Chelsea’s ‘list of untouchables’ includes seven players — report

Chelsea face yet another critical summer transfer window, the ninth in the reign of BlueCo, who seem no closer to actually executing on their grand promises of winning and competing for trophies. They’ve said a lot of big words and wrote a lot of big checks on a lot of massive contracts (certainly in length, if not salary), but the overall situation has been ad-hoc, chaotic, frustratingly directionless, and, at worst, downright incompetent.

They thought they were the smartest guys in the room. Instead, it’s been everyone else laughing all the way to the bank.

The approach for this summer has been widely briefed as a little different than what’s come before from the current braintrust, with Chelsea supposedly looking for “ready-made starters” who are “accustomed to the pressures of a busy fixture schedule” while still consistently “performing at a high level”. The focus is on a center back and a “versatile” attacker. That certainly sounds like a reasonable approach, but we’ll have to see what that actually looks like in real life. So far, there’s not been much talk about any such signings — Morgan Rogers surely a pipedream — with the two incoming kids from RC Strasbourg, Emmanuel Emegha and Valentín Barco, the teenager from Sporting CP, Geovany Quenda, and returning loanee Mike Penders adhering much more closely the previously existing modus operandi.

One also imagines that our financial situation isn’t exactly rosy, given another year of no European football coming up, not to mention our relentlessly persistent inability to do the one non-football thing that the owners should be good at regardless of any other football-related qualifications, find some sponsors and sell some merch.

But we were “not terribly well run” before, dont’cha know.

Good thing Xabi’s here to save the day!

In any case, The Athletic’s most recent rundown of our transfer situation makes it pretty obvious that we’re looking to raise some serious cash in the market, with our “list of untouchables” as short as just seven. That’s perhaps not too dissimilar to any other team, but it is notably small in this case given how many contracts of extraordinary length we’ve given out and how much money we’ve splurged wasted in the last four years on supposedly young and promising talent to rebuild the team from scratch into surefire winners. It was a strategy that couldn’t fail, they said.

Those seven are: Reece James, Cole Palmer, Moisés Caicedo, Levi Colwill, Estêvão, João Pedro, and Josh Acheampong. Acheampong may be the only surprising name on that list considering how little he played this year. (And of course untouchable doesn’t actually rule out a loan.)

As the report points out, Enzo Fernández and Marc Cucurella are not on the list, though the bigger surprise is the absence of Robert Sánchez. Or Malo Gusto? And I don’t imagine the likes of Pedro Neto or Jorrel Hato are anywhere near the shop window. But perhaps it’s not a definitive list. Any takers for Wesley Fofana?

Most importantly, maybe we can get to work sometime soon, too?