Inside Chelsea revolution: from ‘Everton on speed’ to trusting the data

The clips showed the France centre back pulling off tackles, headers and blocks and each time roaring with pleasure or doing a fist-pump, just as he did at the Etihad. His 16 clearances there were the most by a Chelsea player in a Premier League game for eight seasons, and his infectious enthusiasm had Levi Colwill celebrating little bits of defending too.

The feeling at Chelsea is that things perceived in the planning phase are now being manifest on the pitch; that at last a £1 billion project is coming together; that portrayals of it being no more than dollars chucked at a wall by brash American owners are lazy and uninformed.

Of course, caution is required. It was only three weeks ago that Chelsea were reeling from successive debacles against Liverpool and Wolverhampton Wanderers. There have been three good results since, but a club who want to be at the front of football’s data revolution would themselves accept that this is no sample size from which to draw conclusions.

Nonetheless, the mood is one of optimism, and Pochettino, full of relaxed bonhomie before Sunday’s Carabao Cup final against Liverpool, had a gentle rebuke for Chelsea’s doubters. “When you plant a seed, at the start, you don’t see when it begins to grow,” he said. “You need time, you need many things.

“I don’t want to criticise people, but in these type of projects — the first year, or year and a half, or two years — it is always difficult to see what is growing from the outside.”

Indeed, Chelsea’s modelling based on underlying performance factors suggests they should be fifth in the Premier League, rather than tenth, a thesis backed up by similar projections at rival clubs and viewed internally as being good progress, given Chelsea finished 12th last season and have the top flight’s second-youngest squad. Beating Liverpool at Wembley would add to that sense. It would help players like Disasi and Colwill, 20, “build their careers,” Pochettino said, and perhaps for Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali also effect a shift.

Perceptions of the Americans have been negative since their £4.25 billion takeover of Chelsea in May 2022. First impressions are at the root. Boehly installed himself as interim sporting director and oversaw two hyperactive transfer windows, where a net £470 million was lavished on players as diverse as the veteran striker Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, and Brazil Under-20 captain Andrey Santos.

Some moves appeared to involve little recruitment diligence. Marc Cucurella was bought hastily for £60 million after someone in Brighton & Hove Albion’s football department called a friend in Chelsea’s to say Manchester City were bidding (only £30 million, it turned out) for the Spaniard. Boehly handed his personal phone number to people and invited them to his opulent villa in Mykonos, from where he was Zoom-calling agents.

Eghbali, while never attracting as much publicity has always been integral and is famously dynamic. A member of staff hoping for a pay rise found himself tapped on the shoulder by Boehly’s fellow American. “We’re going to sort your contract, we’ll double your money,” Eghbali said as he walked past.

An agent close to deals during that period described it being “like [Farhad] Moshiri’s Everton on speed”. A US lawyer involved in previous American takeovers of English teams observed “every new American owner of a Premier League club has made missteps at first and that usually the problem is outsourcing key decisions through lack of confidence about an alien sport. Whereas Boehly and Eghbali’s issue was the opposite. “They came in like Masters of the Universe, thinking they knew better right off the bat.”

Winstanley, right, was key to the arrivals of Mudryk, left, and Nicolas Jackson among others

Sergei Palkin, the president of Shakhtar Donetsk, told The New York Times a story that summed up Chelsea’s forthrightness. The Ukrainian club were training in Turkey and Chelsea were vying with Arsenal for Mykhailo Mudryk. Palkin took a call from Eghbali. “I’m here,” Eghbali said.

“What do you mean ‘here’?” Palkin asked.

“In the hotel.”

Eghbali had flown in by private jet and after brief talks he reboarded his plane, this time with Mudryk in tow, as the winger headed to London to complete an £89 million transfer to Stamford Bridge.

However, Palkin also said how impressed he was with Eghbali’s dynamism and predicted that Chelsea would be very successful “in three or four years”. A source who deals with Eghbali regularly said the Iranian-born Californian often outlines a position that at first seems rash but which very quickly turns out to be a clever one.

Indeed, the employee whose pay he doubled received an even bigger offer from another club before long suggesting Eghbali’s instincts were not mistaken and it was through bold, intuitively right decisions, that Eghbali built a $70 billion private equity firm, Clearlake Capital, from scratch along with fellow Chelsea director, Jose Feliciano.

