TorontoChelsea

It would be a disaster for at least one player. ) Let's say we play 60 games. That's a total of 180 starts. These 6 players started 253 games last season in Europe and that's with De Bruyne not playing in Europe, with Moses going off to Afcon, with Oscar taking some time to get into the starting XI, etc...Beyond that, there is a massive problem with usage. Chelsea took 16.5 shots a game last season. That number will be around the same this season. You want the striker, Mata, and Hazard taking about half your shots. Then, you've got the set plays and corner where defenders get shots, then you've got your central midfielders like Ramires and Lampard who will also shoot. There really aren't a lot of shots available unless they will start to take away from other players' opportunities. (Mata and Hazard most likely). When you bring in new players, it's not just addition, it's about fitting them in. De Bruyne was excellent last season as the field general who had a lot of freedom to do what he wanted in a team which basically disregarded defense.Schurrle is a very good player, but he took 3.5+ shots a game last season. At Chelsea, both players would come in and be asked to play a completely different role. I think KDB would actually be a better fit because we need someone who can cross into the box with regularity, but I keep seeing this absurd idea that KDB or Schurrle will be able to duplicate what they did last season. Offensive success is very much tied to usage.

They also have Javi Garcia.

Right now, I'd put City as the team to beat. Their signings accentuate the team very well and if they buy a top striker, they'll be in excellent position. They also had a number of injuries last year. Silva, Aguero, Toure, and Kompany, their 4 best players, all missed time started a combined 17 games games fewer than they had the year before. I expect a bounce back to a more healthy team.

I think we'll probably bring back a couple of players from loan and maybe end up buying a few more players. I don't see the point in a massive spending spree. We have a lot of talent already and a lot of it is young and improving. We just need to add to it rather than tearing down and rebuilding. If I had my druthers, we'd do something like- Out: Torres (we just need to move on), Marin, In: A striker like Cavani, Jovetic, Dzeko, etc...don't really care. A right winger like Di Maria or similar, and a central midfielder if we stick to a 4-2-3-1. (Someone like Coentrao would be useful long-term as well.

Wouldn't understand going after him at all. We have a glut of #10 types and Sneijder is not a flexible player . How many #10s do we need? We're likely to sign Schurrle (or failing that, bring back KDB) and already have Mata, Hazard, and Oscar, as regulars. I'd rather build through Mata and Hazard than through Sneijder who has been disappointing for a couple of years anyhow. When you factor in his refusal to lower wage demands earlier in the year, I just don't get it.

Can't stand this criticism. A player who goes where he is transferred shows professionalism. What's he supposed to do? Hold out and say "I'll only play for 7 teams in Europe?" Maybe those teams don't want him. Maybe they'd never meet Athletico's price. People act as if he's going from Barcelona to play in the Bulgarian first division. He's going from a Europa League caliber team to play for an ambitious French team with a history (Seven League 1 titles). I personally, never saw him as a fit for the way most top teams want to play football these days because his game isn't well-rounded and his success is largely built on playing teams built around getting him great service. Really, which top team would he fit at?

Well, they need to be outraged at something.

Also, people keep putting Oscar in central midfield even though in a year where we had no natural CMers and even when our regular CMers got hurt, he basically never played there. It's clear Chelsea see him as an attacking midfielder (in a 4-3-3, it could be different obviously). I think we realistically need to get a CMer or two and someone who can play as a real right winger and straighten out or striker situation. We'll see what happens, but it should be interesting.

The notion that Ake has proven that he's good enough to play for Chelsea in any important role is absurd. He played in 6 games, 2 of them came as literally a 90th minute sub and the rest of them were in second-tier games. He hasn't proven anything at all. You are conflating two issues. Chelsea's future with our prospects and young players. The reality is that they don't matter very much because we spend 60M pounds a year. We can spend 5 years developing someone who might turn into a good player or we can buy Hazard, who is already the best player in France two years in a row at 21 and Oscar who is already Brazil's #10. That's the way top teams do things. Chalobah might turn out and he might not, but it will be at least a year and more likely 2 or 3 before he is ready to even play for that role. We are a team trying to compete for everything. The goal of the club is not to develop youngsters, it's to win. Developing young players is a very small part of that. We have been one of the most successful clubs in the world over the last decade and have developed nobody particularly noteworthy in that period. Taking someone like Chalobah, with one year's experience in a vastly inferior league, into the first team would be ridiculous for a team trying to win. It'd be fine for Southampton, not for Chelsea. Developing young players is nice and people always like tracking their progress, but I'll never understand the fascination with and massively overrating of youth players. It just leads to massive disappointments when they inevitably fail to live up to what were unrealistic expectations to begin with.

