“Might as well…” Chelsea’s dodgy reasoning for not signing a striker explained | OneFootball

The London is Blue podcast had CFC Central for their regular scouting show, and he had some really interesting insight into how Chelsea got themselves into a situation where they’re currently without a striker.

Nicolas Jackson and Marc Guiu got injured in the same game, and suddenly the Blues are forced to play someone out of position. How does a well constructed squad get to this point?

According to CFC Central, it was just a failure to sign any of the top targets last summer which have put the club in a bad position:

“In terms of when you’re scouting and you want to reinforce a certain position, let’s say the club usually has a tier 1, tier 2, tier 3 and tier 4 signing. And in our case I think we had Samu [Aghehowa], we had Jhon Duran, we had [Victor] Osimhen as well and we failed to get number one, number two number three, if you can’t get the top 3 targets, might as well let the centre forward hang until we’ve figured out who the next guy’s going to be.”

Chelsea too focused on future; not enough on present

Marc Guiu looks to have injured himself against West Ham.

Of course you don’t want to spend money on someone you don’t rate, but this excuse doesn’t really wash for us. If you want another run at your top targets next summer then get a loan player in. Or don’t waste money on someone like Deivid Washington if he’s not going to be good enough.

There’s building for the future, and then there’s neglecting the present. It’s always going to be a balance of the two, but the evident problem with this whole model and how far forward it looks is that it’s making it impossible for the team to succeed in the short term – and that in turn hurts out prospects going forward.