Chelsea and their experience problem

Enzo Maresca, the inexperienced coach of an inexperienced group of players assembled under an inexperienced ownership regime, has been talking about the importance of experience.

He feels Chelsea could do with a little more of it. He cites the example of Liverpool, for whom his club will roll out the red carpet at Stamford Bridge on Sunday, his players lining up to offer a guard of honour to a team crowned Premier League champions with four games to spare. 

“The difference is, they have been consistent compared to us,” the Chelsea coach told reporters recently. “Also, in terms of experienced players that know how to win games and these kind of things, they have something more compared to us. When you have experience, you have something more, no doubt.”

What Maresca has not done is demand that Chelsea rip up their youth-focused transfer strategy and sign a core of experienced players to build around — or indeed that they hire a more experienced coach to lead them. Experience, he says, is something that can be acquired through…well, experience. He believes he and his players will be better and wiser for what they have learned this season, particularly if they end up qualifying for the Champions League and winning the UEFA Conference League.

It is a reasonable theory. But, like this entire Chelsea project, it leans heavily on a basic assumption: that everything improves with time.

In a sport like football, progression is rarely linear. If it were, wouldn’t Chelsea, having made the largest single-season transfer spend in football history in 2022-23 and the second single-season spend in football history in 2023-24, be in better shape by the final weeks of 2024-25?

As important as the objectives of Champions League qualification and Conference League success undoubtedly are — and as attainable as they appear, despite the state of disillusionment that has settled over Stamford Bridge since the turn of the year — they would represent only the most meagre return on the £1billion-plus spent on new players since a consortium led by Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali bought the club.

The fascinating question is whether — and to what extent — Chelsea would regard a top-five finish in the Premier League and victory in Europe’s third-tier competition as vindication for the strategy that has brought such a minimal uplift over the past three years.

The approach has been so extreme, not just in the amount of money spent but, even more starkly, in the number of players signed and the age profile: Enzo Fernandez, Mykhailo Mudryk, Nicolas Jackson and Filip Jorgensen were signed at 22; Wesley Fofana, Benoit Badiashile, Moises Caicedo, Cole Palmer at 21; Noni Madueke, Renato Veiga and David Datro Fofana at 20; Romeo Lavia, Lesley Ugochukwu, Malo Gusto and Aaron Anselmino at 19; Omari Kellyman, Carney Chukwuemeka, Andrey Santos, Deivid Washington, Kendry Paez and Marc Guiu at 18. Even before Mike Penders (19), Dario Essugo (20) and Estevao Willian (18) join the club this summer, this is far from an exhaustive list.

It is dizzying just to write down those names and the sums lavished on them. Some were signed having impressed fleetingly elsewhere — Gusto after 34 Ligue 1 starts for Lyon, Lavia after 26 Premier League games for Southampton, Madueke after 21 Eredivisie starts for PSV Eindhoven, Mudryk after 19 Ukrainian Premier League starts for Shakhtar Donetsk, Jackson after 19 La Liga starts for Villarreal, Palmer after three Premier League starts for Manchester City, Datro Fofana after 20 starts for Molde in Norway’s Eliteserien — and expected to compete for a first-team place at Chelsea immediately. Even Fernandez, a World Cup winner with Argentina, had started just 17 games for River Plate in Argentina’s Primera Division and 17 for Benfica in Liga Portugal.

There is no shortage of talent there, but of that group, those signed with barely a full season of first-team experience under their belt, perhaps only Palmer can claim to have made a sustained impression at Chelsea. Gusto, Fernandez, Madueke and particularly Jackson have shown their quality in spells — Lavia likewise on the rare occasions he has been injury-free, while Andrey Santos has excelled on loan at Strasbourg — but how many of them have shown enough to suggest they can be integral parts of a Chelsea team that competes for bigger prizes than the Conference League title and a top-five berth in the Premier League? And the less said about Mudryk, Badiashile and others, the better.

The difficulty is that this clutch of talented young players have spent the past two or three seasons at a club in a state of flux: so many players coming and going, so many coaches coming and going, little time to develop partnerships and understanding and — an important one, this — so little sense of established identity in terms of playing style, dressing-room culture, in terms of experience, leadership, know-how and all the ingredients that coaches talk about when they are outlining what (beyond talent) makes a great team.

