Chelsea FC Newscorner

[themanwhowasntthere]

Jay Gooner schrieb vor 17 Minuten:

beneid euch chelsea fans derzeit echt nicht

Wieso "derzeit"? 

[HannesRapid]

menasche schrieb vor 17 Stunden:

ich glaube nicht, dass so schnell eine entscheidung gefällt wird. nagelsmann ist sicherlich eine überlegung. solang der kelch aka pochettino an uns vorübergeht, ist ja alles gut.

• luis enrique wäre sicher ebenso eine überlegung wert, jedoch bin ich bei ihm schon ziemlich skeptisch. außer mit barcelona war das bis jetzt eher nämlich gar nix.
• conte ist verbraucht.
• ancelottis letzter aufenthalt in der PL war auch alles andere als berauschend (der profitiert mMn nur vom exzellenten kader madrids).
• experimente wie ruben amorim oder oliver glasner (wobei der zumindest schon einmal einen el titel vorweisen kann) brauche ich auch nicht wirklich.

wer bitte schön bleibt denn dann noch über?

Matthias Jaissle oder Zoran Barisic  

[huawaJ]

menasche schrieb vor 21 Stunden:

anscheinend hat man sich auch finanziell sofort mit ihm geeinigt und er verzichtet auf einen großteil des ihm (eigentlich) zustehenden gehalts. ein top lad,

Vor allem hat chelsea bei den transfers auch arg gespart, also ganz wichtig, hier demut zu zeigen und auf die eigene abfindung verzichten. Echt ein top lad 😂😂😂😂😂

[Scr-cfc92]

Was soll ein Trainer groß machen, wenn die Effizienz vorm Tor seit Monaten fehlt ?

[GianfrancoZola]

Das zu erwartende Not gegen Elend.

Der Talksport Moderator hat gesagt die beiden Klubs im Vergleich zum gleichen Zeitpunkt letzte Saison gemeinsam 

41 Punkte

52 Tore und

14 Siege weniger haben.

 Hab's nicht gecheckt aber bei dem Saukick den beide Klubs im Moment spielen wird's nicht weit weg sein

[Kante]

Scr-cfc92 schrieb vor 17 Stunden:

Was soll ein Trainer groß machen, wenn die Effizienz vorm Tor seit Monaten fehlt ?

Wobei es da schon irgendetwas haben muss, weil es bei Brighton ident war, mit de Zerbi hat sich das geändert. Das kann ja nicht nur Zufall sein.

[Scr-cfc92]

https://www.chelseafc.com/en/news/article/club-statement-frank-lampard

 

Das besänftigt mich dann doch etwas.

[menasche]

gute lösung, jetzt einen "charakter" zu holen, der im team in den nächsten zwei monaten mal die "chelsea dna" verankert. dieses midtable gesülze und "the boys gave everything" kann ja keiner mehr ertragen. 

je länger die diskussionen gehen, desto eher bin ich team enrique. ich denke, unser team braucht ein klares konzept, eine struktur - und die sehe ich eher bei enrique als bei nagelsmann. er scheint mir auch motivierter und schlicht geiler auf den job zu sein; man hat das gefühlt, dass es in ihm brennt. 

bearbeitet 7. April 2023 von menasche

[GianfrancoZola]

On 4/7/2023 at 9:53 AM, menasche said:

gute lösung, jetzt einen "charakter" zu holen, der im team in den nächsten zwei monaten mal die "chelsea dna" verankert. dieses midtable gesülze und "the boys gave everything" kann ja keiner mehr ertragen. 

je länger die diskussionen gehen, desto eher bin ich team enrique. ich denke, unser team braucht ein klares konzept, eine struktur - und die sehe ich eher bei enrique als bei nagelsmann. er scheint mir auch motivierter und schlicht geiler auf den job zu sein; man hat das gefühlt, dass es in ihm brennt. 

das wichtigste ist das der Kader ordentlich ausgemistet wird. Da wird seit 2017 kreuz und quer zusammengekauft. Wahrscheinlich nicht einmal so schlechte Spieler aber halt im Prinzip keine Linie. 

