For opponents of the lazy just-buy-dozens-of-good-players financially hysterical way to run a club, it was not a good weekend.
Because, though there’s months ahead to drop a brick yet, Chelsea are starting to look as good as 10 talented footballers should look, especially when one is possibly the best footballer in the league.
The club appear to have made the last few months’ decisions after eating peyote and tequila worms; Chelsea doesn’t even seem like a club in the traditional sense, having all but severed any connections with the past. They now see Academy players as a route to pure profit rather than a tangible link to the community.
Indeed, as far as the club is concerned, if you’re troubled by the sale of Conor Gallagher and the loaning out of Trevoh Chalobah and other less high-profile players, you can sod off. Such legacy thinking is of no interest to Big Head Todd and the Monsters (they’re a very good band).
Others like Manchester City pay lip service to the idea of a club as part of a wider context, but not Chelsea. This is football as an entertainment facility and nothing else. Fans are customers to be exploited for profit – loyal suckers who turn up or buy merchandise, no matter how much they’re abused or how poor the team is.
It must seem like a free market capitalist’s wet dream not to be subject to the capitalism they claim to worship. Money keeps coming no matter how poor your product is or how much you charge; that’s closer to a form of communism where the profit motive is replaced by set contracts guaranteeing income.
Chelsea fans must swallow all this down, ignore all the lunatic behaviour of their directors and just enjoy the football exhibition, as you would going to the theatre to see modern dance.
They’re starting to look more balanced than they did. Things look less directionless and shapeless than they did. It’s starting to look like the manager has about 16 players he wants to work with and knows what to do with them.
There’s still no specific Chelsea identity and it does still look like they’re making it up week to week. They look like strangers and there seems to be no collective spirit, but they’re already just two points off top, in fourth and they demolished a West Ham side so abject that it looked like David Moyes was still the manager. For a change it was a good watch and even enjoyable.
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It may be like watching a dog running around the park off the leash but in the moments it clicks, it is undeniably good and Cole Palmer is exceptionally effective despite wearing a ‘go and see the headmaster’ worried schoolboy expression and a ‘done by his mam ‘cos he’s got worms’ haircut.
This provides a challenge to those who think of football as part of civic life and the greater social fabric, because if behaving like this is successful, and it may well be, it could be a chaotic model others choose to follow, in the process shredding everything the club means in wider society, in favour of success above anything.
If the latest lunatic owners say ‘let me spend a billion and we’ll be successful but the price is your club’s identity, history and everything about it to this point’ would you shrug and say OK? Or is football more important than that?
Because what do you do if the football is good but everything else stinks? That’s the question for the age as more billionaires buy up even lower-league clubs in search of the free money and temporary status football potentially has to offer. Are you just an asset available for sale? Does it matter to you? Can you be placated by good football if everything else is wrong?
It often seems that way as fans acquiesce to every insult, preferring grumbling to doing anything. If you’re an owner with decent PR, a lot will buy into absolutely anything, as Newcastle fans have shown us in accepting a murderous regime by being made to feel they can do nothing about it even if they do care.
Times change and things move on, whether it’s for the best or not. If Chelsea is a place where some players play for a while but could be anywhere, as far as they’re concerned, and there is that kind of air around the place as they collect players like Panini stickers, does it matter anymore?
In an all-too-real way, Chelsea might be an early example of the future. The men’s game at all levels always belonged the people in a spiritual, existential way, but does Chelsea prove it doesn’t anymore?
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