The idea, if your project is built almost exclusively around trading in young talent, is that those qualities are fostered over time, individually and collectively. But does that organic improvement still happen when a squad has been built without — indeed to the very active exclusion of — experienced players who know the club and know the league? Surrounded by battle-hardened team-mates in the Argentina squad at the 2022 World Cup, Fernandez was a revelation in midfield. At Chelsea, he has often been the one his younger team-mates have looked to for inspiration and leadership, even as he has been trying to adjust to the demands of the Premier League.

Even with the possibility of a trophy at the end of this season, it is little wonder there is such a sense of nostalgia among Chelsea’s supporters right now. This week saw the 20th anniversary of their 2005 league title triumph under Jose Mourinho, the club’s first in half a century. There have been more entertaining Premier League champions, but few have been more formidable, more unflinching, more uncompromising: Petr Cech in goal, Ricardo Carvalho and John Terry at the heart of the defence, Claude Makelele and Frank Lampard in midfield. They conceded 15 goals in the Premier League that season — a record that no team has come close to matching.

Chelsea’s title winners of 2005 (Richard Sellers/Sportsphoto/Allstar via Getty Images)

That was a young team by title-winning standards; of the regular starters, only Claude Makelele (31) was older than 27. Terry, the captain, was the same age (24) as Fernandez now. But most of the players were in or approaching their prime. Carvalho and Paulo Ferreira were 26 and had won the Champions League with Porto a year earlier. Didier Drogba was 27, Lampard 26, Damien Duff 26. The youngest of their regular starters, goalkeeper Cech and winger Arjen Robben, were 22 and 21 by the season’s end, but both had four years of regular first-team behind them by the time they arrived at the start of that title-winning campaign.

That is a very different approach to putting so much faith in the potential and meagre experience of the players the modern Chelsea have signed. There is a vast difference between a) signing Robben from PSV at the age of 20, adding one of the most captivating talents in Europe to a squad that had enough experience to help him through his growing pains, and b) signing a largely unproven Madueke from the same club at the same age — or indeed signing Mudryk from Shakhtar at 22 — and hoping that he swims rather than sinks in a dysfunctional team.

Maresca cited experience as the biggest difference between his team and the Liverpool side for whom they have promised a guard of honour at Stamford Bridge on Sunday afternoon. He might also have mentioned stability. Liverpool’s success this season has been built on a core of players (Alisson, Virgil van Dijk, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Andy Robertson, Mohamed Salah) who were fundamental to their team’s rise under Jurgen Klopp, reaching the Champions League final in 2018, winning it in 2019 and winning the Premier League in 2020. There are times when a lack of transfer activity has Liverpool’s supporters tearing their hair out, but the difference between their recruitment strategy and Chelsea’s over recent years — judicious and capricious in extremes — is astounding.

Liverpool don’t tend to buy “star” players at the very top end of the transfer market; they made a rare exception for Van Dijk, who at £75million became the most expensive defender in football history when he joined from Southampton in January 2018. Nor, with the exception of a 29-year-old Thiago Alcantara in the summer of 2020 and a 30-year-old Wataru Endo three years later, do the modern Liverpool look towards older players if they can avoid doing so.

They place a firm emphasis on youth and on potential for improvement and, where necessary, resale value. But they go for quantity over quality; they don’t hedge their bets by signing five young goalkeepers and five midfielders in the hope that one or two of them prove to be the next big thing while the others can be sold on. And while they do prioritise younger players, it has been a different age group and a different market to the one in which Chelsea have invested so heavily in recent years.

Salah, a former Chelsea player, and Liverpool have marched to the title (Carl Recine/Getty Images)

Van Dijk was 26 when Liverpool signed him. Alisson, Salah, Gini Wijnaldum, Sadio Mane and Luis Diaz were 25. Fabinho, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Alexis Mac Allister were 24. Roberto Firmino, Naby Keita, Cody Gakpo, Diogo Jota and Robertson were 23. Ibrahima Konate, Dominik Szoboszlai and Darwin Nunez were 22. Ryan Gravenberch was 21. Not all of them were resounding successes, but the hit rate has been impressive enough over a sustained period to suggest that clubs in Liverpool’s position should be prioritising that 21-26 age group, adding established up-and-coming talent to a strong core, rather than taking the Chelsea approach and focusing almost exclusively on those aged between 18 and 22.

