sabin6912

I'll set it up again closer to the season start if enough are interested.

Half the quality of Reece James and injured twice as much. Sell all day long. I suspect if he does go it’ll be on loan as no team in their right mind are going to pay his £23m book value given his injury record

I think over the seasons, many a CFC supporter would have had an irrational dislike of certain Chelsea players. Sometimes it just can't be helped. Could be they're not very good, perhaps keeping one of your favourite players out of the team. Previously played for a hated club. Maybe just a stupid haircut. Whatever.
Now we have this current crop of players and there are just. way too many to choose from. But since Sterling left, I think that Gusto has become No.1 for me. I just cannot see the point of him. He offers nothing. Keeps Josh out of the side AND he has a f**king stupid haircut. Yes, there are plenty of contenders who wind me up for various reasons but Gusto - f**k I want to see him gone.

This is exactly what should be happening here, but instead we're stuck with the lame ducks who've spunked nearly £2bn to take us backwards. Cowards.

I think the question of sell or keep is academic. It was patently evident in his performance and body language yesterday that mentally he's already left. It wouldn't surprise me if he is the first agreed deal that is announced. That was not Cucurella playing yesterday. I reckon a deal is already agreed and ready to go.

Already want Emegha gone, and he’s not even here yet.

James, Palmer, Colwill, Pedro, Acheampong and Caicedo.

Never, in my history of supporting CFC, have I ever seen us have such an "unlikeable" group of players. I honestly wouldn't care if we sold the lot of them and started again.
That's possibly a bit harsh on a few of them and the players that haven't been playing much earn bonus points - the likes of Colwill, Hato and Acheampong (would keep them).
I just hope that whoever we get as the next coach can sort things out and make me actually a like a few of the players again, like Poch was able to do.

I said ages ago the American invasion is all about getting them majority voting rights among the Premier league clubs, they can then push through funding change, TV money sharing, match times, match locations etc.
These c**ts who now own us are leeches, absolute scammers out to bleed us and football dry with no care at all about the loyal fans. They want tourists who spend in the shop, day trippers to cas in on.

The scammers on the board were all there to see the mess that they've created. If the owners had any balls they'd sack the lot.

Absolutely this. Would not surprise me one bit to learn that we have paid over inflated transfer fees (Gittens springs to mind, amongst others) whilst some of their preferred agents have profited. They are either naive enough to have been strung along by agents, incompetent beyond the level we already know they are, or they have got their hands in the till. At this point, nothing would surprise me.

Absolutely this. Would not surprise me one bit to learn that we have paid over inflated transfer fees (Gittens springs to mind, amongst others) whilst some of their preferred agents have profited. They are either naive enough to have been strung along by agents, incompetent beyond the level we already know they are, or they have got their hands in the till. At this point, nothing would surprise me.

Such a blatant pyramid scheme. Hate every single one of them.

I’ll go for Leeds 3-1 here. Ordinarily would have gone to the game but I shan’t be wasting my money until this ownership admit to their mistakes and get rid of the sporting directors who are largely responsible for this catastrophe.

