club do.

Watching Chelsea since September 7th 2022 has been an exercise in patience, misunderstanding and the slow maddening of a man (me). Football has become increasingly tactically complex. Some would say excessively so. And I would like to pride myself on understanding, most of the time, what is actually happening on a football pitch. It made Potter's puzzle-like teamsheets a nightmare to decipher, with no clarity provided by the players on the pitch as to what the directives and tactics were. It frustrated me because I was consuming football more than ever before, reading about it more than ever before, reaching a deeper understanding of it as a game than I had ever before. I thought I should know what was going on, but I didn't. I was irate.

I do believe that Potter himself knew what he wanted out of the players. I'm not as sure with Frank Lampard's second stint at the club. I loved him as a player and I loved his first stint as manager, but in my view, he has soured himself at the club with his wasteful, moaning, distatseful stint. He called for players to be more aggressive despite him knowing full well that he was out of his depth. He was wisely not kept on for the newest season, the reins being taken by a manager I couldn't help but have admired in Mauricio Pochettino. But, while they are slowly disappearing with games like the enthralling 4-4 draw with Manchester City or the game that actually sparked this - our 6-1 League Cup victory over Middlesborough, the problems of last season and the new ownership as a whole are still present.

They have invested with too great an emphasis on youth. That's not a groundbreaking suggestion by any means. But it is so visible every single time these extremely talented, well-paid, World Cup-winning players set foot on the pitch that they lack any sort of leader. Thiago Silva is a notable exception, but his limited English makes it too difficult for him to communicate effectively. The clubs designated captains James and Chilwell are injury-prone and still rather young. A stat I saw recently mesmerised me when it said they had only played together 11 times since May 2021. Pochettino has been handed a somewhat poisoned chalice. There is a leadership vacuum in this team. It was evident when the young Alfie Gilchrist, u21s captain for Chelsea, came on for his debut in the dying minutes against Crystal Palace that he was the most natural leader on the pitch. While that's great for the future and for his future prospects with the club, it speaks volumes about how poorly this squad has been assembled.

Alfie Gilchrist. I love this guy. Watch as the owners sell him "for pure profit" to excuse some of their more questionable investments.

The club's stance on selling players from its academy means, unfortunately, the American owners may view this exciting, passionate, leader-born defender as a sellable asset to fund the next wunderkind from South America or to offset their more dubious recruits. Perhaps Cobham, Chelsea's renowned academy, has been giving lessons on Spartan military training and tactics that have evaded the senior team. Valuing the physical capabilities of youth is profitable and can provide success, provided it is the right youth. That is the balance that is yet to be struck. There are young beasts in this team like Mudryk, Palmer, Badiashile and Colwill. They just need to be moulded, mixed into the mash with experienced pros who can grab them by the scruff of their necks in games when they're showing the headlessness that has characterised a lot of Chelsea's season thus far and the season previous. Money cannot buy cohesion, but it could certainly have helped this team mitigate the disasters that have, occasionally, been seen on the pitch this season.

The team lacks everything that has gone before for Chelsea teams of the past two decades. There are few stars on the pitch, in spite of the money spent on all these players. The homegrown players are only at the start of their careers. Their goalkeeper situation is, at best, questionable - though I am a big fan of Djordje Petrovic. The team currently are missing the adoration of the fans. This is somewhat fair enough considering this is a fairly new team, and two of its three most experienced players are perenially injured. However, the fans need connections on the pitch. When Chelsea recently played Fulham, the biggest cheer a player on the pitch got was for Willian, once a darling of Stamford Bridge but now playing for our closest rivals. That is telling. The club currently lack a culture for fans to get behind, which begets a hostile atmosphere if the time doesn't play well. This team, with the exception of a few veyr notable performances, have not played well at all this season. Something's gotta give.