TorontoChelsea

Ashley Cole left Arsenal, the team he came up with, in the middle of his career because he wanted more money. There's nothing wrong with that at all, but you can't say he's a super loyal player or any other nonsense just because he didn't play in the EPL after leaving Chelsea. It's incredible to me how blind supporters are. It doesn't go one way. You can't demand loyalty of players and then get rid of them when you want. Lampard has a chance to play for the Premier League champions who are you to say "no, you can't because you used to play for Chelsea." We let him go. We didn't want him anymore. He can play wherever he damn well pleases. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

It's because GKs are much more replaceable and as such, much less important.. Cech has been fantastic for Chelsea but had he gone somewhere else, we would have recovered very quickly and easily. Losing Lampard or Terry would have been impossible or extremely expensive to replace. (It's why keepers are by far the least expensive transfers. That's not to take anything away from Cech, he did the best he could do and is still fantastic, just that the respective positional value is very different.

It's funny to me because so many supporters are so eager to push out any player they think is a second past their prime and replace them with someone else, but if a player were dare to go somewhere else? Traitor!!! Loyalty to us must be absolute but we can dump you any time we feel like.

Liverpool aren't contenders. You can't replace someone like Suarez (2 good players don't equal a great one), other contenders improved, they had the benefit of not playing in any other tournaments for any length of time, and they got lucky last year, Still a good team who I think will battle United for 4th but I could also see a disaster season if things go a little wrong which is quite possible and something around a 7th place finish. .

Being a Ryan Bertrand fan would be really expensive.

You do realize that your profile picture is of Drogba, right? Robben does go down easily but the same can be said of about 90% of players.

As an attacker, I'd take Salah over Willian too but Willian is a better fit for the way Chelsea play and is a more complete player. Besides, Mourinho clearly loves him. Bottom line is that if Salah plays well, there are lots of opportunities for him to get playing time but I still have a hard time seeing him as anything more than the 5th or 6th choice at attacking midfield.

Robben is one of the better players in the world over the last decade. He is a dynamic player who creates havoc for the opposition. He, like all players, has his flaws, but he is not nearly as selfish as people pretend he is. Last year, he took 2.7 shot a game. Oscar took 2.2. Ronaldo on the other hand, took an insane 7.2 shots every game.

Possible but teams like ours need players that are fine with not being starters. Chelsea have Hazard, Willian, Oscar, Schurrle, Fabergas and Ramires who will play at attacking midfield during the season. You want a little more depth and flexibility but that player won't play much so there's no point spending 40M pounds on your 6th attacking midfielder. There's no value there at all. You need someone like Salah (or Moses) to be able to play sporadically and still have enough quality to help the team. Don't expect him to be a superstar, but he can still be very useful for us.

He is what he is and that player has value on a Mourinho team. It's too bad his transfer fee was so absurd because it makes us want more than he can deliver. He's a hard-worker with great energy and he can create space with his pace and movement but he isn't much offensively. He plays with his head down, makes some strange decisions, hold on to the ball FOREVER instead of moving it quickly, and has a poor final product. (He's scored 44 goals in 317 career games, the vast majority of those games in a poor Ukranian league).

We need another striker. Anything else is luxury but going into the season with Drogba and Torres primed to play major minutes is extremely weak and in the case of a Costa injury or failure to adapt, we have no chance of winning anything. Not upset about the transfer particularly because the fee is very good although I don't think it's bad for Everton either (like I think the Luiz fee was ridiculous for PSG). They get a 21 YO striker who scored 15 goals for them, fits their system, and is likely to improve. I wouldn't be surprised if he scores 20 for them this year and scores in the 15-20 range for another decade in the league. I don't think he's a superstar by any means, but it is extremely rare to find strikers this young being this successful so yes, there is a lot of value in that. If we can go get another striker, I will be fine with this, If not, I won't be.

The issue I have is that defensive football actually isn't any more successful than offensive football. The bottom line is that you have to score more goals than the other team and that can be 5-4 or 1-0. In fact, last year, goals for was a better indicator of success than goals against. The top 7 in goals for finished 1,2,3,4. 7, 5,6 (in other words all the top 7) The top 7 in goals against finished 3, 1, 5,4, 7,8, 11. I don't expect us to be exciting offensively because Mourinho is not that kind of coach. I don't like it, but it's the way we went and we have to keep on that path if we want to win. Trying to force a certain offensive style on a team it doesn't fit is a disaster.. BTW, for 95% of teams, you just need to do what you can do win. I will never begrudge a lower level team of playing super defensively against us. What can you do when your entire roster costs less than any two players on the other team's squad? However, when you are spending 60M pounds a year, you should be able to produce some attractive football.

Exactly. We should assume that every young player with any talent is secretly a start player because it happened to one player. Let's just run out our youth team because Paul Pogba did it! Feruz, Loftus-Cheek, Bamford, Baker...we will have a team of potentially elite players! (And finish in the relegation zone). Pogba is a rarity, even the exception. You can't point out the exception and say that's why we should be doing something. There have been thousands and thousands of players who have played in the Championship in the last decade, played in youth teams and exactly how many of them went immediately helping out even mid-table Premier league sides? For every Pogba, there are a thousand Zahas, a thousand Tom Inces, and a thousand Wes Hoolahans. And those were players who were elite in the Championship, not someone who was benched regularly. Maybe Chalobah could play with Chelsea this year and be a great player but historically those odds are probably not even 0.1% and why risj it? What exactly is the benefit? Almost no chance of making an impact and no game time for a player who badly needs development all because fans want to see a young player play? If he's good enough, he'll force his way here eventually and if he's not, he won't. He isn't good enough yet.

