_Ilya_

If they did this, like, literally - a Hunger Games style program on Chelsea TV - it would be both a huge revenue-generator and pacify the fans to a significant degree. Feels like an unmissable opportunity right there. "It's day 3 in the arena and today we release the tigers."

you do not, under any circumstances, gotta hand it to George Galloway

As annoying as it is when random youtube video's get dropped (who has the time), I thought this was very good. tl:dr - they are not going anywhere - there are fairly likely to start changing senior personnel - e.g. SDs, manager - fairly soon - they are fairly likely to have to change the "model" a bit (older players, more control to manager) - they are very likely to have to sell some players that can be sold for serious profit this summer - and this will hurt (I dunno, pick one of Palmer, James, Estevau... ☹️ f***ing hell) https://youtu.be/A9u0JWHAKqo?si=qZcCbixmFhifz4kE

This is just weird... I am not fully bought into the popular (here) narrative of "they only care about money and are trying to gut my club - that's why they spent a gazzion quid and are overpaying for every useless youngster". It doesn't quite feel like this theory fully adds up. But whatever are their evil, cynical, money-motivated reasons - surely it pays to have a team that reliably gets into CL? It improves player value, if nothing else. Surely there's an experienced coach out there that will be agreeable enough and will comply with a general arrangement of "your goal each season is 3rd spot, you get a decent - if unspectacular - team to achieve this". A kind of a Villa/Emery - but with a side-business of weird mass player-trading. Why are they hiring these obviously inadequate managers?

Neither of these are a particularly striking success (yet !) - not even in the first 11, never mind being something like "the stars of the team - and the "obvious signing" probably has a touch of selection bias in it. There are dozens "junior age-group" captains/stars for major footballing nations and plenty of them do not grow up to be super-stars. I would say that it's exactly for differentiating between a junior age-group star that will come good and one that won't - is where data-driven approach might be useful. We'll find out in a year or two if these were the right choices. :)

Two thoughts come to mind. (1) Will this be a kind of "Conte switching to 3 at the back" moment, where by luck or genius or common sense we stumble on something that works and stick with it? (2) Will this actually work as brilliantly as it did yesterday against Stoke on a rainy Tuesday low block, parked-bus defences? The Nottingham Forests of this world will not play like PSG did.

I dunno, Jackson often looks like he's kinda fainting during big chances...

Feels like Noni-out, Gittens-in is a fairly straightforward like-for-like swap of a winger who is better on the right - of which we have too many - for a winger who is better on the left - of which we don’t have enough. Similar money, similar players. Just squad rebalancing. Anyone with an especially strong opinion about one being significantly individually better than the other is probably wrong. 🙂

Exactly! And just as they start to relax and get over-confident we deploy the Jackson-kicks-somebody-in-the-face move to throw them off kilter.

It looks like many here doesn’t understand his tactical approach - which is to bait the opposition players into falling asleep and/or losing the will to live, giving up and dying right there on the pitch en mass. And then boom! - 17 more passes around the decaying bodies of opposition players and Jackson is through on empty goal, and that’s, like, 1 in 3 chance of scoring.

And didn’t even elbow a lollipop lady in the face on his way in? One of his good days then…

For Cooling Break Jackson needs to be put into a freezer. And yes, I know he’s off, still…

Where has it all gone wrong?

Not, like, defending their transfer dealings overall 🙂 but if PR from today is that we refused to overpay and walked away - twice! - it’s very good PR.

This feels like such clear dig at team’s (manager’s) tactics that I’m surprised it’s not getting more attention.