Jype

Nah, Sarri just thought Kepa was injured so was trying to sub him off. Kepa himself said later he just took his time to catch his breath and waste a few seconds on the clock. That was all just a big misunderstanding from all parties involved. I already said before the UCL final that Kepa should be subbed on if it went down to penalties. In that game City were just too shite to even make it to pens, but I'm glad it happened yesterday. Mendy is a superior goalkeeper in pretty much every other metric, but it's obvious Kepa is the better option for penalties.

Been some talk today that he might have to quarantine till Monday, so if that's the case then Palace is definitely out of the question.

C. Bakayoko accepts a smaller pay packet from a new club and Chelsea subsidizes the difference in wages for the next year, just like the club also would in your B scenario. I really don't see much of a difference in options B and C from either Bakayoko's or Chelsea's perspective. Either way Chelsea will have to cover for a portion of his wages for the coming season and in both cases he'll then go for a smaller pay packet at his next permanent club, whether the contract is signed this year or next year. In both scenarios Bakayoko still gets the same £5.3M for the coming season so riding out the contract would make very little difference for him, unless he thinks he's getting a significantly higher contract when signing as a free agent. I could see a club potentially handing him out a slightly bigger contract as a free agent, but then again if he has a bad season he might get even less than he would this year. Or if he gets a bad injury during the season (while playing out on loan) he might get nothing. So there is definitely an incentive for him to find a club to sign his next long term contract ASAP. I fully think the contract stuff will sort itself out but the only problem in my point of view is finding a club who are actually willing to pay any kind of transfer fee for him. Bakayoko's amortisation value for the coming season is £8M so the club should optimally be looking for at least that much, and there might not be any takers.

Not necessarily throwing it, just not taking any unnecessary risks either. I'd hate for someone with very little pre-season minutes to come in an injure themselves in the process. Villarreal seem to be taking it really seriously and are throwing the kitchen sink at it, as they should because it's a glorious opportunity for them. It might backfire on them if players are not fit, or the risk might pay off. Either way even with this squad we are heavy favorites to win and there shouldn't be any excuses to lose. Just hope Tuchel reacts quickly if things aren't working out, and takes in a few more first teamers.

Rüdiger is a leader.

So Pau Torres is fit to play just four days after finishing his 2020/21 season at the Olympics, but Azpi/Christensen still can't feature having already trained for a couple of weeks. 😆 Excited to see Chalobah being given a chance though, let's hope it works out. He played well in pre-season.

I wouldn't compare Bakayoko and Drinkwater together at all. The former is obviously still trying his best to make a good career for himself and has played the last three seasons at very decent clubs (Milan, Monaco, Napoli). He's obviously not a top player but at the very least he's proved himself to be competent at clubs aiming for UCL spots in Italy/France so wherever he ends up at he'll probably have a good 5-8 years ahead of him at that level. Drinkwater on the other hand is a washed up alcoholic who's played less than 10 games of football in the last three years despite no major injuries, and has failed to make any sort of impact at any of his three loan clubs too (unless you count a training ground brawl with his team mate as having an impact). I wouldn't be surprised if he announced his retirement from football the day after his contract at Chelsea is over because he clearly doesn't have any ambition to play anymore. With Drinkwater there's absolutely zero hope of him moving before his contract expires but I can't see Bakayoko staying in the U23s for a year just to collect his pay check so he should be doing whatever he can to make a permanent transfer happen. Or what do you think will happen if he rides out the last year and plays no football? He'll have wasted a prime year of his career for the sake of £1-2M difference in wages and he'd probably get even less for his next contract then.

Interesting to see the lineup in 15 mins. Mendy, Rüdiger, Kante, Kovacic, CHO, Werner, Ziyech, Havertz should be nailed on starters but the back line worries me a little bit. Azpi and Christensen got no minutes in the tank during pre-season so will they start or not?

While that's probably true, why should it matter? If he still had a long term contract, the wage issue would be a bigger obstacle but nearing the end of his deal it gets less and less important. Bakayoko's deal is up next year and by now he should know he's not getting anywhere near his current wages (£110K/wk) for his next contract anyway. If he lowers his demands even a little bit (for example to somewhere around £60-80K range) his new salary should fit nicely with Lyon's other players wages. The difference in salary for the 2021/22 season could either be subsidized by Chelsea or covered by Lyon with a one-off signing on fee for the player. That's assuming Bakayoko knows his level and accepts the reality. If he has his head in the clouds and imagines he's getting the same wage or more at his next club, there could be problems. He already hit the lottery once by getting a contract too big for his skill level, he's not going to get it again.

That's surprisingly low for a player who scored 17 league goals last season, would've expected a few millions more given there were multiple clubs interested. Maybe the club have negotiated a sell-on percentage in case Ugbo makes a proper breakthrough at Genk and moves on for 5-10 times that much later. Either way it's a few more millions in the bank for Chelsea and one less player to have to worry about, so that's good.

