Blueboys

Singling him out is unfair. His performance mimicked the teams. Great first 30 mins then went missing rest of the game

In fairness today aside where it was bad again with a couple of what are hopefully one game injuries, it’s getting better. It’s not the type of thing that’s going to change overnight unfortunately.

Yeah he’s good enough. Not a world beater but not everyone in the team needs to be

Bookies should start offering a first player injured market for Chelsea instead of first goal scorer

He may end up a better player but where we are at now I’d much rather get a perm proven Toney who we know can get 15 odd goals a season in our league vs another risk/reward type deal

Little by little improving every game. That’ll be the story of our season anyway

All this sponsor stuff is showing me is the PL rules are sh*te. Any rules that allow stealth advertising of Chinese betting companies but not giant US media companies can’t have been written by a sane person

Backwards from where? Outside of a 6 month purple patch under Tuchel we’ve been no where near winning anything for years. That 6 months was very much the blip, just a good one. Also on the owners. The honest answer is if you’d ask the fans of 99% ish of clubs around the world they’d bite your hands off to have our owners after they’d made the now customary billion quid joke

I don’t think it does but you need to get one side right first before filling in the other. And getting the good younger players in first is the logical way of doing that. Don’t be surprised if our next signings are a couple of more experienced heads to help in positions. The Mitrovic/Wilson arguments are interesting but they are just as big a risk in their own right. Washington for £20m might turn into a world beater in 18 months, he might not in which case the club will get most that £20m back. Mitrovic for £50m, picks up regular knocks, not played for a bigger team before. Won’t get much, if any of the £50m back for not guaranteed performance. Your human venture capital but I don’t disagree with, but that’s just football. The top teams hoard as many players as possible for various reasons. Look at us, ours has changed from hoarding lower prem level pros to farm out in a loan army to balance to balance the books to hoarding young talent for a similar reason.

This might take the award for worst post made to this site for a while so well done. not sure who all these people you speak to are but they must have an extremely narrow view of football to all think our owners are the worst in the country, especially when people like Ron Martin exist (I suspect Google might be your friend here).

@enigma nice to see someone speaking a lot of sense. I’ve said on this thread previously the ownership got absolutely crucified last summer for a “shotgun” approach to recruitment that involved big money for experienced players. I like that since then we seem to have a plan of how we want to move forward, am expecting it to be a bit up and down until it all starts to gel.

What I’m saying is let’s not hold it over the heads of the players that remain and are here for the future.

Tell you what I am a sucker for these sponsorless shirts. I’ve got/ordered both.

In fairness to Sarr if I was him I would 100% be seeing out this stupid contract I shouldn’t be on

How can anyone write him off? let’s set a ground rule - last season doesn’t count for any of the players still with the squad. That was a mess in its own right. This season he has played a total of 55 mins which isn’t enough to judge anyone on to say they are good enough or not. my view: Trying a little too hard but also has come on in games where we are chasing a result, not the best games for confidence building. I’d imagine bit by bit throughout the season he will get some better games to build on performances from and end up in what’s likely to become a core 15 ish players

Rumour is united wanted to send him back in Jan which would have been a terrible deal anyway - screams them not playing him and him being cover

Well I’ve remembered why I tend to avoid these match threads. SO. MUCH. NEGATIVITY

I think the board approached it the right way this time and so be it if we miss out for somebody wanting to massively overpay. last season we paid asking price for a load of players and everyone has been bashing the board for that. this year, we are rightly trying to get the best deals (which has worked on the signings we have made already!) and now the board are going to get bashed for not paying asking price for a player at the beginning. we can’t have it both ways.

What’s funny about this is it isn’t in anyone in Saudi’s interest to be quiet about things. They’re on a mass advertising campaign to grow their league and entice players.

Going against the general feeling here but price dependant I think he’s a good signing. Probably better than Kepa and you would assume would be happy being second choice at Chelsea long term.

Pretty standard during a corporate restructure to have a couple of “losers” as things settle down

I can’t remember the rules exactly but I’m sure it’s if you are trained for 3 seasons before being 21 at the same club you count as homegrown, so hopefully some of the younger ones fall into that category. i can see the concern for the current youth players, we’ve already lost some of them. Definitely a watch this space area, hopefully most that are Chelsea level will stay and follow that route although 1 of those that left recently will obviously become a star because life

If anything this is proof of the new system potentially working. Not all the young signings will work out. young player bought for a cheap fee. Isn’t first team ready so can go out on loan, if he doesn’t end up being Chelsea level he’s on low wages and we won’t take a book hit on him. Someone will take a low fee gamble on a young player from Chelsea, always. This is completely different to the old system that gave us Bakayoko (although Baba R is probably a closer comparison here)

I find a lot of the Chelsea specific stuff is a bit naff. Podcast wise London is Blue is the best one, although I’ll only listen to the “specials” with journalists etc which are frequent enough. straight outta cobham has gotten steadily worse over the past couple of years and anything worth knowing ends up on the athletic football podcast in way more / better detail. I subscribe to Simon Phillips Substack thing which is about £2 a month which I find totally worth the money just for his daily blog which collates all the news from everywhere including twitter which means I don’t need to go and look at several different sources throughout the day to stay in the loop. talking twitter, avoid it as much as possible as it’s a cesspit. If I need to look on there I gravitate towards checking the blue dodger or absolute Chelsea feeds as they are heavy on just information without input. I hate when these accounts decide they need an edgy personality.

I’m generally positive but if it’s true it was going to be crypto but now a gambling site I wouldn’t have said that’s the sponsor that offers benefits to the fans that was promised