Chelsea face yet another critical summer transfer window, the ninth in the reign of BlueCo, who seem no closer to actually executing on their grand promises of winning and competing for trophies. They\u2019ve said a lot of big words and wrote a lot of big checks on a lot of massive contracts (certainly in length, if not salary), but the overall situation has been ad-hoc, chaotic, frustratingly directionless, and, at worst, downright incompetent.<\/p>\n
They thought they were the smartest guys in the room. Instead, it\u2019s been everyone else laughing all the way to the bank.<\/p>\n
The approach for this summer has been widely briefed as a little different than what\u2019s come before from the current braintrust, with Chelsea supposedly looking for \u201cready-made starters\u201d who are \u201caccustomed to the pressures of a busy fixture schedule\u201d while still consistently \u201cperforming at a high level\u201d. The focus is on a center back and a \u201cversatile\u201d attacker. That certainly sounds like a reasonable approach, but we\u2019ll have to see what that actually looks like in real life. So far, there\u2019s not been much talk about any such signings \u2014 Morgan Rogers surely a pipedream \u2014 with the two incoming kids from RC Strasbourg, Emmanuel Emegha and Valent\u00edn Barco, the teenager from Sporting CP, Geovany Quenda, and returning loanee Mike Penders adhering much more closely the previously existing modus operandi.<\/p>\n
One also imagines that our financial situation isn\u2019t exactly rosy, given another year of no European football coming up, not to mention our relentlessly persistent inability to do the one non-football thing that the owners should be good at regardless of any other football-related qualifications, find some sponsors and sell some merch.<\/p>\n
But we were \u201cnot terribly well run\u201d before, dont\u2019cha know.<\/p>\n
Good thing Xabi\u2019s here to save the day!<\/p>\n