Sure, last years signings amount to roughly £42M/year in amortisation (all players bought for fees signed a five year contract). The last financial statement released by the club covers the 19/20 season, where player amortisation was roughly 130M and last year around 40M (see above) was added to that. There were also some sales which take that figure down a little bit due to getting their amortisation value off the books (Morata being the biggest one) not to mention releasing some players on free transfers whose yearly amortisation value was significant (Pedro and Willian total around £10M/year). Overall I'd say last years signings didn't increase the total amortisation by more than £20M/year compared to the previous season. The club's business model is dependent on the occasional sales (ie. Hazard being sold for £100M and club's overall profit being around £30M for the year, partly due to covid reductions of course) but I'd say things are quite well balanced now and it's not wrong at all to say that the sales this year go a long way towards signing Lukaku. After all, the club need cash in the bank to pay the actual transfer fee for the player and with Inter's dire financial situation I'd guess they've demanded a payment up front for most of the total fee. Selling players gets you that cash.

There's also been talk of that 18yo Moriba kid from Barca. He's refusing to sign a new contract (current one expiring 2022) and because of the contract situation Barcelona have banished him out of the first team setup. It's almost certain he'll leave, if not this year for 15-20M€ then for a free transfer next year. If the club can do a deal with Barca, he could fill the 4th CM spot for the coming season. He already made close to 20 appearances for them last season (most subs) so at his age he might be willing to play the minutes left over from Gilmour.

Feel free to list the players of Diego Costa's quality who are available for that kind of money today. Only two years prior the club also signed Hazard for around 30 million, that doesn't mean a player of similar quality is available for anywhere close to that cheap these days. Grealish just went for £100M and his career path so far is worse than Hazard's in 2012 (not to mention Hazard was a better player even at 4 years younger than Grealish now). Transfer fees and wages have skyrocketed in the last five years to ridiculous amounts, there's absolutely zero point going back almost a decade and comparing a 2021 signing to them as far as the prices go.

I'm pretty sure they knew already, after all they've already failed more than ten times. 😂 Feels inevitable they'll win it within a few years though, their squad is simply too good not to.

Quote me where I've said that. You are aware there's a middle ground between thinking he's shit and thinking he's the second coming of Jesus Christ? In pretty much all my posts regarding Lukaku I've openly said I think he still has flaws in his game and that he can still easily end up being deemed a failure at the club, especially given the amount of money invested. But I've also said that I believe he has improved his overall game under the coaching of Antonio Conte and that I can see him being a good fit tactically under Tuchel as well, due to already proving he's a good fit for Conte's tactics which are not all that different. I don't know about you but I will rather choose to be optimistic and see how it goes. No one likes a moaner.

Then again, if he does succeed your 'reputation' will be 'destroyed' as well and you should expect to be called out for it. For people like you it's basically a win-win. Either he fails and you can keep moaning forever and say 'I told you so' or he's a huge success and you can quietly hop on the bandwagon and pretend you always rated him. Or somewhere in the middle ground, like we've seen with many players in the past: when they have a good game or just generally in good form the topics go quiet for ages, but the minute they put a foot wrong the moaners come out of hiding.

That's not what I said at all. Learn to read for fucks sake. I said Lukaku can be considered a failure even if he scores a lot on a personal level, if the team doesn't improve with him in it. Of course he still needs to be a prolific goal scorer but he also needs to develop good chemistry with the other attackers in the team to be deemed a success and that's why I think it's stupid to just put a label on him and say he needs to score an X amount of goals because even if he does, the transfer can still be either good or bad depending on the other factors. He scored a decent amount of goals at Utd but never developed that chemistry with Rashford, Pogba, Martial etc. and that's why he's widely considered to have been a failure over there. That lack of chemistry might not even be fully his own fault because Mourinho was also clueless on how to set up a functioning attacking unit, but it is what it is.

True, but it's not like Shane Long is a long-term player for them either. He turns 35 in January and is out of contract next summer. And Michael Obafemi has been a fringe player for them anyway and is also out of contract next year, so without a huge improvement this season I can't see him staying there much longer either. Unless he's a total flop in training Broja should be ahead of those two at the very least. That would leave Armstrong and Adams as his main competition for playing time, and I think Soton play with two strikers so whether it's as a starter or a substitute he should get minutes in most games. Of course there's risks that he might get stuck on the bench with little playing time, but this is a massive opportunity for Broja. He has a chance to prove himself at the best league in the world so let's hope he keeps his momentum going from last season instead of wasting a year and then having to take a step backwards (like Tammy after Swansea loan).

I couldn't give less fucks about how many goals he scores on a personal level, but the team need to play well with Lukaku in it. I've seen people claim he needs to score 25+ league goals every year to be considered a success, but that's a very unrealistic expectation to put on any player. Aguero did it only once in his 10 year City career, Salah has done it once in his career across all clubs and leagues, Kane has done slightly better but still less than half his seasons are 25+ in the PL etc. Diego Costa for example reached a maximum of 20 league goals a season for us, yet he was a massive player for us and improved the team immensely to win two league titles in three years. If Lukaku scores 20 in the league but the team aren't playing well I wouldn't consider him a success even though on paper he'd have matched Costa's performance in the team. To be labeled a success Lukaku needs to develop good chemistry with the players around him and help them score more goals as well, either by providing the final pass or just by making movements that bind defenders to mark him and thus creating space for others to score. At Inter he had that chemistry with Lautaro Martinez so I don't see how he couldn't have it with Werner, Havertz as well.

