The thing is with this Chelsea team is that their players have been bought for it all to come together around the 2027-28 season onwards.
Colwill’s 22, Badiashile 24, Gusto 22, Caiceido 24, Fernandez 24, Santos 21, Palmer 23, Garnacho 21, Gittens 21, Estevao 18, Pedro 24, Delap 22, Guiu 19, George 19, Lavia 21, Hato 19, Acheampong 19… the average age of their entire squad is just 23.7.
This Chelsea team are decent and can play very well in individual games but, being such a young side, they’re going to be inconsistent. That’s just the nature of young players and young teams, it’ll never not be the case. Even having around 3 young players in a starting 11 will bring risks of a poor performance if they all have one of their inconsistent games, but Chelsea can have as many as 8 young players on the pitch with sometimes only Sanchez, Cucurella and James being over 25.
It’s going to take this Chelsea team a few years to hit its peak yet, so why are they not giving Maresca the time to see it through? It makes no sense at all. He’s a coach in the same mould as his team; he isn’t going to be at his best yet, it’s his first big job, he’s an up-and-coming young coach who’s worked under Pep when City won the treble so has a good base to work from. He got Leicester promoted with 97 points, that has only been bettered three times in the last decade and one of those coaches who bettered it is now at Bayern.
In the games Chelsea play well, I always think that you can see how good Chelsea could be in a few years when all these players are in their prime and are more rounded, better, more consistent, more experienced players with Maresca being the same as he’d have learnt more himself and they’d be playing at that level more consistently.
Just makes no sense at all for me.
