da poker： Over the years, Chelsea have spent plenty of money on duds.
da casino： Fernando Torres is perhaps the most recognisable given his transfer fee and the difficulties he had when he did arrive. He simply wasn’t the same player as he was when he wowed the nation in a Liverpool shirt.
But it does tend to go back further than that. Since the late 1990s, Chelsea have had expensive foreign imports, not all of whom have covered themselves in glory. Perhaps it was a combination of the west London postcode and the correlation between the types of players who care about such things and players who aren’t inclined to put enough effort in. Winston Bogarde is a name which springs to mind – having fallen out of favour at the club, he refused to be sold and spent four years winding down his contract and collecting a massive wage.
Since then, though, in the Roman Abramovich era, Chelsea have spent big. And even if they’ve been more prudent over the last few seasons, there have still been plenty of flops.
On August 29th 2009, Andriy Shevchenko left Chelsea on a free, having signed for £30m three years earlier.
He spent two seasons at the club – his third he spent on loan back at AC Milan – scoring nine Premier League goals, and 22 in all competitions. Not a brilliant record by anyone’s standard, but spending £30m on nine league goals is an expensive mistake, and one that Chelsea would repeat later on.
Two years later, Torres would arrive in January, and the mistake would be repeated, but four years to the day when Shevchenko left the club, Samuel Eto’o arrived.
Perhaps that’s not the same category of flop. And maybe we can’t argue that Chelsea hadn’t learned their lessons from the Torres and Shevchenko debacles by signing Eto’o, after all, he did arrive on a free. But it does show that another player arrived at the club on name alone, having been sensational for Barcelona and Inter Milan. And yet again he proved to be less than prolific for Chelsea.
What’s interesting about all of these strikers, and what’s interesting about Chelsea’s entire spending over the Abramovich years, is that buying on name has never really worked out very well for the club. In fact, it’s been the relative unknowns – or at least decent European players who weren’t household names – who have come to the club to make a name for themselves who have been the best buys.
Throughout the whole time that the likes of Shevchenko, Eto’o and Torres were flopping at Chelsea, it was Didier Drogba who was banging in the goals for the club. In the end, what made the big names look bad wasn’t just the fact that they couldn’t get on the scoresheet, but it was also the fact that they were playing in a side who simply didn’t need them.
That’s not to say that spending money on players who fit the side better than Shevchenko or Torres wasn’t necessary, but it is to say that Chelsea weren’t much better with either of them in the squad, especially since Drogba – a very good player who signed from Marseille but who wasn’t a massive European name – was the player Chelsea ended up relying on. And perhaps that’s one of the reason Chelsea ended up signing so many flops, because Drogba just couldn’t be replaced.
This summer, things are different. Chelsea have finally broken their club transfer record which had stood since Torres’ arrival in 2011 on Alvaro Morata, another one of European football’s biggest names, but one who is at the sort of upward trajectory stage of his career rather than the downward ones that the three flops mentioned above were on.
That might stand Antonio Conte’s side in good stead this season, but when it comes to future transfers, let’s hope Chelsea have learned their lesson.