Mauricio Pochettino called for perspective.
“This is a process,” said the new Chelsea head coach. “We need to believe in the process. This is only the beginning.”
Such “process” talk has been known to rankle in football circles, just as it did initially when it became a mantra in basketball’s NBA a decade or so ago. Not every Arsenal fan found it easy to “trust the process” in the early days of Mikel Arteta’s tenure, when even an exiled Mesut Ozil used the phrase as a stick to beat a beleaguered manager with. Only gradually did the benefits of patience become clear.
Generally speaking, “process” talk tends to be heard at clubs who, after a period of drift, are building from a low base with low expectations and perhaps a limited budget. Arsenal back in 2019-20 were a classic case as Arteta battled to clear the decks, streamline an underperforming squad and re-establish core values in the dressing room and on the pitch while his hands were initially tied in the transfer market.
Most of those challenges apply to Chelsea today, but “trust the process” wouldn’t usually apply to a club who had just embarked on the biggest spending spree in the history of the sport. Since the summer 2022 takeover led by Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital, Chelsea have committed more than £900million (just short of $1.15billion) on new players, including £115m for Moises Caicedo, £106m for Enzo Fernandez, £69.5m for Wesley Fofana and an initial £61.6m (potentially rising to £88.5m) for Mykhailo Mudryk.
But Pochettino was right to emphasise the need for patience, even before the 3-1 defeat at West Ham United on Sunday.
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Just as the sums Chelsea have paid are extreme, so has been the youth-driven nature of their recruitment drive over the past two windows (since the ill-judged £150million combined outlay on Kalidou Koulibaly, Marc Cucurella, Raheem Sterling and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang last summer).
With an average age of 24 years and 342 days, Chelsea’s starting line-up at the weekend was only the fourth-youngest in the Premier League this season (behind Burnley’s against Manchester City, followed by Arsenal’s in their wins over Nottingham Forest and Crystal Palace). But their matchday squad was the youngest by far.
Of the 20 players on Pochettino’s team sheet at the London Stadium, 13 were 22 or under. As well as having Levi Colwill (20 years old), Malo Gusto (20), Fernandez (22), Carney Chukwuemeka (19) and Nicolas Jackson (22) in the starting line-up, Chelsea had Lucas Bergstrom (20), Bashir Humphreys (20) Lesley Ugochukwu (19), Caicedo (21), Ian Maatsen (21), Mudryk (22), Noni Madueke (21) and Mason Burstow (20) on the bench.
Their matchday squad had an average age of 23 years and 139 days — and that was with the Premier League’s oldest outfield player Thiago Silva, who turns 39 next month, in it.
A young Chelsea at times looked overawed at West Ham (Jacques Feeney/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)
There is an obvious excitement at seeing any club building around youth. You only had to see some of Chelsea’s combination play in the first half on Sunday to see the potential within this new-look squad.
Caicedo and Mudryk were derided in some quarters for their lack of impact from the bench as the game drifted away from their team, but they are young players trying to adjust to new surroundings and the burden of expectation that comes with such huge transfer fees. This is, as Pochettino said, a process rather than the short-term approach Chelsea managers have taken so often over the past two decades.
But the whole thing feels so extreme.
It has the look of a wild experiment, spending so much money to build a squad around players who, for all their obvious talent, are so short of top-level experience. The best teams — even Manchester United’s team of the mid-1990s, who famously disproved the claim that “You’ll win nothing with kids” — tend to benefit from a sprinkling of youthful energy and enterprise, rather than an approach as drastic as the one Chelsea are taking.
It is all the more intriguing when you consider that Chelsea, whose youth academy is commonly regarded as one of the best in European football, are primarily building this new era with imported, rather than homegrown, talent.
Reece James is their new captain, Conor Gallagher has so far survived a summer of change and it is encouraging to see Colwill given the opportunity to establish himself in central defence, but it doesn’t seem long ago that Chelsea were looking ahead to a bright future featuring players such as Fikayo Tomori, Marc Guehi ,Mason Mount and Tammy Abraham. Instead, they cashed in on all of them. And now Lewis Hall has left for Newcastle United, on loan but with an obligation to buy — another fine homegrown prospect crowded out.
It still isn’t clear whether the young prospects they have signed are better equipped for life at Chelsea than the ones they sold.
It’s interesting looking back at the youngest teams in each season of the Premier League era. They include Southampton, who were relegated last season, and the Fulham side who suffered the same fate two years earlier.