So when do they take responsibility, the five stooges? Paul Winstanley, Laurence Stewart, Curly, Mo and Larry, whatever their names are, the brains trust in charge of directing football at Chelsea? At what point are they considered culpable for the mess that has been made of this club?
It is hard, keeping pace with the Manchester clubs, with Arsenal and Liverpool, without Roman Abramovich’s largesse both above and below the counter. But it shouldn’t be as hard as this. And certainly, given Chelsea’s expenditure, it should not be a struggle to keep pace with Brighton & Hove Albion, Brentford or Bournemouth. It is not the top five that have been troubling Chelsea for a number of weeks now. It is the clubs sitting seventh to 14th. That is where Chelsea have been heading under Liam Rosenior, not just out of the Champions League places, but out of the European places altogether. They are the Wolverhampton Wanderers of six months ago right now, the Tottenham Hotspur of next season
Had Rosenior remained, it was hard to see where their next point was coming from. He looked like that school teacher we all remember, the one the class had stopped listening to, who tried to instil discipline as the misbehaviour carried on and the paper aeroplanes flew regardless. It was possible to feel pity for him while at the same time acknowledging he really wasn’t up to the job. And while that is on Rosenior, it is also very much on the men who appointed him; who placed such an unqualified figure in a vitally important role; who shaped this mish-mash of a squad and let them all sink into the swamp together.
Chelsea were in a good place going into this season. The victory at the Club World Cup, particularly the win in the final against Paris Saint-Germain, suggested they were at last making progress. There was a philosophy and the basis of a very good squad. How has it come to this?
The parting with Enzo Maresca now appears one of the most calamitous decisions in any club’s modern history. The manager thought he would be heard having won two trophies, the five stooges felt they were smarter. He left, they weren’t. It is plain that dismissing him alienated key players such as Enzo Fernández and Marc Cucurella, and the appointment of a novice in the unfortunate Rosenior only compounded the internal dissatisfaction. When did it start to go wrong? On day one.
The record shows that Rosenior won six of his first seven matches in charge, but that isn’t strictly correct. Maresca left on January 1 and it was quickly known that Rosenior would be his replacement. He wanted to take a final game with Strasbourg, away to Nice, on January 3, by which time it was all but confirmed this was his farewell. Chelsea had a game against Manchester City the following day, taken by Calum McFarlane — who is now back in charge until the end of the season — meaning Rosenior’s first game was at Fulham away, on January 7. Except he wasn’t on the touchline at Craven Cottage, he was in the stands, observing. As if Chelsea, who had already slipped to fifth, could afford that. As if a manager of elite pedigree could wait a minute longer than necessary to get involved. It spoke, not of thoroughness, but of timidity, of performance, playing to the gallery. Fulham away is still a tough gig. Avoiding it meant Rosenior’s first game was Charlton Athletic, a relegation-threatened Championship side, in the FA Cup. It smacked of Ruud van Nistelrooy’s time at Leicester City, sidestepping an away fixture at Brentford to ensure his first match was soft-touch West Ham United at home. Van Nistelrooy, like Rosenior, won — but it didn’t end well for either man.
There was too much of that in Rosenior’s tenure. Nonsense about respecting the ball, the performative disciplining of Fernández to the team’s cost against Manchester City. He took away his captain’s armband, then inexplicably gave it back last night. And what was that, those long stares at the away end after the 3-0 defeat by Brighton? It was as if the manager was in a film, and certainly not a good one.
Chelsea may not be performing like they have a world-class squad, but their dressing room has plenty of players who will see themselves that way. World Cup winners, European Championship winners, European trophy winners, domestic champions and, of course, a great many Club World Cup champions. Game recognises game. The moment Rosenior attempted to control a loose ball in a Carabao Cup tie against Arsenal, only to see it spin off his shoe to widespread derision, anyone who knows football winced a little inside. That wouldn’t be forgotten. If things went wrong for him at Chelsea, that would be the changing room verdict. Can’t play, not one of us. Kenny Dalglish was an absolute beginner, succeeding Joe Fagan at Liverpool; but he was Kenny Dalglish. And managers do not have to be great players. That’s not the point. José Mourinho wasn’t, nor Jürgen Klopp. But those guys arrived with an aura, and a serious assortment of trophies. A Bundesliga title wrested from Bayern Munich, a Champions League won against the odds at Porto. They had knowledge to impart. Knowledge of how to win.
Rosenior had nothing comparable. His managerial pedigree is underwhelming. His playing career was too. After that poor touch at Arsenal, Estêvão — who is 18 — asked him if he had actually played. Rosenior generously told that story against himself, but it was equally wince-inducing. Sir Alex Ferguson managed better players than he ever was, but one imagines none of the class of 92 would have pointed that out.
And Chelsea look like nothing more than a team that has switched off from the manager. The performance against Brighton on Tuesday was as bad as any witnessed in the Premier League this season. As poor as anything turned in by Wolves or Tottenham Hotspur, as weak as West Ham United at Wolves in January. All Rosenior had left in his post-match press conferences was impotent fury. Empty threats about what he would do to put it right, angry invective about his standards.
What standards? Rosenior had a reputation as a good young coach, but that is all. He seemed to have done a good job at Hull City. There were impressive reports from Strasbourg. Yet it was increasingly apparent he had been overpromoted, plunged into a club and a challenge that was beyond his frame of reference. If he had great wisdom to impart, Chelsea’s players were staring out of the window or doodling in the textbook as he spoke.
Whose fault is this? We’re back to the stooges, and senior executives such as Behdad Eghbali, a managing partner of the investment firm Clearlake Capital, which is part of BlueCo’s ownership group. Eghbali also appears to fancy himself as a judge of football matters. It was Eghbali who said Chelsea’s policy was no mid-season managerial changes — there have now been two in 2026 and we’re not at the end of the fourth month — uttering the deathless endorsement “I think we’re behind Liam” last week. It was this that somehow gave Rosenior the confidence to announce that the board were “100 per cent” with him on Monday. As a Chelsea manager from the 1960s, Tommy Docherty once said he didn’t want the board behind him. He wanted them in front of him, so he could see what they were doing.
The mystery is how the managers fall, but those responsible for this crisis remain upright. L’Équipe, the French newspaper, reported that Stewart and Winstanley have been stripped of their strategic roles at the BlueCo-owned Strasbourg, but it transpires this was only to skirt Uefa’s multi-club ownership rules, rather than a judgment on their performance. What have Chelsea done to deserve the full attention of this five-man brains trust, though? This is a mess of a squad, lopsided, callow, with too many ordinary characters and few leaders. Rosenior wasn’t the man for the job, but who is? Any manager with a reputation will not entertain the stooges shaping his future, any manager grateful to be through the door at Stamford Bridge risks suffering Rosenior’s fate. As for the players, those who had reservations about staying true to the Chelsea project will be scheming an exit route as we speak. Why should Cole Palmer invest in the next grand plan, wait for the great lurch forward? “When you get punched in the face, you’ve got to fight back, you’ve got to stand up and fight,” said Eghbali last week. A bit hard, when it is your own fist that keeps doing the punching.

