There have been two major consistent themes, at Chelsea Football Club, during the Todd Boehly/Clearlake Capital era. The first is transfer window super spending sprees, where the overall strategy and objective is anything but clear. The second is playing overall mid-table football. Starting left back Marc Cucurella, in stating that he’s happy at the club, still called for them to develop “stability.”
Chelsea have topped everybody else’s spending and broken multiple records in all the transfer windows of the Boehly era.
The result has been chaotic transfer windows, with a flurry of comings and goings, and in the end, the squad ends up at a size that is eventually over-bloated. Cucurella is right that they need stability. He could have said that they need an identity and coherence too.
In an interview with Spanish news agency EFE (h/t 101 Great Goals) the Spanish fullback said: “I’m happy, I think the coach we have is very good, he has very clear ideas.
“We’ve come from years of changes of coaches, let’s see if we can get stability without many changes, and that the manager can transmit his ideas.
“We need stability, we have very high-level players and hopefully we can have that patience that is needed, that calm, so that everything goes well. We have the level, we just need stability and for the coaches and players to be allowed to work in order to do something important.”
He’s right, the southwest London club has a ton of high level quality players on the roster. At Spain, Cucurella has seen what can happen when you have a cohesive structure, with well defined roles and an overall identity. Spain are the current holders of the men’s European championship, men’s Olympic gold medal and women’s World Cup.
Cucurella later admitted, during the interview, finding stability is tricky when there are so many new faces. He discussed the concept of building team chemistry.
“It’s true that it’s difficult,” the former Brighton man continued. “Here [with Spain] everything is much easier to create a good atmosphere. At Chelsea I try, but it’s a time of change in which many players leave and others come.
“One of the keys to success at the Euros was the good group we had.
“In these tournaments you’re together all day, we have to put up with each other and if we hadn’t gotten along, it would have been difficult. Creating a good atmosphere comes naturally to me.”
The comments made by Cucurella will certainly resonate with much of the football world because no one, anywhere, really seems to know what CFC is actually doing right now.
Paul M. Banks is the Founding Editor of The Sports Bank. He’s also the author of “Transatlantic Passage: How the English Premier League Redefined Soccer in America,” and “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry.”
He currently contributes to USA Today’s NFL Wires Network. His past bylines include the New York Daily News, Sports Illustrated and the Chicago Tribune. His work has been featured in numerous outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, the Washington Post and ESPN. You can follow him on Linked In and Twitter.