Boehly, 50, a former high-school wrestling champion, accrued a personal $5.3 billion fortune in a similar way. He has been learning about English football since being part of a group that tried to buy Tottenham Hotspur in 2014, and has transformed other sports interests, such as the LA Dodgers (for whom he outbid Arsenal’s Stan Kroenke in 2012) through similar fearless largesse that he has shown at Chelsea, recently handing the Japanese pitcher, Shohei Ohtani, a record-breaking contract worth $700 million over ten years.

A sympathetic view of Boehly/Eghbali would be that here are two hugely sharp and successful investors undergoing a natural learning process in a new field; that Kroenke and Liverpool’s owners, Fenway Sports Group, endured their own glitches and took years to get Premier League investments right.

It was never Boehly’s intention to be a sporting director and both he and Eghbali are significantly less hands-on now than in their first season at Chelsea. They have deepened their footballing knowledge and become genuine fans. A Chelsea director jokingly asked Boehly recently if his plan was to finance the club through all his trips to the club shop to buy kit and memorabilia, while Eghbali often brings his entire family to games, watching from a box at Stamford Bridge with his parents, wife, son and daughter.

There are weekly four-way calls between Boehly, Eghbali, Winstanley and Stewart but these can be friendly catch-ups as much as strategy talks. The sporting directors are empowered to do their jobs. They have been in situ for just over year: Winstanley, the former Brighton head of recruitment, beginning work in January 2023 and Stewart, Monaco’s former technical director, joining a month later.

Caicedo was signed for £115 million as Chelsea made improving their midfield a priority last summer

JASON CAIRNDUFF/REUTERS

They are a bright, people-centred pair with a genuine rapport and shared appetite for thorough, joined-up building. Their first transfer window, last summer, was still busy, with eight senior players arriving, but the business was more focused — six of those players have become first choices for Pochettino and it might have been seven had injury not prevented Roméo Lavia from establishing himself.

Thirty players have arrived since the takeover but those with close knowledge of what Boehly/Eghbali inherited say a high volume of transfer activity was necessary because a squad laden with older players needed churn and sanctions on Roman Abramovich compromised the previous regime’s forward planning.

The spending spree was also needed to establish a more sustainable model. Throughout his 18 years of ownership, Abramovich spent an average £1 million a week propping up Chelsea, accruing debts of £1.5billion. Under non-sovereign wealth ownership, this could clearly not be sustained and while big fees have been lavished in assembling the new squad of young players, wage costs are down dramatically.

Recruiting to a consistent profile is Winstanley and Stewart’s main focus. Stewart recruited Disasi for Monaco in 2020 having trailed him since he was in Ligue 2 with Reims. Winstanley was the talent-spotter who brought Moisés Caicedo to Brighton as a teenager in 2021.

Having maintained a friendship with the former Ecuador international Antonio Valencia, from his days as performance manager at Wigan Athletic, he was tipped off by Valencia about Caicedo when the midfielder was a 15. A year later, Winstanley was in Ecuador visiting Independiente del Valle when their director, Santiago Morales, said: “We’ve got a real good player in the academy, Moisés Caicedo.”

With the name ringing a bell, Winstanley began researching and scouting the player and concluded his transfer with help from Sam Jewell, the son of former Wigan manager Paul Jewell, who succeeded him as Brighton’s recruitment chief but is now on gardening leave pending a move to take up a senior position in Chelsea’s recruitment team.

Winstanley’s ties with Caicedo were key to him joining Chelsea, for £115 million, in preference to rival suitors Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United. Similar personal relationships enabled Joe Shields, Chelsea’s co-director of recruitment and talent, to attract Lavia and Cole Palmer to the club.

There is now a joined-up approach to playing personnel decisions. For years, Chelsea used the loan system to park unneeded senior players with money-making in mind, collecting loan fees and protecting transfer value. Lucas Piazón went out on seven loans and Baba Rahman spent eight years at Chelsea but didn’t play for them in the last seven.

Stewart and Winstanley want to instead fill Chelsea’s allocation of seven loan-out spots with youngsters — with development prioritised.

