The criticisms aren't blind rage, they're supported by facts, and winning won't change them!

Fans aren't stupid, and we see the evidence right in front of us

January 2025 was a hell of a month for Chelsea fans. Inconsistent results, and increasing frustration at an ownership and sporting directors who appeared on the surface to be completely unaware of these needs or at least unwilling to do anything to solve them. We also saw two players we signed in the summer, Joao Felix and Renato Veiga, leave on loan, probably to be sold off in the summer.

I certainly grew increasingly frustrated and angry as the month went on, as did a lot of the fanbase. I’ve never seen a fanbase more collectively united as they were this month, against Behdad Eghbali, Clearlake and the Sporting Directors, and with complete justification.

Now the window is over and it calmed down a bit, and we won against WHU, it allowed space to calm down and reflect.

I’m not and will never be a cynic. Assuming the worst of everyone or putting a negative spin on everything isn’t healthy and is rarely accurate. Most of the time there’s nuances and different perspectives on things. I’ll give credit to the sporting directors and owners when it's deserved, happily, but if they mess up I’m not gonna hesitate to call them out on it, and I think I have this last month.

Just clinically, coldly examining the evidence in front of us, there’s several serious and legitimate criticisms. These are overly emotional rants or meltdowns, simply facts we can all see, which are of concern.

To begin with, we have two signings worth a combined £59m leave on loan six months after joining the club, with Felix apparently wanting to leave, is staggeringly poor performance. The club also wanted to move on Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall after only 6 months. This is breathtakingly incompetent and awful squad building.

There IS a plan, but I’m certain Felix and Dewsbury-Hall weren’t part of it, they were signing to sort out our PSR position. Let's be clear, other clubs had PSR issues, none of them bought players they didn’t need to satisfy those issues. This was not necessary and we wasted £85m on two players which could have got us a top striker, allowing Jackson to be rested and likely meaning we’d be higher in the table.

I don’t say any of the above sitting here in a pit of rage, it's simply a matter of fact. Just from a purely objective view, we’ve allocated funds badly, made some bad decisions, and we’ve signed players who’ve been available after just 6 months at the club, demanding ridiculous fees (£60m for Joao Felix) to sell them. Felix stated in the summer he wanted us to be his permanent home, but according to Fabrizio, feels so let down and left out, he wanted to leave after 6 months.

But some comments from Cesare Casadei this week, after we sold him to Torino for £12.5m, should give us all some cause for concern:

"I needed to be at a club where I feel important and where they make me feel important. I couldn’t wait. I had been trying (to return to Italy) for a couple of seasons but, for one reason or another, I was hindered.”

- Cesare Casadei

What this is basically saying is, he didn’t feel important at Chelsea, he wasn’t made to feel important, and Chelsea (the sporting directors, I presume) hindered him from moving back to Italy for about 18 months.

In isolation this could be dismissed, but when you look at how we’ve treated Trevoh Chalobah, stripping him of his shirt number, making him train with kids, trying to force him out, then recalling him shamelessly, and how they forced Conor out, it really is a compelling case.

Players are human beings, not commodities. They deserve to be treated with respect and decency. Cobham players who’ve been at the club since they were kids and been loyal to the club, should be celebrated and respected, not forced out of the club against their will. And just because a player isn’t a regular starter, or doesn’t have a long term future at the club, doesn’t mean they should be treated any differently.

There’s a base level of class, decency and respect which any person deserves. Players are not simply commodities or cash cows to be traded without sentiment, emotion or humanity. And the impression being given to fans and likely others outside Chelsea is that we don’t treat players well - and we’ve even seen some young talents reject us in January (one for Spurs), something which wasn’t happening much two years ago.

In the same way, I won’t dehumanise Behdad Eghbali or the Sporting Directors. They’re human beings with families and I wish no harm on them personally, in fact the opposite, I wish them nothing but good things. None of my criticism is personal and the personal attacks on them and their families on social media are a disgrace.

No, my criticism is of their job performance in a job where they have a big responsibility and likely get paid a lot of money. They work for Chelsea Football Club, a club that demands not just to compete, but to win. As such, they should be held to the highest standards, and they simply aren’t performing to those standards. They look out of their depth.

Unlike Todd Boehly, who seems to be a good listener, willing to acknowledge he’s not an expert, and listen to fans and experts, Behdad seems to think he’s a genius at football and found a new way to build a winning team, and gets heavily involved.

The next thing is treating fans like we’re stupid. Quite frankly, I’ve had enough of being treated like a mug who’ll swallow anything the media feeds me, with no intelligence or critical thinking skills. I don't work in professional football, so I’m not qualified, but that doesn’t make me stupid or gullible. I’m far from the only fan who thinks this too. Patronising fans and insulting our intelligence tells us a lot about how Behdad and the sporting directors see the world and treat people, and even further justified these arguments about how they handle players. This is not how a good owner and a well run club talks to its fans.