The irony in all of this is that the people supposedly discussing the plan for Liam are the same idiots who thought it was a good idea to appoint him in the first place.
Where is the accountability for the Sporting Directors? Or are our ownership that dense when it comes to footballing matters, that whatever these Directors tell them, they believe to be true?
In what other world would the owner(s) of a business allow the leadership team to get away with what these under qualified SD’s are getting away with?

The irony in all of this is that the people supposedly discussing the plan for Liam are the same idiots who thought it was a good idea to appoint him in the first place.
Where is the accountability for the Sporting Directors? Or are our ownership that dense when it comes to footballing matters, that whatever these Directors tell them, they believe to be true?
In what other world would the owner(s) of a business allow the leadership team to get away with what these under qualified SD’s are getting away with?

The irony in all of this is that the people supposedly discussing the plan for Liam are the same idiots who thought it was a good idea to appoint him in the first place.
Where is the accountability for the Sporting Directors? Or are our ownership that dense when it comes to footballing matters, that whatever these Directors tell them, they believe to be true?
In what other world would the owner(s) of a business allow the leadership team to get away with what these under qualified SD’s are getting away with?

The irony in all of this is that the people supposedly discussing the plan for Liam are the same idiots who thought it was a good idea to appoint him in the first place.
Where is the accountability for the Sporting Directors? Or are our ownership that dense when it comes to footballing matters, that whatever these Directors tell them, they believe to be true?
In what other world would the owner(s) of a business allow the leadership team to get away with what these under qualified SD’s are getting away with?

Under Roman he would have never been hired in the first place and if he had been, he would have been long gone before now.
We are in such a financial mess that I imagine we have to wait until we mathematically can’t qualify for the Champions League to then get rid of him without having to pay him off from his 6 year deal.
What a mess.

I’ll go for Leeds 3-1 here. Ordinarily would have gone to the game but I shan’t be wasting my money until this ownership admit to their mistakes and get rid of the sporting directors who are largely responsible for this catastrophe.

The ‘squad building’ over these 4 windows has been atrocious. We have one recognised senior striker in Jackson, 3 attacking midfielders who are all paid as if they should be starting and seemingly 3 central midfielders (I won’t even count KDH as a CM because he’s championship level).
The other elephant in the room is how PSR is dictating our squad building. Petrovic wasn’t banished because Maresca didn’t think he was good enough, it was because we signed him for £8m so he’s the only goalkeeper we can sell and book a profit on. The same reason we have to play Sanchez every week because we vastly overpaid and no club in their right mind would offer more than £5m for him now. Maresca alluded to the same thing with Chalobah. Everyone could see he’s miles ahead of Disasi but we’d book a loss on a Disasi has to stay and we have to farm Chalobah out. The same thing with Gallagher, Mount, CHO etc etc. Ironic now that we are crying out for a LW and about to drop £60m on Garnacho having sold Callum for £3m.

The owners have to recognise that the sporting directors are hamstringing us with their woeful signings. We’ve overpaid for so many duds who we will now have to loan out season after season because we can’t afford to sell them due to likely PSR breaches. The club is an absolute farce. Get some proper football operators in, not ones whose only appointment at note is working for a mid table Brighton. 
 
