The London derby between West Ham and Chelsea this month promises to be one of the most unpredictable matches in recent memory. Why? Because both teams have been wildly inconsistent, and it’s impossible to predict which version of either side will show up.
So far this season, both West Ham and Chelsea have shared similar fortunes: we’ve both been beaten by Manchester City, and have also faced Crystal Palace, albeit with different results, we won, Chelsea drew. Chelsea’s season has taken a surreal turn, highlighted by their 6-2 win at Wolves, followed by a stumble in Europe against Servette which nearly cost them a Europa Conference place.
I really do think that Chelsea Football Club is a bit of a circus, and this is demonstrated no better than in their transfer activity. I know I’m biased and everything and I’m bound to write that in a West Ham publication, but seriously, look at it. According to transfermarkt.co.uk, they’ve spent over £200m on signings: Wolves’ Pedro Neto was the most expensive at £50m, but he’s had an inauspicious start, being taken off in the 1-1 draw against Palace.
Fellow Portuguese Joao Felix was another big-money signing in what might charitably be described as a ‘strange one’. He left Chelsea after an underwhelming six-month spell in 2023, went to Barcelona and Atletico Madrid, where he was also underwhelming, and they’ve now resigned him for way more than you might consider his market value to be (roughly £44m). Please explain this logic to me?
They’ve also dished out money on Leicester’s Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, Filip Jergensen from Villareal, Mike Penders from Genk and a bunch of others… the list goes on. Is there a single country that Chelsea haven’t signed a player from this season? I fully expect to read about the latest high-profile signing from Lesotho in the mid-season transfer window.
These transfers, however, don’t tell the full story – as whilst that £200m accounts for nine incomings, there are 13 additional players that have come to the club either on loan, or back to the club as their loan has ended. Ah yes, loans. It’s fair to say Chelsea have made some, er, creative use of the loans system.
With owner Todd Boehly having forked out over £1.3 billion (yes, that’s billion) in his time at the club, the vast number of loans in, some with obligation to buy, are a clever way of pushing the cost of these deals into the next window. I fully expect to see more of this, but honestly, the list of deals in and out is virtually off the page. And you thought we’d done a bit of business over the summer.
The Chelsea ‘philosophy’, if you can call it that, appears to be ‘if you get enough players in your squad, and ensure you’re creative with the system, success will come’. Of course, we all know that to be absolute nonsense – the word ‘disjointed’ has never had to do so much heavy lifting in relation to a football squad before. But that’s what you get when you’ve an owner with billions in the bank who wants to use a football club as his latest shiny toy, and this all points to a deeper problem with Chelsea – one around its identity.
Chelsea have an expensively-assembled squad, and lots of talent, but are they a team or a club? Or are they just some kind of trading company that you might as well see advertised when you click on a YouTube video, showing off the latest crazy deal? They will probably do quite well this season. Short term, I expect results to be mixed, long term they’ll probably gel a bit and likely end up in the top six. They’ll probably finish above us, but to be honest I really don’t care.
I’d much rather have a bit less success and be a West Ham fan. We may argue about whether the move to the Olympic Stadium was right, we may moan about our board. But I just feel that as a club, we still have a soul. Sometimes hard to spot, but it’s there.
When I look at Chelsea and think about us, I see the direction that we very definitely don’t want to go.
Chelsea Football Club is a play thing that is used by wealthy people. I think that it represents everything that is wrong with football today. The spending, the way they treat their people – Mauricio Pochettino left ‘by mutual consent’ and hardly looked upset with this development – and the way the club appears to be run is obscene.
It has the look of a club that is designed to be a profit-making entity, first and foremost, to the exclusion of everything else. That is not what football should be about. In the end, our derby will be more than just a clash of clubs; I think that it’s a meeting of two philosophies.
One club is chasing success with an expensive but disjointed squad, while the other is at least trying to hold onto its roots, for better or worse. And while Chelsea may finish higher in the league, I wouldn’t trade our places for anything. Being a West Ham fan is about more than just results, it’s about pride in who we are. I hope we win.
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