Einen kleinen Kader, einen guten Trainer und wird spielen wieder vorne mit. Die naechste trainerentscheidung ist enorm wichtig. von den derzeitig genannten bin ich auch fuer Enrique. 

[Scr-cfc92]

GianfrancoZola schrieb vor 5 Stunden:

das wichtigste ist das der Kader ordentlich ausgemistet wird. Da wird seit 2017 kreuz und quer zusammengekauft. Wahrscheinlich nicht einmal so schlechte Spieler aber halt im Prinzip keine Linie. 

Einen kleinen Kader, einen guten Trainer und wird spielen wieder vorne mit. Die naechste trainerentscheidung ist enorm wichtig. von den derzeitig genannten bin ich auch fuer Enrique. 

Wenn man die Trainer wie Unterhosen wechselt, noch dazu so unterschiedliche Typen, kommt bei den Transfers keine Linie zustande. Aber ja, ausmisten und punktuell (9er, 6er, evtl GK) nachrüsten.

[Jay Gooner]

https://theathletic.com/4418023/2023/04/17/chelsea-manager-boehly-egbhali/

Chelsea look unmanageable – and they need to change that perception fast

Spoiler

The past few months cannot have been easy for Graham Potter, the guy who waved Brighton & Hove Albion goodbye, imagining his career was heading skywards, only to be brought crashing down to earth at Chelsea.

Potter still lives in the Brighton area, among the fans who, feeling let down when he left them last September, mocked him when he and his Chelsea team suffered a chastening 4-1 defeat on his return at the Amex Stadium in October — a result that looked like a first real setback at the time, but can now be seen as the start of what would prove a swift unravelling.

Brighton are hardly missing him. As impressive as their progress was in their three years under Potter, they are scaling new heights under his successor Roberto De Zerbi, attracting plaudits, sitting seventh in the Premier League, pushing hard for European qualification and looking forward to an FA Cup semi-final against Manchester United next Sunday.

But Saturday afternoon at Stamford Bridge brought some level of recognition of Potter’s part in two different stories.

After Brighton condemned Chelsea to their third straight defeat under interim head coach Frank Lampard, De Zerbi made a point of thanking his predecessor for the “very great and very strong team” he inherited — and while Potter might not have had the answers at Chelsea, it is clearer than ever that their problems go an awful lot deeper than that.

 

Lampard has not had the immediate impact he and the owners had hoped for since his return (Photo: Craig Mercer/MB Media/Getty Images)

Their shortcomings on Saturday — tactical, technical, physical, mental — are analysed in depth here by our Ahmed Walid. But the bigger picture is that Chelsea are a mess. Potter left a stable, well-run, upwardly-mobile club for a madhouse.

Yes, there was always a certain chaos around Chelsea in their glory years under Roman Abramovich’s ownership; in contrast to the long-term strategic planning favoured by some of their rivals, their success was built on the wealth and ambition of their Russian owner, the short-term impact of managers who were never allowed to outstay their welcome and, not least, the fierce drive of characters such as John Terry, Didier Drogba and Lampard in the dressing room.

But this Chelsea? What are they even meant to be under this consortium led by Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali? What kind of vision are they trying to sell?

In the first year of this ownership, Chelsea have spent well over £500million ($621m) in the transfer market — and that is before you consider the £21.5m they paid Brighton in compensation for taking Potter and his staff, the £13m they paid Thomas Tuchel in compensation when he was fired in September and however much they end up paying Potter and his lieutenants in severance terms.

The result has been chaos. And of course, the onus is on the coach — first Tuchel, then Potter, now Lampard — to bring a sense of order and find a way forward. But when you hear about a squad so bloated that some players had to sit on the floor during meetings and get changed in an adjoining area before training because there isn’t enough space in the dressing room, you start to get a sense of the dysfunction Chelsea’s scattergun transfer policy has brought. They literally have more players than they know to do with.