Nobody disputes the quality and potential of some of the players Southampton signed last summer (or their resale value, as illustrated by the profit they just made by selling Romeo Lavia to Chelsea after one year) but, as was argued here at the time, it was an approach that left them desperately short of experience and know-how for what always seemed likely to be a relegation battle.
More encouragingly, those youngest line-ups, season by season, include the Arsenal team of two seasons ago, who finished fifth and then, a year older and wiser, fought Manchester City for the title into the final weeks of last term. They also include the Liverpool side who finished fourth in 2017-18 and then, after adding more quality and proven experience, won the Champions League in 2019 and the Premier League a year later.
But for the most part, that list is made up of teams (Roy Evans’ Liverpool in the mid-1990s, David O’Leary’s Leeds United around the turn of the century, Martin Jol’s Tottenham Hotspur in the mid-2000s, Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal in the late 2000s and early 2010s, Spurs again under Pochettino in the mid-2010s) who are recalled for playing with a swagger but never quite having what it took to win the biggest prizes — building towards a bright future that, for all the promise, remained just out of reach and then faded away.
Premier League youngest average starting XIs by season
Season| Club| Years| Days| Final position
—|—|—|—|—
1992-93
Tottenham
25
108
8
1993-94
Tottenham
25
209
15
1994-95
Liverpool
25
288
4
1995-96
Aston Villa
25
298
4
1996-97
Aston Villa
25
348
5
1997-98
West Ham
25
266
8
1998-99
Leeds
25
95
4
1999-2000
Leeds
24
162
3
2000-01
Leeds
25
7
4
2001-02
Liverpool
25
347
2
2002-03
Liverpool
25
128
5
2003-04
Leeds
25
220
19
2004-05
Tottenham
25
78
9
2005-06
Tottenham
25
123
5
2006-07
Tottenham
25
187
5
2007-08
Man City
24
336
9
2008-09
Arsenal
24
225
4
2009-10
Arsenal
25
280
3
2010-11
Arsenal
25
58
4
2011-12
Arsenal
25
216
3
2012-13
Aston Villa
24
174
15
2013-14
Aston Villa
25
24
15
2014-15
Tottenham
24
282
5
2015-16
Tottenham
24
328
3
2016-17
Tottenham
25
298
2
2017-18
Liverpool
25
351
4
2018-19
Southampton
25
293
16
2019-20
Man United
25
96
3
2020-21
Fulham
25
247
18
2021-22
Arsenal
24
308
5
2022-23
Southampton
25
41
20
In theory, it should be easier for Chelsea, given the size of their budget. Even with inflation taken into account, their spending over the past three transfer windows has been off the scale.
But so many of their players are still making their way at this level.
Colwill had started only 13 Premier League games (all of them on loan at Brighton & Hove Albion) before this season; Lavia managed 26 last term in a relegation-bound Southampton team; Chukwuemeka was signed after starting two Premier League games for Aston Villa; Gusto and Ugochukwu after 40 and 18 starts each in France’s top division, Ligue 1; Madueke after 21 starts for PSV Eindhoven in the Dutch equivalent Eredivisie; Mudryk following 19 starts in the Ukrainian Premier League for Shakhtar Donetsk; Jackson after 16 for Villarreal in Spain’s La Liga. Fernandez, a World Cup winner with Argentina last December, and Caicedo, so impressive as Brighton qualified for Europe last season, are more battle-hardened, but watching them in the second half on Sunday, both looked a little lost while their even younger team-mates looked to them for leadership.
In many ways, Mudryk and Jackson are the poster boys for this recruitment strategy.
Both, interestingly, joined Chelsea having seen relatively unheralded moves to smaller Premier League clubs (Brentford and Bournemouth respectively) fall through in the previous transfer window. They then seemed to click into their form of lives, scoring and assisting goals at a rate far beyond anything they had done previously, and were immediately snapped up by Chelsea.
Going into the final six weeks of last season, Jackson was a promising young forward who had scored three goals in 27 La Liga appearances (eight starts) for Villarreal. Then came a run of nine goals in eight games, at which point triggering the £29.8million release clause in his contract must have felt like the most straightforward and perhaps the most risk-free deal the new regime at Stamford Bridge has made.
Jackson has not scored in his first two Premier League appearances, but, with his direct running and some of his link-up play, has shown glimpses of quality against both Liverpool and West Ham. If he is to be Chelsea’s main centre-forward this season, however, leading the line for a team who averaged just a goal a game last season and lack an established goal threat, he will require patience, support and understanding — just as Mudryk and so many of these players will.
Chelsea have the right coach for that.
