Chelsea have a billion-dollar team, but do they have a plan?

The club’s owners have invested a fortune in new players. But there’s a sense the squad has been assembled without a clear blueprint

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On the one hand, Chelsea were much the better side for the last half hour of the first half at West Ham on Sunday. They scored an equaliser, missed a penalty and had plenty of other chances. Raheem Sterling looked back to something near his best, Enzo Fernández glided about finding space and angles and Carney Chukwuemeka scored a very fine goal, his first for the club. On the other, they lost 3-1, meaning they have won only one of their last 16 games.

It’s not quite 15 months since the Clearlake consortium fronted by the US businessman Todd Boehly completed its takeover of Chelsea, since when 24 players have been signed at an outlay of $1.1bn. Soccer has never seen anything remotely like it. Of the 23 players in the matchday squad when Chelsea won the Champions League in 2021, only two were in the squad at West Ham on Sunday. A team that had won the sport’s most significant club prize, that looked only a few tweaks from being a consistent challenger for major honours, has been transformed into a chaos of potential – at a cost of over a billion dollars.

This is an extract from Soccer With Jonathan Wilson, a weekly look at the game in Europe. To subscribe, just visit this page and follow the instructions.