The Ultimately Empty (60) Million Pounds

As the cost of Chelsea’s transfer expenditure soars spectacularly skywards (or perhaps that should be Sky-wards) with each passing day, Foul Play wonders exactly when it is going to dawn on Roman Abramovich, or Claudio Ranieri for that matter, that an association football team is only permitted to field eleven players in any one match.

It’s anyone’s guess as to how much input Ranieri has had into the summer’s comings and goings, but he certainly looks rather pleased with himself these days. He had a miserable £500,000 stg at his disposal this time last year. Now he – or Abramovich, at any rate – has spent slightly more than the other 19 Premiership sides combined.
But are they buying players to build a proper team, or are they just snapping up lads they like the look of? One suspects the latter, certainly after the news that Juan Verón and Joe Cole had been acquired on the same day. Verón, in particular, may be a marquee signing too far: Ranieri gives every appearance of a man who will happily move three other players out of their preferred positions in order to accommodate his latest new toy.
Chelsea won’t be winning any championship next May, for a number of reasons. Firstly, because it can take an inordinate length of time to accommodate one new player into a team (depending on where he plays and how good he is), never mind six. Just ask Sir Alex Ferguson.

And secondly, Chelsea’s new arrivals, though uniformly good footballers, are not massively better than the existing personnel they will be replacing – except on the left wing, where Damien Duff is as much of an improvement on Jesper Grønkjær as an Ipod is on an early Sony Walkman. In general, decent players are making way for extremely good players, but they still don’t look like a bunch of title-winners.
Joe Cole, for instance, is not going to make an appreciable difference to any side crying out for the final piece of the jigsaw. He is an eye-catching player who lacks the drive and imagination to be truly top-class. Certainly, he will not get you goals from midfield – he scored 13 in his entire West Ham career, which is slightly more than, say, Danny Murphy would manage in a normal season at Liverpool.

And how do you put him and Verón in the same midfield? You don’t. Geremi will go on the right, Duff on the left, and Frank Lampard will almost certainly be an automatic choice in the middle. If Lampard, a relatively ordinary player who gave a good showing last year, were to be unceremoniously dropped for no reason other than to accommodate a new signing, it would hardly do much for team morale.
At the time of going to press, Abramovich and Ranieri had given up on trying to lure Christian Vieri – a better player than anyone they’d hitherto signed – and were going after Mark Viduka instead. Say, for argument’s sake, they get him. That would leave them with a starting XI of Cudicini, Johnson, Terry, Gallas, Bridge, Geremi, Lampard, Verón, Viduka, Gudjohnsen and Duff.

Assuming that it got fielded regularly considering Ranieri’s penchant for needless tinkering, this would certainly be some side to watch – an outfit fully capable of pulverising half the teams that crossed its path. But would you put your wage packet on them winning the Premiership? Or would you just head off to HMV instead?