When the transfer window closed quietly on Tuesday evening, with Carlo Ancelotti resisting the temptation to make any last-minute additions to his squad, nobody at Chelsea imagined that it would be January 2011 by the time it reopened.
Nobody really believes that now, such is the club’s confidence that Fifa’s “totally disproportionate and extraordinary” punishment will be reduced on appeal, but, if the sentence is upheld, Ancelotti’s greatest concern will be how to rejuvenate a squad that already relies heavily on a large number of players already at or beyond the peak of their powers.
By January 2011, John Terry, Ashley Cole and Florent Malouda will be 30. Paulo Ferreira and Nicolas Anelka will be 31. Ricardo Carvalho, Frank Lampard and Didier Drogba will be 32. Deco will be 33. Michael Ballack and Juliano Belletti will be 34. If they were not an old team before, as Sir Alex Ferguson has alleged and subsequently denied saying, they certainly will be by then.
Roman Abramovich always had in mind that, when these players grew old, a new generation of stars would be waiting. Frank Arnesen was lured from Tottenham Hotspur — after an expensive illegal approach — to oversee the purchase of those stars-in-waiting, but, four years after his arrival, only John Obi Mikel and Salomon Kalou, of his dozens of young recruits, are even regular squad players. Miroslav Stoch and Franco Di Santo are on loan to Twente and Blackburn Rovers respectively, neither of them having convinced Ancelotti that he is ready for first-team football.
Ancelotti was so impressed with the squad he inherited that he decided last month, having signed Yuri Zhirkov, Daniel Sturridge, Nemanja Vatic and Ross Turnbull, that there would be no more signings this summer. But before that Chelsea had made serious moves for Andrea Pirlo, Franck Rib?ry, Kak?, David Villa and Sergio Ag?ero. Had they known that their hands would be tied until 2011, they might have cast their net wider and more aggressively.
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Still, think of the bottom line. If Abramovich is desperate to show that Chelsea can be self-sustaining, what better way to prove it than by spending nothing in the transfer market over the next two transfer windows? Finally, it seems, Chelsea are about to become self-sustaining, but the question might be how long those ageing players can sustain themselves.