The attractions of signing younger players are obvious. Why sign, say, a 26-year-old Van Dijk from Southampton for £75million when, with a more youth-focused transfer policy, you could sign him from Celtic for £13m at the age of 24, or from Dutch club Groningen for £2.6million at the age of 21? Why sign Salah from Roma for around £44million at the age of 26 when, with a more youth-focused transfer policy, you could sign him as a 21-year-old from FC Basel for a quarter of that sum?

But Chelsea did sign Salah for £11million as a 21-year-old, just as they signed a young Kevin De Bruyne from Belgian club Genk two years before that. And they had so many players competing for attacking positions that, unable to give either of them the room to develop, they were happy to make a profit by selling them to Roma and Wolfsburg respectively. It is not a new story for Chelsea to be signing more young players than any club would know what to do with.

What is new, under the Boehly/Clearlake regime, is that the emphasis on youth has appeared so extreme. It was striking in one sense that last summer’s intake included a cluster of players in their mid-twenties — Tosin Adarabioyo, Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, Pedro Neto, Jadon Sancho and Joao Felix — but even at the time it seemed unlikely that these would prove to be the battle-hardened characters who would provide the many ingredients that Chelsea had lacked when finishing sixth under Mauricio Pochettino the previous season.

Pochettino said on many occasions during his unhappy spell in charge that Chelsea needed to “bring experienced players”. It was one of several areas of tension between him and the club’s sporting directors, Paul Winstanley and Laurence Stewart, and, ultimately, the ownership. The former coach, now in charge of the United States national team, felt he was one of the few people at the club who fully understood the complexities of the challenge they were facing, having invested so heavily in so many young players.

Trust the process? That remains difficult. Quite apart from an apparent hedging of bets in signing so many players, there are questions about the desperation to get rid of others. An undervaluing of their homegrown players afflicted the previous ownership regime (getting rid of Marc Guehi, Fikayo Tomori and Tino Livramento, to mention three) but even now it is unclear why, beyond PSR concerns, a club so hellbent on building around youth would sell Lewis Hall and Ian Maatsen.

The desperation to offload Trevoh Chalobah last summer was followed by a desperation to recall him from a loan deal at Crystal Palace in January. The excellence of Djordje Petrovic and Andrey Santos on loan at Strasbourg this season would be easier to applaud if it were not for the suspicion Chelsea would have been better off with them in their squad.

Andrey Santos helped Strasbourg beat Paris Saint-Germain yesterday (FREDERICK FLORIN/AFP via Getty Images)

Whatever the pros and cons of the decision to part company with Pochettino, few would have imagined the solution would be to hire a coach of such limited experience as Maresca. He has been coaching for eight years, earning an excellent reputation while working with Manchester City’s youth team, but in terms of front-line experience — 14 games in charge of Parma and 53 in charge of Leicester City — he, like so many others at Stamford Bridge, has found himself learning on the job.

It is easy to see why Maresca should find himself emphasising the value of learned experience, of gaining that know-how by sustained exposure to top-level football. Achieving success, even if that means the Conference League, can sometimes bring a level of certainty and collective belief that can help to propel a team forward.

But there is a naivety in imagining football to be like a video game where experience points are accumulated over time and where, by unlocking one achievement (50 Premier League appearances! 100 Premier League appearances! A top-five finish! You won the Conference League!), you put yourself irresistibly on course for the next.

There are so many variables in football, but the best teams are built around certainties — in their collective approach, in each other. Look at Liverpool: Alisson, Van Dijk, Salah. Look at the Manchester City team of recent years: Ederson, Ruben Dias, Rodri, De Bruyne, Erling Haaland. Look at the Chelsea of the mid-2000s: Cech, Carvalho, Terry, Makelele, Lampard.

The hope at Stamford Bridge is that the nucleus of highly promising players they have bought over the past few years develops into a strong, reliable core. Caicedo is one player they could confidently build around. Palmer, his recent drop in form notwithstanding, is another. Others have sparkled intermittently, but all the money Chelsea have spent, for all the excitement they generate in every transfer window, the number of certainties is alarmingly small. Even with the hope that another difficult season ends on a much-needed high, there are far more questions than answers.

(Top photo: Eddie Keogh/Getty Images)

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