Date: 27th February 2021 at 5:24pm
Written by:

Brian Wolff, from Chelsea in Chicago, the producer of many of the banners seen at Stamford Bridge and a long-time listener and great friend of the Chelsea Fancast sent in this superb email which we reproduce here:

I am compelled to defend the good Tony Glover for his comments a few weeks ago about how Chelsea is a rich man’s toy train set. I suspect some of the negative responses to this are in fact because he’s hit the nail on the head, and there’s more truth in those comments than many want to admit. Chelsea is a football club ran like a business, most often poorly.

One only need to look at Manchester City for what they have done under similar circumstances and see the unprecedented success they’ve enjoyed over the last decade. They are the gold standard. Their owners have come in with a tremendous amount of money, hired intelligent football experts to run the operations, purchased world class players, and backed a manager through thick and thin. The results speak for themselves.

Going back to 2003, I thought this was supposed to be us? The numerous statements from Peter Kenyon and Bruce Buck about creating a foundation of long-term continental success, the amount of world-class players we brought into the club…for multiple reasons, it’s gone wrong. We’ve not competed for a league title now in 4 seasons, the longest such period since Roman has taken over. We’ve not advanced beyond the Round of 16 in the Champions League since 2014, the longest such period since Roman has taken over. We have gone from a Top 5 club in world football to one closer to 15th and in danger of slipping beyond that. Here’s a couple of areas why that is:

The Personnel: We do not hire and empower decision makers with high football IQ’s. One example in particular stands out: since 2003, we have been trying and failing to merge attacking football and winning football. Roman has long admired Barcelona, and the architect of those great teams was Txiki Bergiristain, their Director of Football. In 2010, he left Barcelona and joined Manchester City in 2012. He has overseen the creation of an immense global scouting network and purchase of world-class players. Why did Roman not hire him? We’ve never had a truly qualified Director of Football. We instead hired Avram Grant, and then eventually promoted Michael Emenalo to the role. No other hire sums up the stupidity and cronyism at Chelsea more than the hiring of Emenalo in 2007, first to Grant’s staff and then promoting him to Director of Football: a bang-average player who was running a girl’s Tucson Soccer Academy in Arizona when he came to Chelsea. What person can look at his body of work and say “this is the man I want overseeing our scouting, development and transfer strategies for a global club?”

The people running the club don’t have a clue about football, nor do they care about finding people that do because of the risk of undermining their own roles. Our owner is not terribly football intelligent. Our board is an American lawyer, Roman’s former personal secretary, and Roman’s financial advisor. These are not jobs you suddenly grow into more competently over time. What actual skills do they bring to the club? We coast along on this cronyism, hiring friends rather than experts; “Yes” people instead of those who may be contrarian. We will drive away intelligent people that do not want to work in this power structure. A scarier thought is that we tried and failed to hire Berigirstain because he saw the writing on the wall.

The Players: The knock-on effect from the failures of the top levels of our club manifests itself in the players. We no longer buy at the top of the market. Perhaps snakebitten from too many public failures (the irony being most of them were personal choices of those in charge,) we buy average to above-average players and place them in tremendously difficult positions to improve. Since we last won the league in 2017 and up until this summer, we have signed 12 senior players for over 450 million pounds (Morata, Bakayko, Drinkwater, Rudiger, Zappacosta, Emerson, Giroud, Barkley, Kepa, Pulisic, Jorginho, Kovacic.) None of those players were world class when signed. None of the 7 currently in the side have improved significantly to justify their fees. Only 1 (Giroud) it can be said has actually been great value for the money.

This is a conscious decision taken by the board. Look at Ross Barkley’s signing announcement: something like “this is a player we’ve long admired and identified…” The major decision makers identifying the players and completing the signings are not doing a good enough job. When you look at that list of players, is it a shock as to why the last 4 years have gone the way they’ve gone? 450 million pounds spent on average to above-average players. Imagine some of the names we might have signed instead…

The Managers: No need to spend much time here. The board has hired-and-fired managers with the express purpose of getting the most out of the players named above to qualify for the Top 4, and then rinse-and-repeat the following season. In the last 4 seasons, we’ve had 4 different managers, 4 different tactical systems, and every season the end goal has been the same: Top 4 qualification and a cup run. Perhaps it’s not the fault of the managers anymore? Perhaps these struggles every 18 months are actually foreshadowed by a lack of patience and understanding in the upper echelons of the club? When will people slating the managers over a bad run of 4 games “saying the results aren’t good enough” take a step back and look at the last 4 years and say “results haven’t been good enough?”

I think Sarri’s and Tuchel’s hirings are a bit funny now in context. The club obviously wanted Tuchel a few years ago, but couldn’t get him and settled for the Budget version of him in Sarri, with the thought that “yeah, we’ll be in this exact position two years from now, don’t worry, hire you then! Guten tag!”

I know one response to this email may be “why care now, Brian? You only care because Frank was sacked.” And yes, that’s partly true because it’s Frank Lampard and if you still don’t get that, you never will. But from a football perspective, there’s more than that. Frank’s hiring was a sign to us fans that Roman & the Board would let him and Cech make the majority of decisions on personnel, receive financial backing to go and sign players at the top of the market like Werner and Havertz, and be given time and flexibility to work though difficult circumstances to take us above the Top 4 slog we’ve fallen into and again to challenge for top honors.

But no. Here we are again. Does Roman, Buck and Marina really think this will end differently? Do they actually think this ends with players like Jorginho, Rudiger and peg-legged Pulisic hugging each other in Istanbul come May having beaten Bayern in the final? And even if they are, at the first sign of trouble next season, Tuchel will be gone too.

Our standards have slipped tremendously. Those running the club do not seem to care. What is the vision at Chelsea? Can anyone actually describe what the club is trying to accomplish more than one season out, other than making gobs of money?  I’m incredibly grateful for the last 20 years, but I am bored, I am tired, I am being marginalized by a club that frankly has no ambition anymore and it’s quite sad.

 

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