daniel chigunweIT’S time to forget everything we thought we knew about how to run a football club.
Forget stability, forget continuity, forget financial prudence, forget carefully-targeted player recruitment, forget inspirational managerial appointments.
Just tear everything to shreds, sell everyone, then max out the credit card by buying footballers. Dozens and dozens of footballers. Not just one new squad of players but two or three squads’ worth.
Buy so many footballers that they can’t all fit into the dressing room at your training ground. Already got seven elite wingers? If another one becomes available, go and buy an eighth. You only live once.
Because Chelsea and Nottingham Forest are the two great overachievers of this Premier League season — the Blues just two points off the summit and Forest in the Champions League places, above Manchester City.
Both clubs have spent like sailors piddling it up on shore leave.
If you have previously received the impressions from this column — or pretty much anywhere else in the media — that Chelsea’s Todd Boehly is a clueless American muppet, your mind must be playing tricks on you. Boehly always was a football genius.
The nine-year contracts for unproven players. The knifing of more managers than Roman Abramovich. The transfer-window trolley dashes. Genius, all of it.
And any ideas you had that Forest’s Evangelos Marinakis was a panic-buying shopaholic — a wild conspiracy theorist who hired that bloke off Gladiators to rumble referees — must have been the product of your own overactive imagination.
Here is a big cuddly Greek Santa, laden with gifts and leading Forest into the promised land.
Since Boehly and his Clearlake crew purchased Chelsea in the summer of 2022, the club has signed 45 players for a total of £1.3billion.
Since Forest won promotion to the Premier League that same summer, they have got more than 40 players for a combined total in the region of £300million.
And at both clubs, somehow, it’s working. At the age of 33, Forest’s Kiwi striker Chris Wood is the new Erling Haaland. Chelsea star Cole Palmer was Pep Guardiola’s blind spot.
Anthony Elanga and Jadon Sancho are more effective than any winger currently on Manchester United’s books.
The Premier League is a madhouse. To succeed, join the stark-raving lunatics, as Chelsea and Forest have done.
Understated managers
What both clubs needed, it turns out, was an understated, unheralded manager to sift through the shopping, to settle on a core squad, to play ball with eccentric owners and coach a bloody good football team.
Neither Enzo Maresca nor Nuno Espirito Santo were wildly popular appointments. Maresca had led Leicester to the Championship title but was nobody’s first choice to succeed Mauricio Pochettino this summer.
Yet the Italian was 20/20 in his vision of Chelsea’s best team, ruthless in his pre-season squad-slashing and he is now presiding over a premature vindication of Boehly’s seemingly-unhinged regime.
Nuno, after his car-crash reign at Tottenham, replaced Forest’s promotion-winning Messiah Steve Cooper to a chorus of shrugs, just before the club would be deducted four points for breaching PSR last season.
The Portuguese boss with the charisma bypass is the polar opposite of Brian Clough. Yet he is threatening to become the best of Forest’s 29 managers since the exit of Old Big ’Ead. — Sun.
Online Reporter