Similar can be said of Nottingham Forest under the ownership of Evangelos Marinakis. Forest’s squad needed to be reinforced in terms of quality and quantity after last season’s promotion, but there is a point at which squad depth becomes too deep and the manager finds it harder and harder to see the wood for the trees (Forest pun definitely not intended).

From the start at Chelsea, but particularly after a January influx that saw the signings of Benoit Badiashile, Enzo Fernandez, Mykhailo Mudryk, Noni Madueke and David Datro Fofana (plus Malo Gusto and Andrey Santos, who are on loan at Lyon and Vasco da Gama respectively in the short term), Potter struggled to work out the best system and the best partnerships in just about every department.

Over the course of 31 Premier League games this season, Chelsea have made 112 changes to their starting line-up, an average of 3.6 per game. It goes without saying that this is the highest such figure in the division. The next highest is Liverpool’s 88 (three per game). Newcastle United and Arsenal have averaged 1.3 and 0.9 changes per game respectively and, while the demands of Champions League football is a factor in Chelsea’s higher number, their chopping and changing seemed extreme under Potter.

But given Potter had been a firm advocate of stability at Brighton, it can only reflect the difficulty of finding continuity and a winning formula at Chelsea. How much harder that must be when working with a senior squad which, even with so many others out on loan, at times extended to 40 players.

Since taking over on an interim basis three games and 11 days ago, Lampard has largely favoured players he knows from his first spell in charge. Away to Real Madrid last Wednesday he used 16 players, of whom just six (Wesley Fofana, Kalidou Koulibaly, Fernandez, Raheem Sterling, Joao Felix and Marc Cucurella, a second-half substitute) were among this season’s signings. There were six new signings in the starting XI against Brighton, but Wesley Fofana, Denis Zakaria, Fernandez and Sterling were all substituted with Reece James, Mateo Kovacic, Mason Mount and Hakim Ziyech among those coming on. That told its own story, as did the fact there was no discernible uplift in performance.

They were outmanoeuvred and totally outclassed by a Brighton team assembled, at a fraction of the cost of their opponents, with great care and great clarity of vision. At Brighton — under Potter previously, but particularly under De Zerbi — there is a strategy and a framework which has helped recent acquisitions such as Moises Caicedo, Kaoru Mitoma, Pervis Estupinan and most recently Evan Ferguson and Julio Enciso to thrive. At Chelsea, nobody, least of all the new signings, seems sure about what is expected of them.

It has all looked so capricious, so thrown together. Alarm bells were ringing in the summer when Boehly appointed himself as interim sporting director and repeatedly clashed with Tuchel over recruitment, leading to the German’s dismissal. The sums lavished on Wesley Fofana, Koulibaly, Sterling, Cucurella, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Carney Chukwuemeka looked wild, and it is worth recalling some of the other players Boehly pursued: Jules Kounde, Frenkie de Jong, Edson Alvarez, Raphinha, Anthony Gordon, a 37-year-old Cristiano Ronaldo.

 

Fans make their unhappiness clear to the owners at Saturday’s loss to Brighton (Photo: Alex Davidson/Getty Images)

The appointments of Laurence Stewart and Paul Winstanley as sporting directors, Christopher Vivell as technical director and Joe Shields as co-director of recruitment and talent were intended to bring some sense and much-needed clarity, but the January window looked even wilder: £106million for Fernandez (whom Benfica signed for £14m seven months earlier), £62m — potentially rising to £88.5m — for Mudryk (whom Brentford and Bayer Leverkusen both came close to signing last summer for less than half Chelsea’s guaranteed outlay), £33m for Badiashile, £28.5m for Madueke, around £10m for David Datro Fofana, £26m for Gusto, at least £11million for Santos — oh, and around £15m, in loan fee plus wages, to borrow Joao Felix for the remainder of the season.