This 100%. Sure he'll sign a 5-6 year contract so (assuming there's no release clause) he should spend at least 3-4 years at his next club but that's when it gets really tricky. Either Haaland & Raiola will start engineering a move elsewhere at that point and there's not all that much the club can do about it given only 1-2 years left on the contract, or if the club have been super successful and won lots of trophies they might be willing to negotiate a contract extension. But what happens when you try to extend a Raiola player who's already on massive wages (£400K/wk minimum) and the player's shown he's got what it takes to succeed at the very highest level? They'll demand even more money. Raiola has already said publicly they're planning for Haaland to become a £1M/wk player at some point in his career so keeping him for +10 years is completely out of the question wherever he goes.

Exactly. And while we're talking about Serie A being a 'lower level league' I would also like to point out that Mo Salah scored 35 league goals over 2,5 seasons while playing over there (0.43 goals/game). He then joined Liverpool and scored almost as many goals in his first season in the PL and has kept a really impressive scoring rate for four years now (95 league goals in 145 games, averaging 0.65 goals/game). If the Serie A is such a garbage league, how come Salah didn't really dominate there but broke the record for most PL goals over one season in his first year back? Just like Salah improved his game in the Serie A and came back a better player, I don't see why it's so impossible for some people to think Romelu is capable of having done the same.

There's just so many things wrong about this. For starters, a player who by the age of 26 already sat #20 on the list of all-time PL goalscorers was not a flop by any definition of the word. He might not have been a superstar success at Man Utd but he still scored 42 goals in two seasons for them, he just wasn't the best fit for how they played football at the time. And as for his time at Inter, he played there for two seasons (not one) and scored 23-24 league goals in both seasons. I won't go into the argument on whether Serie A is a 'lower level league' or not but Lukaku got POTY in Serie A when he fired Inter to their first title in more than a decade, breaking Juve's decade-long dominance. The same Juve team who have been a good performer in the UCL as well, reaching two finals with mostly the same core group of players. And is it so hard to imagine that just maybe Lukaku has actually improved as a player in the last couple of years after being coached by a better manager than any of his seasons before (Martinez, Koeman and a Mourinho who's gone through a massive decline)? It's been widely reported that Conte identified some of his weaknesses and had him work drills in training for months on end to improve them, not to mention the improvements on his diet and physical training which have both helped him become a better player. He's obviously still not a superstar technically but things such as positioning and awareness definitely improve with experience and better quality coaching. Btw, Heskey played in the PL for 18 full seasons and got overall less PL goals than had Lukaku by 26. Heskey's best season was 14 league goals which he reached exactly once in his career, which Lukaku has already bettered in 5 of his 7 full seasons in the league.

Havertz > Lautaro

Chances are divided into two categories though, the first one being 'chances created' which counts every pass that leads to a shot and then there's also 'big chances created' where the expectation to score a goal is much higher (ie. a player being one on one with the keeper or getting a shot inside the six yard box) so they definitely consider the quality of the chance too. In the first category 'chances created' Chelsea as a team created 450 chances during the last league season, which was only behind Man City and Liverpool (both at 457). Manchester United for example only created 414 chances according to the statistic. In the second category 'big chances created' the team recorded 62 last season, while Man Utd got 68 and both Liverpool / City had 79. Sure you can see that those three teams had a slightly higher percentage of their total shot-creating opportunities recorded as big chances, but to say we were 'middle of the road' in that aspect is just wrong when there were 16 teams in the league who had a lower 'big chances created' number, with the majority of the teams not even close in the stats (Leicester and Spurs were the only ones not far behind). Another decent metric for goalscoring chances created is the xG statistic, which definitely considers the quality of the chances created. For last league season Chelsea were third in that aspect (68.6 xG), again only behind Liverpool (72.2 xG) and Man City (77.7 xG). Man Utd on the other hand placed lower in this table, having only 63.1 xG. On the xG table you can see that in the Premier League only Fulham, Brighton and Sheffield Utd underperformed their total xG by more than Chelsea, which would imply that the problem was definitely not creating the chances but rather putting them away. Of course statistics never tell the whole story but having watched all our games and a good amount of rivals' games as well, I'd be inclined to come to the same conclusion as the statistics that creating good goalscoring opportunities was not the team's biggest problem and we'd have got much more goals if the players knew how to finish. Having a good goalscoring striker like Lukaku will definitely help with that, and if players like Havertz and Werner can start finishing with a better conversion rate having had a full season to fully settle in the team then that should help a lot as well.

That's all the endorsement I'l need, Drogba knows a quality player when he sees one. 😎