The soul is being ripped from the club and we are being dumped with the sporting directors failed signings. Sell any player who we are fortunate enough to be able to make a profit on and see what we’re lumbered with. How on earth is that a winning strategy for sporting success?

The ‘squad building’ over these 4 windows has been atrocious. We have one recognised senior striker in Jackson, 3 attacking midfielders who are all paid as if they should be starting and seemingly 3 central midfielders (I won’t even count KDH as a CM because he’s championship level).
The other elephant in the room is how PSR is dictating our squad building. Petrovic wasn’t banished because Maresca didn’t think he was good enough, it was because we signed him for £8m so he’s the only goalkeeper we can sell and book a profit on. The same reason we have to play Sanchez every week because we vastly overpaid and no club in their right mind would offer more than £5m for him now. Maresca alluded to the same thing with Chalobah. Everyone could see he’s miles ahead of Disasi but we’d book a loss on a Disasi has to stay and we have to farm Chalobah out. The same thing with Gallagher, Mount, CHO etc etc. Ironic now that we are crying out for a LW and about to drop £60m on Garnacho having sold Callum for £3m.

The owners have to recognise that the sporting directors are hamstringing us with their woeful signings. We’ve overpaid for so many duds who we will now have to loan out season after season because we can’t afford to sell them due to likely PSR breaches. The club is an absolute farce. Get some proper football operators in, not ones whose only appointment at note is working for a mid table Brighton. 
 
The soul is being ripped from the club and we are being dumped with the sporting directors failed signings. Sell any player who we are fortunate enough to be able to make a profit on and see what we’re lumbered with. How on earth is that a winning strategy for sporting success?

The ‘squad building’ over these 4 windows has been atrocious. We have one recognised senior striker in Jackson, 3 attacking midfielders who are all paid as if they should be starting and seemingly 3 central midfielders (I won’t even count KDH as a CM because he’s championship level).
The other elephant in the room is how PSR is dictating our squad building. Petrovic wasn’t banished because Maresca didn’t think he was good enough, it was because we signed him for £8m so he’s the only goalkeeper we can sell and book a profit on. The same reason we have to play Sanchez every week because we vastly overpaid and no club in their right mind would offer more than £5m for him now. Maresca alluded to the same thing with Chalobah. Everyone could see he’s miles ahead of Disasi but we’d book a loss on a Disasi has to stay and we have to farm Chalobah out. The same thing with Gallagher, Mount, CHO etc etc. Ironic now that we are crying out for a LW and about to drop £60m on Garnacho having sold Callum for £3m.

The owners have to recognise that the sporting directors are hamstringing us with their woeful signings. We’ve overpaid for so many duds who we will now have to loan out season after season because we can’t afford to sell them due to likely PSR breaches. The club is an absolute farce. Get some proper football operators in, not ones whose only appointment at note is working for a mid table Brighton. 
 
The soul is being ripped from the club and we are being dumped with the sporting directors failed signings. Sell any player who we are fortunate enough to be able to make a profit on and see what we’re lumbered with. How on earth is that a winning strategy for sporting success?

The ‘squad building’ over these 4 windows has been atrocious. We have one recognised senior striker in Jackson, 3 attacking midfielders who are all paid as if they should be starting and seemingly 3 central midfielders (I won’t even count KDH as a CM because he’s championship level).
The other elephant in the room is how PSR is dictating our squad building. Petrovic wasn’t banished because Maresca didn’t think he was good enough, it was because we signed him for £8m so he’s the only goalkeeper we can sell and book a profit on. The same reason we have to play Sanchez every week because we vastly overpaid and no club in their right mind would offer more than £5m for him now. Maresca alluded to the same thing with Chalobah. Everyone could see he’s miles ahead of Disasi but we’d book a loss on a Disasi has to stay and we have to farm Chalobah out. The same thing with Gallagher, Mount, CHO etc etc. Ironic now that we are crying out for a LW and about to drop £60m on Garnacho having sold Callum for £3m.

The owners have to recognise that the sporting directors are hamstringing us with their woeful signings. We’ve overpaid for so many duds who we will now have to loan out season after season because we can’t afford to sell them due to likely PSR breaches. The club is an absolute farce. Get some proper football operators in, not ones whose only appointment at note is working for a mid table Brighton. 
 
The soul is being ripped from the club and we are being dumped with the sporting directors failed signings. Sell any player who we are fortunate enough to be able to make a profit on and see what we’re lumbered with. How on earth is that a winning strategy for sporting success?