There is so much potential there — nobody is disputing that Chelsea’s new recruitment team have an eye for a player — but so far this hasn’t looked like the kind of regime that is going to give young players the time and the space to develop like, for example, Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Martinelli have had across London at Arsenal. It is so much harder to do that when you have two, three or even more players competing for every position — except, of course, at centre-forward where, for all the money spent, they only really have Aubameyang, who has barely kicked a ball in anger (or disillusionment) since January.

Then there is the Mount situation. There is talk of selling the England midfielder this summer unless he lowers his wage demands and signs an extension to a contract which has just over a year to run. Better to cash in than to lose him for nothing, sure, but to make an example of one of their outstanding academy graduates, in a belated attempt at prudence, would seem strange. Yes, Mount has had a poor season, but which Chelsea player hasn’t?

Even some of the more well-judged signings look questionable. Along with Fernandez, the most assured of the younger intake has been 22-year-old Badiashile, but he plays the same position, on the left side of central defence, as Levi Colwill, who is 20 and making a big impression on a season-long loan at… Brighton. Is there room for both? How many of Chukwuemeka, Madueke and the younger Fofana can expect to feature regularly next season after — no doubt — another frenzied summer in the transfer market, with France striker Christopher Nkunku already committed to joining from RB Leipzig?

These questions about the pathway for younger Chelsea players used to crop up in the Abramovich years too; a club with a clear sense of its long-term strategy (and with coaches who did not live in constant fear of the sack) would surely, having signed them, made more of the talents of Kevin De Bruyne, Mohamed Salah and Romelu Lukaku. Those three, along with many others, left Chelsea because they felt they wouldn’t get the opportunity to develop. It is one thing to build a recruitment model around young players but it takes real patience to build a team around them.

Patience? There has been precious little of that under Boehly and Eghbali. So far, it has been the coaches who have paid the price for that — Tuchel just a few weeks into the owners’ first season, Potter seven months into a five-year contract — and no matter how much they try to assure candidates that this is a long-term project, they will be precisely the same assurances that Potter was getting until the final weeks.

As for the suggestion within the club that a less patient regime would have sacked Potter earlier, it is worth recalling the 2-0 home defeat by Aston Villa on April 1, which sealed his fate, followed a run of three wins and a draw. All of which suggests he was one defeat from the sack for his final weeks in the job, even as he enjoyed a stirring Champions League last-16 victory over Borussia Dortmund. Even if Potter didn’t have the answers, even if the mood on the terraces was becoming mutinous, that is not giving a manager time.

Once they had terminated Potter’s contract, with no replacement in the pipeline, the decision to bring back Lampard on an interim basis seemed like a measured one from Boehly and Eghbali. It brought them some time and breathing space while trying to work out their next move — and to approach candidates for the head coach role, which might have got very messy if Potter were still in office.

Beyond that, Chelsea record goalscorer Lampard’s appointment seemed likely to appease the match-going fans and take some of the sting out of the atmosphere at Stamford Bridge. In some ways it has, but three defeats out of three later, and Saturday saw the first public show of dissent towards the owners.

It was far from toxic, but those pictures of supporters in the stand above remonstrating with Boehly during and after the game, as he sat in the directors’ box, spoke of a frustration and a state of confusion felt by many Chelsea fans. Abramovich never had to deal with that.

And of course, Boehly responded because he is that kind of guy — engaged and approachable in a way that, to put it mildly, Abramovich certainly wasn’t. Boehly also responded when a Sky Sports reporter doorstepped him last week a few hours before that Champions League quarter-final first leg against Real Madrid. He said Chelsea would win 3-0. They didn’t. They lost 2-0.

There is something appealing about an owner who is prepared to talk and interact with public and media alike, rather than setting his security staff on you.

Supporters are entitled to expect the owners or the executives to explain their vision for the club. But talking airily about multi-club ownership models at a business conference — about the need to put their young players “somewhere in Portugal or Belgium or something like that” — is not communicating a vision. Neither is telling a reporter you’re going to beat Real Madrid 3-0 in the Bernabeu.

