TQB

... and yes intelligence is also genetically determined.

I'm sure you did an extensive study on these percentages, but Dr. Alun Williams, Director of the Manchester Metropolitan University’s Cheshire Sports Genomics Laboratory happens to disagree with you. According to him scientific evidence suggests that athletic ability is dependent on both genetic and environmental factors. “The genetic component appears to be around 50-70%, depending on what aspect of ability one is thinking about. Even a very favourable set of genes will not automatically make someone a good athlete, let alone a champion,” he said. “But certainly, if someone has a very unfavourable set of genes, in many sports no amount of training and diet will make them a champion.” Anyway I suggest we close this topic and get back to the Charly Musonda discussion.

Please stop the stupid responses without any substance or arguments, while I wasn't even quoting your original post. Out of all the football players in the world there are only a select few that get to play on a professional level. I don't believe it's so far fetched that those players would pass on their natural given abilities to their children, so they have a higher chance of having children that go on to be professional athletes (football or other) themselves.

Definitely also genetics. The fathers of Lukaku, Musonda and Origi were all professional football players that came to play in Belgium.

Congratulations Thibaut on winning the Spanish Title! .

Personally I think Lukaku is one of the most frustrating players to watch. One moment you love him, the other moment you wished he was playing for the opposition. There are aspects of his game that still need development and I agree that his age is factor we need to take into account. The question I ask myself regularly is “have those aspects improved enough over the past 4 years since he has been a professional player to have any hope that he will be able to reach the level required for Chelsea?” I guess only time will tell, but from my perspective if you’re playing for a top 8 team in the premier league at the age of 20 and scoring like he is doing that makes you far from being an average player, regardless of the fact that he will ever become “world-class”.

Thought he was good for his first game, alhough he was (very understandable) nervous. Too bad he didn't score, because it would have been a huge confidence boost. Also let's not forget that he's only 21 years old, so I'm sure he will make a lot of progress training on a higher level with better players.

I have to say that so far he has far exceeded my expectations until now. When he first joined I thought the main reason was because he was "the brother of" and if you read through the early posts on the forum when he joined in 2012 I wasn't the only one. Even though the Belgian League isn't the strongest in Europe winning the best player of the year award at 20 years old is not something that should be underestimated. Two names of come to mind of players that won the award when they were 20 years or younger: Vincent Kompany and Axel Witsel. Regardless of the fact if he will ever make the first team we have done a great piece of business signing Thorgan Hazard.

You do realize that we are playing against Arsenal tonight, right?

Yes

In that case ... Yes, Chelsea has a world class youth system with "youth" players like Hazard, Oscar, KDB, Lukaku, etc

What I am afraid of is that other top teams that are in need of a top goalkeeper (Barcelona would be the first one to come to mind) would throw in a player that they do not really need, but that would strenghten our team. The reality is if you look in the short term then we do not really need to strenghten the team, because we still have Cech for at least the next 2-3 years. That same cannot be said about other positions (eg striker).

On the bright side, we now have an extra game to play against Brentford, so that will mean one less game that we will have to miss Hazard in the competition.

No, I was not referring to Atletico's ranking, but the Belgian League (should have stated country ranking and not club ranking, so I stand corrected). But I agree with pr22 that it doesn't make any sense arguing about this any further.