johnnythefirst

Come on man, you know what I mean. Bayern bought away Dortmund's best players. Lewandowski, Gotze... That would be the same as Chelsea winning the league last year and Man Utd snatching Hazard and Costa. The situations can't be compared.

Chelsea never had to sell their best player because of a bigger club, with the possible exception of Robben. You might not sign everyone you want, but at least you can keep a stable squad here.

It's so strange that apparently only Mourinho is a "guarantee for trophies". It's not that Klopp didn't play European finals and stuff. ;-) He just had the bad luck his team wasn't very rich so they lost their best players nearly every season. This would not be the case at Chelsea.

Wenger, of course.

Did they though? I seem to remember it differently.

I'm a ginger. Come say that to my unearthly, soulless, ginger face bro.

Well, maybe Messi should move to Sunderland then, so he'll have a bit of a challenge on his hands.

A lack of ambition moving to Bayern? It's 10 times the club city is...

I'm actually starting to think he's not going to leave after all.

Technically he will not get much better anymore probably, but he'll get smarter in how he plays. Playing to his strengths... Also 4 goals in 22 matches? Weird. He became the Europa Cup top scorer in March, were there 22 matches after that? Let's not forget Everton's whole team had a dismal year last season...

Oh come on, José has been shitting on him for about 10 years now, let him have it.

Did he really word it like that? Seems kind of immature. There was room enough on the bench last week wasn't there?

Not the point. ;-)

Hmm, have been reading up on this for the last few pages. Shitty business. What baffles me is that apparently an untrained football coach (unless Mourinho is hiding a Master in Medicine somewhere) is going to tell a staff of professionals when a person is or isn't injured, especially after that player asks for treatment himself (correct me if wrong). He should apologize to his staff and that should be that. Obviously he'll never do that, because he thinks the equator runs through his butt crack, but still. ;-) These people are doctors trained to save lives. He (and Hazard btw) are just playing football.

You know what they say about guys with comically large noses ey?

I wasn't talking about the 13/14 season. I'm talking about all their seasons. Go look at Hazard's stats for Lille, where he was the only real star as well. He had 20 goals and 15 assists in 2011/12 in the French league alone + made them win it. His inefficiency for Belgium is mostly because they refuse to give him the fucking ball for some reason. It's like a game they seem to play. He makes runs all the time for nothing.

Dude, I almost never give Belgian players shit on this forum. I'm not giving KDB shit either. He's had a fantastic season last year. He can be a very efficient player. But if I was the guy with the money at Man City, I'd wait and see what he does this year before throwing 65 million euro at him. He had a miracle season, but he's playing for a second tier team that's completely focused on him. If you look at all his previous years, his goal stats are actually way below Hazard's. Hazard scored more goals than Kevin even last season (with penalties, ok, but you still have to score them). I can't find any career assists stats for Eden. But I would never call him inefficient. He won Chelsea the title last year. No Hazard, probably no title. Give it a rest btw? Have I been whining about Kevin for the last two months or something? :-s

Even as a Belgian, I think that's a ridiculous amount of money to spend on him. Two Belgian players would maybe be worth that sum: Hazard and a younger Vincent Kompany. Also, it's a dumb move for KDB. He'd better stay at Wolfsburg and then go to an actual top team next year or the year after.

I have no doubts for Mbemba making it in the PL - the guy is a rock. Mitrovic will most likely need some time.

He's going to make a massive leap forward this season. Suddenly turned into a scoring midfielder and a game winner. Let's see if he can keep it up.

Well, Anderlecht could use him actually. Thanks guys!

Nope.

Well, let's agree the biggest victim is world football then. ;-)

Of course. But if you grow up poor like many of these young guys in Brussels or Liège - a lot of them with foreign roots - getting a couple of millions and a carefree future is very difficult to resist. I think the next generation will be more careful. There are good examples of what you should not do around now, and they talk. That said, of course the moral responsibility is on the clubs. They're the ones that are throwing the money at them. The moral responsibility of drug addiction lies on the dealers as well. ;-)

My point is that Courtois and KDB already had a full season of first team experience at Musonda's age. Lukaku had had two at the time. Unless he's loaned out to a good European team this year, the boy's wasting his time. Also, I didn't see you post a list of Chelsea youth players playing for at least mid table premier league teams right now. London has eight million inhabitants. Brussels has about a million. Liège has about 200.000. Genk has 66.000. Let's see a list of young prospects that were at least partly formed by these three teams alone that have now regularly played in Europe (at least at Europa cup level): Lukaku, Musonda, Kompany, Januzaj, Praet, Thielemans, Kouyaté, Courtois, KDB, Defour, Benteke, Fellaini, Witsel, Mbokani, Carcela, Vanden Borre, Denayer, Ferreira-Carrasco, Mirallas, Origi, Chadli, Batshuayi... et cetera. I'm sure I forgot a couple. 15 years ago, we had practically no talents. Then we changed the system. Musonda of course hasn't, but would have, had he still been at Anderlecht. All of these except Kompany and VDB were formed in the last ten years. Where's your list? World class academy? Yeah right, it's easy to have a world class academy when you have mountains of pounds to steal every talent that's out there. I'm not even blaming Chelsea. This goes for every English top tier team. You have tons of money but no vision whatsoever.