Chalobah had a very good season and has a bright future, but short-term expectations for him were always insane. He's still a fairly raw Championship player with only one year's experience and still some doubt about his final position and the jump to even the bottom of the Premier League is enormous. You could take the best team in the Championship and they'd be a poor side in the Premier League. The jump to any sort of meaningful playing time with a team like Chelsea is almost insurmountable. Let the lad develop at the pace he should. Hopefully, he'll be loaned to a Premier League side where he will force himself into some regular playing time and show that he can hold his own at the top level.

Wins away at Spurs and Arsenal earlier in the year. We lose either one of those, and we'd have been in serious trouble late in the season.

Feel happy for Robben. He's a great player who was unfairly labeled a choker because of a couple of big misses in huge games. Bayern were a better team but Dante shouldn't have stayed on the pitch.

I'd probably rather have Torres than Ba but not when you consider wages. Ba was quite poor with us and there is a fundamental problem with our system being unable to feed strikers and instead being built around Hazard and Mata at the edge of the box.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/29884/what-happens-losing-teams-championship-shirts

Would be a good move I think. Bertrand will likely never be good enough to be a regular at Chelsea (yes, it's possible, but teams with ambitions like Chelsea can't afford to wait for the possible especially when that possibility is remote). and Cole will be gone after this year. Coentrao is also versatile which is nice.

Ramires is a perfect squad player. He can passably play a number of positions, has fantastic stamina, always defends, and does things other players can't. Unlike most of our team, he doesn't need the ball to be effective because his speed opens things up and he would even be a fantastic starter in certain formations. Playing in this same formation, he's not an ideal starter, no.

Coentrao would be fine. For one year, he and Cole could split time with Coentrao also maybe getting some time elsewhere (RB, LM, DM, etc...)

Don't know if I've ever cared less about a Chelsea game and that's saying something with all the meaningless pre-season and meaningless tournament games we play. Hope we only backups (Marin, Benayoun, etc...) except for a couple of subs.

It's not about not being flash, the truth is, he wasn't very good for most of his time at Chelsea which is why no manager aside from Mourinho ever saw him as a starter and most didn't even like him to be the first backup. Had his contract not been bad, he would have been gone ages ago. The other stuff (being a nice guy, turning up and doing their job) is not uncommon in football. I understand appreciating him. I appreciate what every Chelsea player does for us. I just care more about actual performance and Ferriera's performance, especially for what we paid for, overall, was poor. Kalou was a vastly more important player for Chelsea over the course of his career and people were yelling at him to leave. Malouda was an elite player for us for a bit and people want him gone. It's almost like Ferriera got to die young (in movie star terms) by not playing much once he started to decline. Had he been forced to start, people would have remembered/seen how poor he really was and wanted him to leave and been happy when he did. By never playing, he maintained a different image, one of silent nobility which is ridiculous when you think about it, to give credit to someone for not being good enough to play.

Never got the love for Ferreira. He signed an awful contract with Chelsea and was likely only with the club because nobody else would pay starter wages for a player who wasn't nearly good enough to start. Ferriera had a couple of very good seasons with us, but he was never the reason we won even at his peak. He only started more than 18 games in the Premier League once in his entire Chelsea career. He didn't play in 30 games (which is not a lot) in all competitions since Mourinho left, and was mostly our 3rd choice RB. As for this consummate professional stuff, yeah, he got paid millions of pounds for basically sitting on a bench and doing what little was asked of him without complaining. I'd do it too. We'd all do it. Many many players, indeed, most players, do that for much less money. It hardly makes him special. I like him because because he was a Chelsea player and he seems to be a nice guy but this club legend stuff is just ridiculous. This is not a case of someone like Terry or Zola who was central to a team's identity and success for an extended period. This is not like Essien who was a world-class player for a few years before losing it. This is not even like Malouda who was an amazing player, maybe our best, for a couple of years before flaming out. Ferriera was by and large was a peripheral player that just happened to stay at Chelsea for a long time because we signed him to a bad contract.

Pointless until transfers are made really. The top-5 teams will have very good cores so it will depend on what moves are made.

