The baffling, admirable confidence of Chelsea’s transfer strategy ...Middle East

Welcome to Chelsea, Joao Pedro. You might be the final piece of the attacking jigsaw, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Chelsea have now agreed deals to sign attacking players in March, May, June and July 2025. August is typically the busiest month for transfers. Chelsea are often its busiest club.

Since the end of the January transfer window, Chelsea have now signed seven players for transfer fees north of £200m. Any financial limitations have been eased over the last two years by them selling their own women’s team, along with some buildings, to their parent company.

The boy from Brazil. pic.twitter.com/lVM8B9TlBV

The show can go on. Make your own mind up whether it constitutes a circus.

Joao Pedro may be alarmed to learn that he is the daddy of that group at 23. Of the rest of the previously referenced signings, only Liam Delap is older than 20.

Chelsea has become an elite nursery, using the loan market – and their sister clubs – for those who don’t immediately fit into their first-team plans.

This is essentially hedge-fund football. You buy a number of assets that you believe have growth potential and bank on enough of them coming off for the portfolio as a whole to grow. It fits the persona of Todd Boehly, the self-appointed great disruptor who believes that his way is the best, even if nobody else is doing it in quite the same way.

Amid all this noise, it is easy to forget that, in the 12 months prior to Boehly’s Chelsea takeover being completed in 2022, the Blues had been crowned European and world champions and had just finished third in the Premier League having lost six league games all season. It wasn’t really broken, but boy is he going to try to fix it.

Beyond the age profile of signings, the major characteristic of hedge-fund football is an extraordinarily high turnover of players. In April 2022, Chelsea beat West Ham at home in the Premier League. Of the entire matchday squad, Trevoh Chalobah is the only remaining Chelsea player.

The question for Chelsea supporters and those who wish to outperform them is whether this strategy actually works beyond its own disruption. Even then, we can only really judge that in a sporting sense rather than financial.

Chelsea’s parent company 22 Holdco Ltd has lost more than £1bn over the past two seasons, as per accounts released in April. Losses were “driven by investments in the playing squads”, they state. No shit.

That on-pitch success depends largely upon two assumptions. One is that the vast turnover of players will a) allow for a coherent first-team squad to eventually form and b) that the younger players will get enough competitive minutes to develop to their full potential.

See the case of Renato Veiga, a senior Portugal international who signed last summer and spent the second half of last season on loan at Juventus. Veiga has started one Premier League game and now might well be eighth-choice centre-back – behind Levi Colwill, Chalobah, Benoit Badiashile, Tosin Adarabioyo, Wesley Fofana, Axel Disasi and Aaron Anselmino.

Chelsea buy in such numbers that large-scale loanees become an inevitability and, by the time they return, another crop of arrivals only busies the pathway further.

In 2024-25, you could make a decent team out of Chelsea-contracted players who spent all or part of the season elsewhere: Kepa Arrizabalaga, Alfie Gilchrist, Ben Chilwell, Disasi, Veiga, Andrey Santos, Carney Chukwuemeka, Lesley Ugochukwu, Raheem Sterling, Joao Felix and David Datro Fofana. There are others who must make do with a place on the bench in the loanee XI.

But it also banks on Chelsea being able to achieve their highest ambitions with a distinct – and clearly deliberate – lack of age and experience. The most astonishing statistic from the last Premier League season is that the oldest player Chelsea used was Tosin. He has fewer than 90 top-flight starts in his career and turns 28 in September.

It sits uncomfortably with some supporters because Chelsea have always leant on experience as a key tool in their most successful squads.

In 2004-05, it was Claude Makelele – playing 50 matches that season at the age of 32 – who acted as the glue. In 2009-10, an abundance of it: Frank Lampard, John Terry, Didier Drogba, Florent Malouda, Ricardo Carvalho, Deco, Ashley Cole. Most of those were still around for the Champions League win in 2012.

Most instructive of all was Chelsea’s most recent pinnacle. In 2021, when they won the Champions League, Chelsea set a new defensive record for a 13-match campaign by conceding only four goals. Their three central defenders in that campaign were Antonio Rudiger (who turned 28), Cesar Azpilicueta (31) and Thiago Silva (36). A year later, BlueCo entered Chelsea and everything changed.

What we are really talking about here is leadership. Reece James is a senior player (although he has a history of injuries) and Enzo Fernandez has won a World Cup (but he is not a guaranteed starter ahead of Romeo Lavia and Moises Caicedo), but beyond that, there is a dearth of obvious leaders in a squad where high turnover threatens to make forging an identity difficult.

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This is nothing against Joao Pedro, a young man who came to Watford having never left Brazil and has worked his way to the top – good on him.

But Chelsea supporters are allowed to wonder whether this transfer policy might be better served with a little balance. It is fun to have nine young attackers to go into three positions, but does it mean you’re going to challenge for the title? And if you spend a billion on players, shouldn’t that be the expectation?

Either way, we can be sure of one thing: this strategy is not for changing. Their success will live or die by their single-minded policy.

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