‘The way he has adapted to the team and the club, the way he is playing and performing is fantastic. He is showing the club that they made the right decision to sign him’ -Mauricio Pochettino after Cole Palmer’s four goal performance.
Pochettino knows: Cole Palmer is good, very good. He scored three times before the game hit 30 minutes and added a fourth on a penalty (Let’s not talk about Madueke’s determination to ruin that special moment, with Mauricio feeling the need to apologise to the fans in the incidents aftermath). The first goal encapsulated what makes him special, he isn’t the quickest or strongest, but he is the smartest player. He tunnelled Branthwaite, slotted the ball to Jackson with his backheel, immediately demanded back the ball before guiding it into the far left corner. A calm and composed finished. The second a real poacher’s goal and the third resulting from the kind of luck only players on-form seem to have. Pickford’s blunder left Palmer to lift the ball over the keeper’s head into an open goal, making a difficult outside the box finish look easy. Each goal colder than the next (excuse the pun). His nonchalant swagger exudes a confidence that is hard to put in words.
It comes at a time when Chelsea’s recruitment strategy, if you even feel confident enough to call it a strategy, has come under scrutiny. PSR concerns that have been looming large over Chelsea’s opponent of the day Everton are starting to reach the land of unfettered spending. Questions are being asked over how a club without Champions League football has spent over £900million over the last 2 years and can possibly comply with financial fair play rules. Not to mention the £75,140,524 that have gone to agents in the past 12 months. So far, Chelsea has gotten away with it by amortising transfer fees over the ludicrous 8-year long contracts they have handed out to Enzo and co. The club has exploited regulation loopholes more brazenly than any other club in the competition. With smaller clubs such as Everton bearing the brunt of the penalties so far, the Premier League will likely have to be more scrutinous next season.
The only silver lining for Chelsea: they have been good at selling players. The £60m they managed to squeeze out of Man Utd for Mount being the latest example. Possible player sales will loom large in the summer if Chelsea want to maintain even a semblance of fiscal responsibility. Where that will leave the team is a different question. Maybe it will be a good thing to trim this bloated squad.
Now you could say that Cole Palmer alone justifies Chelsea’s insanity these past years, he is the best young player in the PL, an absolute superstar and Chelsea got him for the ‘bargain’ fee of £40m. Unbelievably one of Chelsea’s cheaper signings of the Boehly era, he is enjoying one of the greatest breakout seasons in recent memory. The reality however is quite different. Far from being a part of Chelsea’s larger strategy Palmer was signed on deadline day when it became clear that City were looking to sell. Credit to Chelsea’s Braintrust for pouncing in a critical moment but he was an improvised signing which lends credence to the impression that the recruitment approach has been chaotic at best.
As the Athletic revealed an unbelievable £303.9million (or 31 per cent of the total Boehly-Clearlake transfer spend in the first three windows of their ownership) has been on the pitch less than 50% of the total playing time. Against Everton, Gallagher and Chalobah played an important role, two players that Chelsea was desperate to sell in the summer. Chelsea’s last two transfer periods have simply been one of the most perverse and extreme examples of ‘new owner syndrome’. Billionaires like Boehly believe they know everything, proceed to sling around gobs of cash to signal that they are willing to spend enough to win. Often, though, they just overspend to lose. Repeatedly billionaires must painfully discover that they don’t know anything about sports.
They want to win right away, and plow ahead with a couple of splashy moves because they don’t know any better yet. Boehly is a particularly funny example, an American who allegedly suggested a 12-man line-up to Tuchel (I can’t imagine a worse pairing for football snob Tuchel than Boehly) and made himself sport director for the first transfer period under his ownership. It is difficult to fathom how delusional this move was. Less funny has been the results of the spending spree. Chelsea is toiling away in midtable the second season in a row and is on their third manager of the Boehly era. Many fans (including me) have been extremely turned off by what has become a shining symbol of the over commodification of a game that increasingly loses touch with the people. Deciding on a whim to spend hundreds of millions of pounds is difficult to condone, even for the most diehard Chelsea supporters. Moreover, young players, who aren’t quite as brilliant as Palmer, like Mudryk, Caicedo, Chukwuemeka, Andrey Santos, David Datro Fofana and Cesare Casadei have experienced a stall in their promising careers. These players weren’t forced to join Chelsea, but they couldn’t have foreseen that the club’s plan was to buy approximately every young talent in football. Of course, we won’t be able to judge Chelsea’s investment before some more time passes but the early returns haven’t been promising.
So, what stays at the end of an exhilarating evening such as this? Cole Palmer is very good. Chelsea’s recruitment strategy is not. Cheers.
