Is this Chelsea squad weaker than the one of 12 months ago? Quite possibly. Are there more questions hanging over them than the squad for 2016-17? Definitely. That might sound strange when you remember that they go into the new season as Premier League champions, while they embarked on the last campaign having finished 10th in May 2016 and were only just getting to know their new manager Antonio Conte. But that doesn’t tell the full story.
The team Conte inherited were essentially the same players who had won the title with Jose Mourinho in 2014-15, plus N’Golo Kante, one of the heroes in the Leicester miracle. Now there is a slightly different look and dynamic to the dressing room and this time they will have to fight on two fronts — domestic and Europe — rather than just one.
The biggest question mark hangs over Diego Costa. It’s not about whether he will leave because both player and club seem happy with that outcome and Atletico Madrid are waiting in the wings. The uncertainty is about how long he hangs around, since Atletico are banned from signing new players until the next transfer window in January.
We got a portent of the breakdown in relations between manager and striker last October when Costa demanded to be taken off towards the end of a 3-0 win over Leicester and Conte told him to stay on. There could only be one winner in the short term in that battle of wills. But Costa now poses a threat to his manager’s chances of successfully defending the title.
“If Spurs finish outside the top four, they won’t hold on to their current stars or attract new ones
Managing a squad of 25 at the top end of the Premier League is difficult enough. You’ve got talented players, often with big egos, who expect to be picked every weekend and the numbers just don’t allow for that. If you’re winning you can get away with it. It’s when you lose a game or two on the bounce — as all the best teams do at some point — that the rotten apples can pollute the rest of the barrel.
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If Chelsea can’t move Costa on in the next few months it will require the senior players to bring him into line before it gets ugly. I would be looking to the likes of Gary Cahill and Cesc Fabregas — established players with a good command of English. That’s how dressing rooms should be run: the senior pros take care of small problems before they become headaches that distract the manager from doing his job. Cahill showed last season that he can take the place of John Terry as the on-pitch leader. Now he must do so off it as well.
Starting up front in place of Costa you would expect to see Alvaro Morata. There’s a saying in football that you don’t know what you’re buying until you’ve worked with the player. Conte worked with Morata at Juventus so presumably he knows what he is getting. But at a fee of £60m Morata must deliver 20-plus goals a season. He is good, but hitting that strike rate in the Premier League is a more difficult challenge than playing in La Liga where he was often second choice behind Karim Benzema at Real Madrid. Chelsea will also be looking for goals from Michy Batshuayi, but he looks like a work in progress at the moment rather than the finished article.
The other major arrivals at Stamford Bridge are defender Antonio Rudiger from Roma and Tiemoue Bakayoko from Monaco. They come with strong reputations but reputation isn’t enough to get through your first few months in the Premier League. The latter is particularly interesting because he is effectively replacing Nemanja Matic. I have some criticism of the Serb — I would like to see him become more of a box-to-box player, contributing more goals (remember that brilliant strike against Tottenham in the FA Cup semi-final) — but he has a great workrate, doesn’t give the ball away and was an integral part of two title-winning teams. At 29 he is at his peak and I would not have sold him. Or, if I did want to move him on, it would not have been to Old Trafford because it only strengthens one of Chelsea’s rivals.
A stronger United makes life harder for Chelsea and I expect Manchester City to do better this season. Going forward they look the best of all the title contenders. Where they slipped up last season was at the back. Pep Guardiola had a major defensive clear-out over the summer but the player who may be most important to their fortunes is the one who has been there the longest, Vincent Kompany. After 18 months dominated by injuries, the Belgian finally strung a few games together at the end of last season. The City captain turned 31 in April — not old by central defender standards — and his club need him to act as the steadying presence in a new-look defence.
I don’t see Liverpool or Arsenal as challengers, and the same goes for Spurs. That observation should hurt Tottenham fans after their performances over the past two seasons. There remain just over three weeks until the end of the transfer window, but I find their inactivity to date baffling. It’s a cliché but true that if you stand still in the Premier League you go back. That’s how I see Spurs.
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The time for them to buy big players is now, when they are on the up. If they wait until they are playing catch-up, two outcomes are likely: the first is that they rush in and buy the wrong players; the second is that they pay inflated prices because the market senses their desperation.
Daniel Levy may argue that the market is already overpriced and he may be right. But this is a fact of life that applies to all Premier League clubs when courting talent from the continent. The “English premium” isn’t going to go away. The board at Tottenham may also, I suspect, be scarred from their use of the Gareth Bale transfer windfall in 2013, which was not money well spent. I was surprised when Mauricio Pochettino, who is not tarnished by those deals, said last month that the club had a different approach from their rivals, in that they backed their own system to produce exciting young players rather than splashing out abroad. Good luck with that. Manchester United’s class of 1992 — six home-grown, world-class players who contributed to more than a decade of success — were a one-off. Nobody talks about the class of 2002 or the class of 2012.
Don’t forget either that the likes of Harry Kane and Dele Alli are already on the radar of big clubs in Europe. They won’t hang around for ever waiting for the next wave of Spurs youngsters to help the club reach the promised land. The fight for a top-four place will be even more intense and if Spurs finish outside that then the best new stadium in the world won’t help them hold on to their current stars or attract new ones.
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