By the way, unlike others, I don’t doubt Clearlake want to win. I’ll say this till I’m blue in the face, it’s a matter of fact, which they will know, that success on the pitch and playing CL football every year, makes the club and owners hundreds of millions more per year than selling footballers or finishing 6th.

“Like anything you've got to put a good product on the field. You've got to win. Your content, your asset is that play and I think the opportunity to make it a platform is there.”

Behdad Eghbali, Nov 2022

Revenue can increase significantly with regular CL football if you do it right, maybe even more. Arsenal have reportedly got £80m from just reaching the knockouts in the new format this season, so chances are you can likely get nearly £100m a season now for CL participation if you get to the quarters/semis, without even winning it. If you win it, you can now make up to £120m, which is what Real Madrid made last year as winners. The prize money is going up and will keep on doing so, so to make big revenues and profits, you have to be playing in the Champions League.

Plus of course, there’s all the commercial deals which come with it - bigger shirt sponsorship (£60m a year at least), a potential partnership with Jordan brand we’ve been linked with, dependent on CL football, (at least £50m a year if not more) and other big partnerships we could get, which in total could be worth at last say £250m a year cash. I don’t need to tell you that is is way more than you can ever make in player trading and does more to satisfy PSR than player sales ever will. Combine that with a bigger stadium, and based on recent revenues, we’d be potentially getting up to £800m a year in revenue, if not more, which you’ll never make just with player trading.

Jose Feliciano from Clearlake outlined their financial goals for Chelsea in 2022:

“We think we have an incredible opportunity to double revenue. We think we have one of the best media properties and sport properties in the world where we can get to a £1 billion of revenue.”

Jose Feliciano, Bloomberg 2022

If you think you can get to £1 billion in revenue just by selling players every year, or flipping young players, without regular CL football, big commercial deals and prize money, you’re living in a fantasy world. The biggest single year revenue in club football, over $1 billion, in 2024 came from Real Madrid, who won La Liga and the Champions League last year.

The richest clubs in the world and the biggest revenues come from teams who win regularly and play CL football and reach to the final stages regularly, that’s a cold hard fact. That’s just data. So it's very clear, if they want profit, which they do, they want to win.

Clearlake is just naive enough to believes winning comes by signing 25 kids and having them all mature together with no established players. Now it might do that, eventually, but that doesn’t make it a good plan, because there is SO much risk involved with this strategy, and its unnecessary risk.

If it works, it will take time and they’ll look very shrewd and smart, but there’s no guarantee of it. But being Private Equity investors, they’re risk takers, so they’ll likely stick with this even if it doesn’t work initially. Again, really frustrating for fans.

The annoying thing is, you can basically still do this plan, but if you add just 3-4 elite proven players, winners, leaders, you’ll get more success (and bigger revenues) now and still have all the same young talent we already have, in order to maintain success long term. It's SO obvious this is the solution, but Behdad thinks he knows better, which is very frustrating.

But the merits of the plan are almost a side issue. My criticism is less of the plan, but of the way this plan is being enacted.

The way the squad is being built, players are being managed by the Sporting Directors, fans are being treated, successive managers not being backed, and transfers in general are being conducted is shambolic, and not how a big club operates. The plan is not being executed well at all, that’s just fact, and it’s definitely not being executed by best in class people, which almost every fan can see now.

Chelsea may get Champions League football this year. We have a good first team and the Sporting Directors deserve credit for that. But that won’t invalidate the criticisms - in fact it will make them stronger, because it will show that if not for wasteful, poor spending and poor treatment of players we should have kept, and if we’d backed our manager properly, we could actually have done even better.

Losing players after 6 months, signing players we don’t need, gaining a reputation for treating players badly, not backing a manager properly in January in successive seasons, and patronising fans in briefings is poor performance and incompetence, and there’s no other word for it. Normally, in a well run organisation, there would be some accountability for this, including from Clearlake. Admit they don’t know it all and have made some big mistakes, learn the lessons and do better. Or better yet, sell to a proven winner who cares about the club, who wanted the club long before Clearlake, Todd Boehly.

There won’t be accountability of course, and that itself is another huge red flag.

This brings me neatly back to where I began. I’m not here venting or sitting in deep rage, just ranting without forethought or with pure emotion, in pure rage.

All the criticisms above have cold hard, evidence to support them. Not to mention, many many smart, rational, fans can now see this happening right in front of us. And despite what Clearlake and the Sporting Directors think, we’re not stupid or gullible.

The owners should have no doubt, these criticisms will remain true and relevant, and we’ll keep making them, no matter what we achieve on the pitch this season. Winning isn’t going to cover up the cracks, no matter how much they’ll try.

The Score