_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.

Just for the sake of "fairness" I'm not sure money spent is a very strong argument. If the whole premise is "this is a development project that will come good in 3 years time" then the amounts spent are neither here nor there. In theory one can have a very expensive development project - and it's still a development project. The fact that we are not exactly in our second week of this, that it's been a year and there has been no actual development is what's damning. In no other job, profession, human endeavour would one accept zero progress after a year of work.

Even if one was inclined to generously interpret the club recruitment strategy as a somewhat high-risk, but "educated" gamble - buying a lot of players with "potential" with the hope that some will turn out to be genuinely world-class and being prepared to write-off the ones that don't - the one thing you absolutely cannot do is f**k it up when your high-stakes bet has worked out. Not getting the most out of Palmer undermines the whole "strategy". You buy 10 over-priced "young prospects". 1-2 will come good. If your manager then somehow manages to nullify the one that comes good - the whole thing is a failure.

With the obvious caveat that it is all guess-work at this stage, would some kind of a 12 month (give or take) ban even make that much difference for Chelsea? The dude is on a million year contract, he is nowhere near crucial or even important for the team at this stage, but there might be some lingering hope that he'll get a bit better at some point in the future. So he spends a year training with reserves (or whatever training set-up that is compatible with a ban)... might not affect his general trajectory.

It’s only lunchtime and I am at work, but drinking my shot. Rules are rules.

Why is it that people fighting for all the most righteous causes are inevitably the nastiest? Looks like this wonderful prejudice-free future we are heading towards will be full of such awful people…

Lovely. What exactly is the purpose of saying this?

Sounds like we probably shouldn’t replace all of Chelsea with all of Ipswich because all of Ipswich might not do well in Premier League. Should limit our interest to just the manager who beat a number of significantly better resourced opponents.

Trying to assess how much of a predictor of greatness is back-to-back promotions. In recent history: - Paul Lambert - Nigel Adkins 🙂🙂 The sample is super-small and there are, no doubt, some crucial specifics that differentiate McKenna's circumstances and achievement, but in itself this stat does not seem to guarantee future CL wins... Having said that, I feel we are not going to get an established genius and the choice between - gambling on a potential genius vs - taking an established non-genius .. seems like a tricky one, with no right answer.

Can't say I am loving this situation what with how much - it appears - is and will be dictated to the manager. But at the same time I feel it's being a little over-dramatised. Managers having to mostly play the players they were given is more common than not - either due to who they inherit or, in some cases, with recruitment being decided by the board. Overhauls are rare. Sure, one hopes they get a little freedom to (a) buy a couple of their own players and (b) not play a couple of unsuitable players - but overall, they play what they have. And this squad is not - overall - that bad. I can't imagine managers out there are looking at this squad and going "f**king hell, I'd need to completely overhaul this mess - this is unplayable". So yeah, there might be some odd cases such as - reportedly - Mudryk, who the board are invested in, but a given manager might not want. Or cases where the board will force a sale of a wanted player (Gallagher). But overall - it's not that unreasonable that a manager would be able to come in and get these players to play.

At this point sacking him would just be weird… Would I support hiring him if I could go back in time and decide knowing what we know? Not sure. It took an awfully long time to click and another manager might have done better. *Might* But right now when good things are finally happening, individual players are improving … why on earth would you swap for an unknown?