Are Chelsea the first Premier League club whose fans have become bored of transfers?

The next time news breaks that Chelsea have made a signing — which, statistically speaking, is more likely to be sooner than later — you might find it interesting to check out the comments.

Below the line, you can still find varying degrees of excitement, the default emotional reaction that powers much of the transfer industry. Football supporters have traditionally been hard-wired to receive a dopamine hit whenever they learn their club is signing a new player. Whether you are searching for a saviour or hoping to strengthen your supremacy, the novelty of an acquisition rarely fails to be compelling.

You will also find plenty of trolling from fans of rival clubs. Chelsea’s vast and seemingly relentless transfer spending tends to provoke strong feelings among those not personally invested in the club’s success, from mockery to resentment and anything in between. Sometimes it is funny, often it is tedious, but it is far from new.

These days, though, the trolling is not limited to rival supporters. A growing number of Chelsea supporters in The Athletic’s comment section and on social media react to the news of their club making a new signing with bored indifference or even anger. “Can he play in goal?… Make it stop… Stockpile FC at it again… It’s getting ridiculous… Please save us from ourselves and give us a transfer ban.”

Such sentiments were expressed in some quarters during the rollercoaster final years of the Roman Abramovich era, so this is not an entirely new phenomenon, but its spread has noticeably accelerated since Clearlake Capital and Todd Boehly assumed control of Chelsea in June 2022. And while trying to pinpoint exactly what proportion of the club’s huge global fanbase feels this way is clearly a fool’s errand, the transfer cynicism is loud and widespread enough to be heard and taken seriously.

So have Chelsea really become the first club to sicken their own supporters of transfers? It would make sense, purely in terms of volume. Clearlake and Boehly have signed more than 40 footballers in less than three years and sold or released almost as many. The churn has been dizzying and while the bulk of the first-team squad overhaul is done, there is every reason to believe they will continue to be aggressive buyers and sellers in the market.

Then there is the particular nature of that recruitment: prioritising potential over current pedigree and future-focused to the extent that four players (Estevao, Kendry Paez, Mike Penders and Dario Essugo) cannot represent the club until this summer at the earliest and another (Geovany Quenda) will not move to Stamford Bridge until 2026. It is understandably harder to generate excitement about the acquisition of a teenager who might help your team at some point in the relatively distant future.

Even when buying for the first team, Chelsea often target players so young and relatively unproven that many supporters have never heard of them. That is another jarring break from the Abramovich era when most signings were established senior internationals already in their prime years, many with extensive Champions League experience.

According to a CIES report in October, the average age at the point of recruitment of Chelsea’s current squad is 22.5 years, the fourth-youngest among all clubs in Europe’s big-five leagues. The three who recruit even younger than them? RB Leipzig (22.4 years), Brentford (22.3 years) and BlueCo sister club Strasbourg (21.8 years).

There is no shortage of social media accounts prepared to hype up incoming Chelsea signings, whether they seek to be club influencers or simply present themselves as possessing specific local or tactical expertise. But the nature of modern football fandom, informed by the culture war that seemingly pervades everything, dictates that while some supporters will happily get caught up in the fanfare, others will be more inclined to react against it (and them).

In these angry, polarised times, there is also a well-documented crisis of confidence in institutions, and you only need to take note of the growing frequency of protests outside stadiums across the Premier League to realise that football clubs are far from immune. Many supporters harbour a sense of disconnect that cannot be remedied by signing a gifted teenage winger to an eight-year contract and this seems to have become more widely felt since the Clearlake-Boehly takeover, an extraordinary event made possible in 2022 by rapidly shifting geopolitics.

More than anything else, though, what comes through in the negative comments is a fundamental lack of trust in the big-picture thinking at Chelsea. Why is so much money being sunk into teenage recruitment rather than addressing the obvious holes in Enzo Maresca’s senior squad? How does seemingly overloading some positions while understaffing others chime with coherent long-term squad planning? Where are the pathways to develop all of this young imported talent, either at Stamford Bridge or elsewhere?

Essugo (right) has also joined Chelsea (Fran Santiago/Getty Images)

Winning on the pitch, and performing more convincingly in the process, will no doubt shift the conversation in a more positive direction. Chelsea fans are more likely to be sceptical of the signings of Essugo and Quenda, and of all that they represent, in the immediate aftermath of a limp 1-0 defeat to rivals Arsenal.

But even if some of this transfer saturation is the mood music of recent results, is it actually a bad thing? It might be for football journalism, which has always been heavily dependent on the transfer-industrial complex for content (though fans engaging with articles out of anger or frustration are still engaging).

The health of football-fan discourse is a different matter. Transfers have always received far more attention than their on-pitch impact merits. If what is happening within the Chelsea fanbase augurs a broader change, it might be a positive development — a new era in which big clubs know their supporters are more inclined to cast a critical eye over what they are doing and less easily distracted by the latest shiny object.

(Top photo: Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images)