Maybe Boehly will have the last laugh. Maybe his prediction will come true in the second leg at Stamford Bridge tomorrow (Tuesday). But you really wouldn’t bet on it.

 

Boehly is looking for his second new permanent manager (Photo: Visionhaus/Getty Images)

It is worth recalling how a Paris Saint-Germain source described the experience of dealing with Chelsea when they were trying to sign Ziyech on loan in the final hours of the January window, only to be sent the wrong document, unsigned, meaning the deal didn’t go through before the deadline. Speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect their position, the source in question described Chelsea as “a Class A circus”.

And that is PSG talking, possibly the biggest circus in European football over the past few seasons. It must be said that Chelsea’s version of events was different and that Shakhtar Donetsk were entirely complimentary about their negotiations with the London club over Mudryk — you would think so too, given the size of fee they got — but that “circus” tag is in danger of sticking if the chaos of this first season under new ownership continues into their second.

The sums they have spent have been unprecedented, but Boehly and Eghbali are hardly the first businessmen to experience a rude awakening in their first year owning a football club. Some spend years throwing good money after bad. Some learn from their mistakes very quickly. Boehly and Eghbali will have to ensure they are part of the second group.

The appointment of a new head coach will be key to all of this.

They need someone who can bring a clear vision, a sense of order, excellent coaching, positive energy and a willingness to make some tough decisions to trim the squad while being mindful of the potential of some of the younger players — some of whom will need to go out on loan while others will need a clearer route to the first team. And they will have their views on the need for further signings. Those won’t be cheap either.

What Chelsea have to avoid is becoming the type of team who look unmanageable, where coaches come and go and nothing changes because the culture inside both the club and the dressing room is one of dysfunction.

Chelsea’s fans might feel the revolving-door approach works, as it often did under Abramovich, but that was a time when the club was strong enough to compete for the biggest prizes immediately.

Two decades on, the biggest single-season transfer outlay in the sport’s history has left Chelsea with a bloated squad which still looks in serious need of further reinforcement in some areas, as well as trimming in others. Whatever Tuchel’s objections last summer, they appear well-founded.

As for Potter, he was the right man in the wrong place.

Right now, as Saturday illustrated, Brighton are everything Chelsea are not.

 

[GianfrancoZola]

Endlich einmal gute Nachrichten 

[menasche]

was sollst denn da noch sagen.

zur pause 0-3 hinten, kein leben, keine struktur, keine abstimmung, billigste ballverluste.. was haben boehly und co bitte innerhalb eines jahres aus dem verein gemacht. 

[themanwhowasntthere]

10 in a row

 

[GianfrancoZola]

1 hour ago, menasche said:

was sollst denn da noch sagen.

zur pause 0-3 hinten, kein leben, keine struktur, keine abstimmung, billigste ballverluste.. was haben boehly und co bitte innerhalb eines jahres aus dem verein gemacht. 

das es eine hoechst durchschnittliche Saison wird, war eh von Anfang an klar, und das Experiment mit Potter kann ich auch irgendwie vertreten obwohl es frueher enden haette sollen. Aber die Lampard Einstellung war einfach nur fetzndeppat. Ich mag Frank, genialer Spieler, sympathischer intelligenter Typ, aber als Manager vollkommen sinnlos.

Ich bin dennoch zuversichtlich das mit einer gescheiten Kaderreduktion (und Kandidaten gibts ja genug), einem guten Manager, einer soliden pre-season und vor allem keiner europaeischen distraction naechstes Jahr wieder eher eine normale Saison ansteht, sprich ein Cupteam das irgendwo in den Top6 endet. 

Von einer Meisterschaftschallenge sind wir eh schon seit Jahren entfernt, und das wird auch noch einige Jahre gute Arbeit benoetigen bevor das auch nur irgendwie realistisch ist. 

20 minutes ago, themanwhowasntthere said:

10 in a row

 

nix tough, er ist zwar eine absolute Legend als Spieler, ein sympathischer hoechst intelligenter Mensch, aber halt kein Manager.