A loan is absolutely the right thing. He is coming off of a poor to mixed season in the Championship (after a great one). He's not ready (the jump to the Premier League is a massive one even for more polished, more experiences, and more accomplished players) and we don't have enough game time to give him to develop. We have Fabergas, Matic, Ramires, Van Ginkel, Romeu, and Mikel all ahead of him for 2 positions in midfield and Terry, Cahill, Ivanovic, and Zouma ahead of him for 2 positions in central defense. (and no, getting rid of Mikel wouldn't suddenly give Chalobah playing time.) I'd ideally love to see him on a lower Premier League team where he'd get minutes (Burnley?), but there aren't many of those and I think back to the Championship is a little more likely.

Chambers isn't starting caliber for Arsenal yet but he's an improvement on Jenkinson and Chambers might not stick at RB either. I've heard talk of him going to CB or CM. Overall, He was bought for the future. Arsenal look quite dangerous to me. They have some excellent talent and a fair bit of depth especially at midfield where it's a ton of depth. . Just because they haven't won in a while, doesn't mean they can't again. People were saying we couldn't win until we did.

I am not one for twitter rumours but chelsea have 4 strikers and too many players so either Torres or Lukaku has to go.

Would be a terrible move unless they aren't done buying yet. Torres and Drogba as our backup strikers? Yikes. Second strikers get a lot of gametime and that's a combo that scored 11 goals in 56 league games three years ago and has gotten older and worse since. I don't think Lukaku is some superstar player, but he has shown the ability to score regularly when given a chance and that's something neither Torres or Drogba have done for a long time.

Why would Sunderland buy him then? People are so obsessed with not losing talent that they want to put buy-back clauses on every player but there is a reason they are really never included. @iii3 Second choice LB is I think, pretty obviously, Azpilicueta.

Nice strawman. I never said anything like that nor do I think for a second that Costa won't start. Too much does not equate to starting ahead of Costa regularly. Too much means playing more than about 15-20 games total all season.

My worry is that Mourinho will play Drogba too much because he's familiar with him. He hasn't been a very good player for a while now and is 36. He really isn't close to Chelsea quality anymore. If he plays regularly, we're in trouble.

We have a bunch of players on the fringes we could get rid of.. Last year, we had 17 outfield players who played more than 15 games in the league (including subs) and 2 more who played more than 10. After that, it's a few players who barely played. And that was with buying and selling people in the middle of the year.That's the total rotation. We could get rid of/loan half a dozen players and be fine. We should actually as outside of the top-16-18 outfield players, nobody will get any game time.

Yes, I can definitely see that as well. If Mourinho doesn't like Lukaku, we might as well sell him for some big money but...that would leave Chelsea with a massive weakness at striker again. I am not sold on Costa as an elite player but no matter what, you need a second striker who can play and I don't think Drogba or Torres are even premier league caliber players anymore(and I mean that) never mind Chelsea caliber players. If that is the case, the Drogba signing is awful and makes us a much worse team. If it's Torres who goes, it really doesn't make any change except gets us some money and some leadership.

We need it, Azpilicueta was very solid defensively last year but overall was overrated because he offered nothing offensively at all. No goals, no assists, the worst passing percentage by a defender and he offers nothing on set pieces (Cahill, Ivanovic, and Terry are all dangerous in the air). He had 5 fewer key passes than Cole in roughly double the number of games. Hard to blame Azpi though as he was on his off side playing a newish position and he was extremely solid defensively. However, Luis can give us some natural width which we desperately need. Last year, almost all of our crosses came from Ivanovic because nobody else played wide. A wide player on the left will stretch the defense and create more space for forwards to run into and attack the ball.

Like you and I wouldn't take that job in 2 seconds! It's easy. Just have two hats. One with player names in it and one with teams. "Sources tell me that Barcelona and Argentina forward Lionel Messi is close to joining Scottish League two side East Fife in a shock transfer". That is fun!!! @Choulo-I think it means that Torres will go. The third striker on a team barely plays but having 4 strikers is useless. I think Atletico will buy Torres and whatever they pay for him is a good deal for us.

Stop being so Canadian. There is no need to apologize! Your post was not offensive or anything. We just disagree and that's just fine! @Chelsea Legend 11- De Bruyne didn't start the first game because he was brilliant in pre-season, he started the first game because Chelsea hadn't bought Willian yet and Mata wasn't back to match fitness.Once those two things happened, De Bruyne was never going to play regularly. He played 1 game, sat a game, and then never saw regular action again. De Bruyne didn't deserve to play regularly (the players ahead of him were better or better suited for the system), but plenty of players had much longer spells of playing poorly and still played regularly (Ramires, Oscar, Willian, Lampard, Etc...) If the pre-season mattered at all, KDB would have been a regular player for Chelsea for a lot longer than 2/3 games.