Suitably streetweared and hair freshly bleached, Alejandro Garnacho surveyed his new kingdom, lounging in the Stamford Bridge owners’ box hours before his £40m move, looking like the ambitious if entitled scion in a prestige drug-gang drama who gets whacked for hubristically undermining the big boss.
Everything the light touches is yours, until you’re flipped to a Madrid club next summer for £50m having scored six goals. We’ll always remember that thing you did against Bournemouth/Brighton/Burnley. Welcome to Chelsea.
Garnacho is the ultimate BlueCo signing in that it makes total financial sense but little footballing sense. Still only 21, there is obvious scope for value retention or growth, obvious glimmering talent to titillate potential suitors.
The scorer of the best Premier League goal of the past decade, perhaps ever, the Manchester United PR machine has protected and bolstered his value. T
here are – charitably – some question marks over his temperament. But consigned to Ruben Amorim’s bomb squad, this is one distressed asset. Cue Todd Boehly from the top rope.
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Joining Chelsea in 2025 requires a certain degree of self-confidence, which Garnacho does not lack. On Saturday, visiting fans serenaded substitutes with “You’re getting sold in the morning”.
Chelsea’s outgoing transfers this summer have amounted to alchemy, transforming spare parts into gold, perhaps the greatest window of selling ever produced. £20m for Armando Broja, who last scored a Premier League goal in October 2023.
A potential £43.7m for João Félix, a nice theory which has been largely disproven. £25m for Lesley Ugochukwu, similar for Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall. This is generational stuff. If nothing else, it vindicates the club’s belief that signing an endless series of talented young players can only go so wrong, that simply being under 25 and owned by Chelsea protects against recession.
And yet despite this prolific turnover, there is somehow a developing sense of consistency around the core squad members. Six of the starting XI on Saturday started the third league match of last season, while Wesley Fofana, Levi Colwill and Cole Palmer likely would have all started were it not for injury.
The same team started against Fulham as had beaten West Ham 5-1 eight days prior. The whole Chelsea project has basically been a long and inordinately expensive process of trial and error, attempting to discover and secure one world-class talent in every position, but there is now a coherent centre to this group.
The peripheries are less clear. Chelsea’s fruitless search for elite, consistent wingers has been a long-running psychodrama of the BlueCo era. Including Garnacho and the £5m paid not to sign Jadon Sancho, Chelsea have spent £329m on nine out-and-out wingers since June 2022, without including Felix, Christopher Nkunku, João Pedro or Palmer. Facundo Buonanotte and Fermin Lopez are both reportedly close to joining, while Julio Enciso heads to Strasbourg from Brighton with reassignment to Stamford Bridge a possible reward for good behaviour. Geovany Quenda will join next summer for about £45m from Sporting on turning 18.
Mykhailo Mudryk is still employed by the club, eight months into his purgatory stint of provisional suspension, watching the life he was promised melt away. Every hour Raheem Sterling becomes more likely to spend the next five months training alone, consigned to oblivion at 30.
Chelsea’s two starting wingers against Fulham were Pedro Neto and Estêvão Willian. Still 18, Willian is fun and phenomenally exciting, if desperately raw and overeager to impress, perhaps among the great talents of his generation. Neto is the current paragon, reborn in recent months but woeful against Fulham, high energy with no outlet, like letting a firework off in your bathroom.
Tyrique George, in likely his last match before going to Roma, joined them on 14 minutes, replacing the stricken Liam Delap. This awkward appearance at striker, hauled off himself on 81 minutes, only served to raise further questions about why Nicolas Jackson was allowed to go to Bayern Munich in the first place. Enzo Maresca suggested Delap will be out for six to eight weeks, by which time Chelsea will be well into the Champions League league phase.
The squad planning also reveals Maresca’s headstrong faith in his own system, his own genius. Malo Gusto and Reece James have been deployed as de facto right-wingers thus far, overlapping from right-back in a role which suits them both. Neto, Garnacho and Jamie Gittens are all right-footed left wingers by preference, which suits the current plan, but would leave them unbalanced if and when tactical alterations become necessary.
That five of Chelsea’s seven goals this season have come from set-pieces or penalties indicates one long-standing issue has been rectified, but another might be emerging.
After the match, co-sporting director Paul Winstanley conspicuously paraded Garnacho across the turf and down the tunnel hours before he was officially announced. Spending £40m on a 21-year-old winger from one of your traditional rivals is no longer remarkable here, just another low-risk, high-reward bet, hedge funds doing hedge fund things.
But amid the constant churn and change, Chelsea are finding results, finding a fortune they have perhaps lacked. Fulham had an opening goal by 18-year-old Josh King disallowed after a baffling VAR intervention, one of the Premier League’s poorest refereeing decisions of recent years.
Chelsea spent last night leading the table, with João Pedro having scored five goals in his first five starts in all competitions for his new club. For all the noise, maybe that’s all that matters.
Photograph by AP Photo/Ian Walton