Throughout his 18 years of ownership, Abramovich spent an average £1 million a week propping up Chelsea, accruing debts of £1.5billion

CLIVE MASON/GETTY IMAGES

There are changes in scouting, with Winstanley introducing an idea he pioneered at Brighton, of which Manchester United-bound Dan Ashworth is a fan: position-specific talent ID, where scouts study the global market for a particular type of player, rather than scouting geographical territories. The fruits are already being seen in the shape of Djordje Petrovic, brought from MLS by the head of Chelsea’s goalkeeping department, Ben Roberts.

Traditional scouting still runs alongside the new approach, while Chelsea have started to beef up their operation in South America and Africa, a market of particular interest to Boehly, whose LA Dodgers have a farm team in Ghana.

For the owners and their sporting directors, the strategy has become “evolution not revolution”. Why sign three central midfielders last summer, having already invested £150 million in Enzo Fernández, Santos and Carney Chukwuemeka in the previous two windows? Because Chelsea hadn’t signed a central midfielder in five years and were losing N’Golo Kanté, Mateo Kovacic, Mason Mount and Ruben Loftus-Cheek. On top of that, it was known that the summer would be crucial in the long-term market for elite midfielders, with clubs such as Arsenal, Liverpool, United, City and Real Madrid all looking to recruit in that position.

This summer’s decisions will be guided in a similar way, by logic and the market. Expect a reduced number of incomings, with a striker among the positions targeted.

Chelsea’s next phase includes significantly building up its data department. In November, Winstanley and Stewart visited LA Dodgers and saw how the franchise has a hub of about 35 number-crunchers working not only in recruitment but areas such as performance analytics, player support, technology and researching developments in the game.

Petrovic, brought from MLS, has been one of the big successes of Chelsea’s scouting approach

SHAUN BOTTERILL/GETTY IMAGES

Something similar is envisaged at Chelsea. It is an area where the owners believe there are gains to make with football stuck in a model where the use of data across the departments is inconsistent and seldom centralised or standardised.

A best-in-class approach to hires has led to Bryce Cavanagh arriving from the FA as head of performance and Paul Burgess, the former head groundsman at Arsenal and Real Madrid, coming in as director of sports surfaces and landscaping.

Owen Eastwood, the performance guru who helped to shape culture for the All Blacks, Gareth Southgate’s England and the European Ryder Cup team, is to head a new project looking into the history and identity of Chelsea, asking what from the club’s past can be used to project it into the future. It will influence how new recruits are inducted and what values underpin the environments at Stamford Bridge and the Cobham training ground.

Pochettino has put the emphasis on fostering a greater feeling of togetherness across the club

KIRSTY WIGGLESWORTH/AP

The most important hire of all of the past 12 months, Pochettino, has brought his own expertise in that area. His record of developing a young team with close bonds at Tottenham, while having an impact on the club’s wider culture, was a key reason for Chelsea recruiting him as head coach. One of his first acts, upon arriving last summer, was to hold a barbecue for players and staff at the training ground. Pochettino paid for all the meat.

In December, he went one better, persuading his bosses to turn the car park at Cobham into a German-style Christmas market. There were sausage stands, a pizza stall, fireworks, and Chelsea’s mascots — Stamford the Lion and Bridget the Lioness — were there for the kids. Invitations went out to club staff with everyone encouraged to bring their families, and Chelsea’s under-nine side were invited too. Children rushed to meet the first-team squad and the event fostered wider togetherness.

On the pitch, even if results were bumpy throughout the first half of the season, Pochettino has begun to achieve consistency of selection, sensible structure and a clear playing style based on physicality, energy, pressing and quick attacks. After the draw at the Etihad, City’s director of football, Txiki Begiristain, messaged Stewart — who was City’s performance manager from 2014-16 — with his compliments. “Stay calm, trust the process,” was Begiristain’s message.

Victory at Wembley would help but, from Pochettino upwards, there is confidence that Chelsea are on the right track. “Last night, I was walking with my wife in London and enjoying the walk and talking,” Pochettino smiled on Friday. “I do not change my habits because we are going to play a final.

“We’re relaxed because we trust in ourselves and the team and the people that are behind the team.”