After winning the league in May, Chelsea have so far had a disastrous transfer window where they have failed to add to the team, a familiar pattern .
Chelsea begin their campaign this Sunday against Arsenal in a rematch of the FA Cup Final, in the Community Shield. While it may not be the most prestigious of cups to win, it is a decent way for teams to boost morale heading into the season and to give a general judge of how prepared teams are heading into the season. For Chelsea, they are clearly nowhere near prepared for the season as the defending champions. Chelsea have had a very poor summer window, where despite buying players they have not actually added to the team and still have a serious issue of depth in the team.
Chelsea have so far brought in Alvaro Morata from Real Madrid, Antonio Rudiger from Roma and Tiemoue Bakayoko from Monaco, three very good players but at the same time, these players are not actually adding to the numbers in the team but rather they are replacing players who are leaving the club.
Morata is essentially replacing Diego Costa, who hasn’t left the club yet but he has already been told that he is not in Antonio Conte’s plans for the season and looks likely to return to Atletico Madrid in January, while Rudiger replaces John Terry who left after his contract expired and Bakayoko replaces Nemanja Matic who left for Manchester United – with Andreas Christensen looking likely to replace the departed Nathan Ake as well.
Chelsea has so far failed to add any kind of depth to their team and if any long-term injuries are to occur then it will spell disaster for them. This window has so far followed a very familiar pattern for Chelsea, one that always seems to occur after they have won the league.
When they won the Premiership in 2010 under Carlo Ancelotti, Chelsea failed to strengthen the team with signings like Yossi Benayoun which ended up costing Ancelotti his job when the team failed to retain their title. The same was similar in 2015 after Chelsea had won the league under Jose Mourinho and had a very poor window where they did not strengthen the team and caused issues within the club. The same is happening this window where Chelsea are once again taking their foot off the pedal and allowing their rivals to strengthen while not doing much themselves.
Chelsea’s team on paper is certainly good enough to challenge for the league title but the issue is that they only have 17 senior players at the moment – they benefitted last season from having no games in Europe but now they will have more games to play this season. They’ll have two games a week where they will have to travel to other countries, which raises fatigue and also raises the likelihood of injuries.
This also doesn’t help when Conte isn’t a manager known for his rotation, even at Juventus, and presents a very real challenge for Chelsea coming into next season. They have failed to sign Alex Sandro from Juventus and is weirdly targeting Danny Drinkwater from Leicester, despite the latter not having the quality to really deserve a place in the Chelsea team.
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It’s hard to know why this always happens to Chelsea after they win the Premiership, whether the Chelsea board seem to think that they do not need to strengthen the team after winning the league or if they just cannot seem to find value on the market but something will need to change this month if they have aspirations of having another successful season like the one prior again this season.