Pochettino showed at Southampton and then Tottenham that he has the nurturing approach which has, at times, been lacking at Chelsea when they have had young players in need of indulgence. He will relish the time to work with these players on the training ground, particularly with no midweek European fixtures to worry about this season.
If it has been a testing start to his tenure, then what looks like a gentler run of fixtures over the next few weeks (Luton Town at home next on Friday, fourth-division AFC Wimbledon at home in the Carabao Cup, Nottingham Forest at home, Bournemouth away) should give Colwill, Caicedo, Jackson and others an opportunity to find their feet.
Pochettino has vast experience developing young talents (Darren Walsh/Chelsea FC via Getty Images)
But it is so rare, so extreme, to have so many young, inexperienced players in one team. Exciting on one hand, certainly, but fraught with risk.
Ralph Hasenhuttl used to say, during his four years at Southampton before getting sacked last November, that “working with young players is like looking after a small flower. Give it water, take care of it and it will become something beautiful”. He stopped saying that last season, when he had so many young players learning on the job together in a team that almost inevitably lost its way.
It isn’t just about trusting the process, as if working in a controlled environment where the outcome is certain. It is about finding the right chemistry within a group of talented but inexperienced and largely unproven players.
It seems questionable to sign so many players of a similar profile in the same positions (for example, Fernandez, Caicedo, Lavia, Ugochukwu, Andrey Santos and Cesare Casadei in central midfield positions alone, all of them aged between 19 and 22, and some on seven- or eight-year contracts). It will be impossible for all of them to make it at Chelsea, never mind for some of those whose pathway from the club’s academy has now all but disappeared. Some, inevitably, will become disillusioned, perhaps settling for a well-paid life in a comfort zone.
Pochettino is right to stress the need for patience. But even after signing so many young players with the long-term in mind, it is not easy to credit this Chelsea regime with the patience they will need if they are to see this process through to fruition.
If anything, the number of players brought in is what is so disconcerting. It has looked so capricious and impulsive, signing Benoit Badiashile, one of the best young left-sided central defenders in Europe, for £33million last January when some within the club were insisting Colwill was the future; or signing Santos and Ugochukwu, two very highly rated 19-year-old central midfielders, in the early part of this summer before adding not just Caicedo, whose arrival was already on the cards, but then also, in what looked almost like a fit of pique, Lavia.
The need for patience is obvious. As remarkable as this might sound, the squad Chelsea have assembled at such huge expense does not look equipped for a title challenge and should not be burdened with the expectation of making one this season. Even after an outlay of more than £900million in three transfer windows (recouping around £270m by selling players such as Kai Havertz, Mount and Mateo Kovacic, all three of them snapped up by what you would consider direct-rival Premier League clubs), the squad looks light in certain positions.
Pochettino understands that. The people running Chelsea’s recruitment operation understand it. Do Boehly and Clearlake’s Behdad Eghbali understand it? You would hope so. Because they seemed pretty unsympathetic to the problems then-coach Graham Potter encountered after they brought him in early last season, struggling to build any kind of cohesion among a squad so bloated new signings such as Mudryk were sometimes left to get changed in a corridor because there was no more space in the first-team dressing room at the training ground.
The squad was in desperate need of streamlining and, by selling or loaning out so many players this summer, Chelsea have done that. If anything, they might have gone too far the other way, so thin does the squad look in places as next Friday’s transfer deadline approaches.
The lack of goal threat is a concern. They are so reliant on Jackson hitting the ground running, Sterling rediscovering his goalscoring touch, or Madueke and Mudryk finding a ruthless, incisive dimension that has not yet been in evidence since they arrived in January.
If the past three windows are anything to go by, it is more likely that alternative solutions will be sought in the transfer market.
They missed out on Palace’s Michael Olise but Chelsea are sniffing around Nottingham Forest’s Brennan Johnson and various others as they look for a safer bet than Madueke, who was signed for £30million just seven months ago.
Chelsea’s miserable experiences last season offered a stark reminder that there are no certainties or guarantees in this game, whether in the transfer market or on the pitch. The change of approach, focusing on youth, brings a freshness and a welcome surge of optimism that should not be affected by an early setback or two.
But that approach requires a calmness that is so far removed from this regime’s approach to date, burning through coaches, players and money at such a remarkable rate.
Investing in young talent and talking about a long-term strategy are the easy parts. Trusting the process and showing the patience to stick with it — these are the qualities that come more naturally to some owners than others.
And that patience is certain to be tested because, for all the money Chelsea have spent, for all the talent now at Pochettino’s disposal, there is no guarantee this £900million-plus experiment will bring the results they expect.
(Top photo: John Walton/PA Images via Getty Images)