This is where you are wrong. Spending does basically equal success.It's statistically proven. Teams that spend, win and teams that win spend. QPR is different because QPR spent 42M from a crappy base of players. Mourinho had teams that were spending 150M with a world-class base already in place. There's spending and then there's spending. Chelsea has had success because we've spent a ridiculous amount of money. Here we go...team spending over last 3 years... In Premier League...City, Chelsea, United finishing 2,3,1 in the league In Spain Madrid, Barcelona, and Malaga (way behind the first two) 2, 1, 6 In Italy, Juventus, Roma, Napoli/Fiorentina. 1, 7, 2, 4 In Germany, Bayern outspends everyone else in the league by ridiculous margins...they finished 1st easily. Of the big four leagues, the highest spending team finished 2nd, 2nd, 1st, and 1st. Money wins. Period. (And if you don't think that's correlation, you don't understand correlation. There are exceptions. Teams that can rise up without spending, teams that can spend and lose but those are more short-term anomalies than anything else.) I don't understand why people want to maintain this romantic myth of team effort or the genius manager. Those things do matter, but spending is about 90% of what matters and everything else is 10% (instead of pretending it's the other way around.) And Manpe is absolutely wrong on this and it just shows me how people can easily misremember . Lampard and Terry were both on the PFA team of the year BEFORE Mourinho came. How can you possibly give credit to Mourinho for developing players that were already deemed among the best in the league is beyond me. Mourinho didn't make them into great players. They were already great players. Team of the year is a big fucking deal. The image people want to have of this mediocre team that Mourinho transformed into a winner, is just nonsense. Chelsea did not overachieve in Mourinho's first two seasons. They did exactly as expected. Man City was also in a completely different situation for a couple of reasons. 1)They were a mid-table side with no superstars. They had a couple of players that would become top ones (like Kompany) but they needed to be developed. We were SECOND the year before and we made the CL semi-final and had a team filled with top-class players like Makalele, Lampard, Terry, Gudjohnson, and Hasselbaink before Mourinho managed a game. We went to the CL semi-finals the year before. We finished second. Man City was 14th when they started getting cash and 9th when the started getting a lot. 2) The Premier League was already transformed when CIty started spending. When we started, nobody was spending much. We literally outpsent the entire rest of the Premier League combined. We spent 300M pounds in two years when other teams were spending 10M pounds a season. The equivalent today would be a team like Spurs, City, or Arsenal going out and spending 500M in two years and then acting like their managers were geniuses when they won and comparing us to City is like pretending that Arsenal going out and spending hundreds of millions and West Ham doing that should end in the same result.

I get that. I'm not against Mourinho coming, but he's not a genius or a saviour. He's a solid manager who will hopefully get time to implement a stable system.

I will argue with that. Winning with Porto was an incredible achievement even if was in a very poor CL year. After that, his achievements have been much more mpdest and overall, he has done no better than should have been expected. He won with Chelsea with a team that out-spent everyone else in the Premier League about 10-1. He inherited a team that finished second and got to the semi-finals of the CL and had already players like Lampard, Terry, Gudjohnssson, Makalele, etc..He wasn't taking the 1987 Chelsea side to the promised land, he was taking the deepest, probably the most talented, and by far the most expensive squad there. Mourinho's performance at Chelsea was about what should have been expected. In 4 years, we won 2 Premier League titles, a few domestic Cups, and didn't get past the semi-finals in the CL. We got worse every year under Mourinho so by the time he got fired, we were playing awfully despite having an insanely expensive and talented side. People want to think of Mourinho getting fired as a clash of cultures, but it was mostly due to the team sucking under him at the end. We were significantly better under Avram Grant than we were under Mourinho's last while and Grant did nothing. This was not like RDM or AVb where we were losing to worse teams with imbalanced squads, this was a a squad that was losing to poorer teams with a bevy of world-class players like Makalele, Carvalho, Lampard, Terry, Cech, Essien, and Cole most of whom were at their peaks. At Inter, the squad had won three straight Seria A titles before Mourinho got there so calling them mediocre is patently ridiculous. Like at Chelsea (and even at Porto), Mourinho was once again coaching for the biggest spending team in the league. The CL win has excellent, but it was not shocking. They were won of the best teams in Europe. At Madrid, his reign was an abject failure. Despite being once again, in charge of the highest spending club, Madrid only won 3 trophies in 3 years, only one of which was a major trophy, which is the worst haul in the history of the club for a manager who has been there that long. Post-Porto, he has managed top European clubs for 9 years and made and won 1 CL. That's not remarkable, it's actually not particularly good. If you gave a random manager 9 years with the squads Mourinho had at Chelsea, Inter, and Madrid, you'd still expect more European success. If he comes back to Chelsea, he will once again be coming back to what will likely be the highest spending club in the league. Yes, he'll likely have success, but like everywhere post-Porto, that success is based enormously on him choosing a team where success is almost inevitable. He's a fine manager, but the regard that many Chelsea fans for him is so insanely over-inflated based on what he's actually accomplished. People also forget the negatives and there are negatives. The boring football (and this is not Greece at the Euros, this is taking the most talented team in the world and making them play super-defensively), the ego circus, the sore losing, etc...I just don't get the obsession or the desire to go back there.

It's not close...Mata is our best player and is best suited for the #10 spot. Hazard would be good there, but he excelled coming off the wing as well so see no need to move him. Those two can (and do) interchange positions on the field a fair bit as both can play LAM/LW/CAM. Oscar is our #3 option there and while it's his best position, de-emphasizing Mata and Hazard for Oscar makes zero sense. Ideally, we'd get a real winger sort of player to compete with Moses (start over him even) on the right. I think no matter what, it's going to be difficult to beat top teams with Oscar, Hazard, and Mata as our front three (and without a natural winger who will draw the defense apart, cross the ball in, track back on the wings, etc...).