Emmanuel Petit is getting quite the reputation as an outspoken pundit, especially when it comes to Chelsea, and his appearance on the Seaman Says podcast via Betway was no exception.
Petit was happy to lay into his former club on a few different topics, chiefly their transfer policy over the summer.
Chelsea have spent vast amounts of money and conducted an unprecedented amount of business, both incoming and outgoing. We come into this season with a squad that’s entirely different to the one we had two years ago. But is it any better? Is it even better than the one that lined up this time a year ago? It’s certainly younger, and definitely cheaper in terms of wage bill.
But have the sporting directors improved their team’s chances of winning trophies? Petit has his doubts. According to him (and, to be fair, every other former footballer we’ve heard from, one thing you can’t put a price on is the stability a team needs in the dressing room if they want to achieve anything significant:
“What Chelsea is doing, this is something I don’t understand. The stability on the bench, stability in dressing room. It’s very difficult to walk into this environment. It’s difficult because you need competition to earn your place in the first XI, but when there is too much competition, there are no links between players. You don’t think about the team, you think about yourself first. It’s quite difficult to get unity with the players.”
It must have been a remarkably challenging summer for new manager Enzo Maresca, and he must be delighted to have the window closed and the majority of players moved on so he can really get to work.
But among those departed players were some who played an important role for Chelsea last season – including fan favourite Conor Gallagher. Petit cast some very significant doubts over that move too:
“You sell Gallagher, one of the best players from last season, for a cheap price tag £35m. And when you look at the money they spent for the last three or four seasons, I’m thinking, what the hell?”
We’ve had our doubts about the move too, especially when you look at the profiles of the players who are nominally replacing him. Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, Joao Felix and Romeo Lavia are the 3 players most likely to hoover up Conor’s minutes from last season. But do any of them do what he does? Not really. They may be better at some things, but none have that crowd-raising pressing energy that saved us so often last year.
