However much Jose Mourinho may claim that last Sunday’s shellacking from Manchester City was "a fake," the bare facts are that Chelsea have played six games (two EPL, one Community Shield and three pre-season friendlies) thus far this season and haven’t won a single one of them.
So what, or who, is to blame for The Blues’ sloth-like start?
For one, they’re knackered. The18 regularly raised the point last season that Chelsea were overly reliant on a core of players who would surely tire as the season wore on. And while it never caught up with them last year, it certainly has this. Think about their biggest under-achievers so far this season: Terry, Ivanovic and Hazard. The first two played every single minute of last season, while Hazard started all 38 Premier League games and a further seven Champions League ties. They looked leggy towards the end of last season but limped across the line, and they’ve started 2015-16 in the same vein.
For two, Chelsea and Jose Mourinho are wrestling with the ever-present problem of champions: re-motivating themselves to win back-to-back titles. Sir Alex Ferguson achieved it on multiple occasions with Manchester United, but never denied the difficulty of re-instilling the hunger back in his players. Witness Manchester City over the last four years for further evidence.
“Jose Mourinho has won back-to-back titles before” we hear you protest. And you’re right, he has: on three separate occasions with three different teams. But there’s another universal truth to Mourinho’s managerial career: he rarely does more than three seasons at a club. Indeed, only at Chelsea has he lasted longer than three years, and then only just. There’s just something about Mourinho’s temperament that starts to grate, and it’s usually in the third season that things begin to sour. He gets agitated, irrational and lashes out at unsuspecting targets for no apparent reason.
Sound familiar?
The final factor in The Blues stumbling out of the blocks is that almost every other team in the league has strengthened while Chelsea’s squad, to date, has stood still. Their net spend so far this transfer window is -$3.5 million, while the likes of Manchesters City and United, Liverpool and even Newcastle have spent gargantuan sums strengthening their squads. The mammoth TV deal coming next season has further leveled the playing field within the EPL, lessening the impact of the extra cash the “Top Four” rake in from regular Champions League football. Just look at Swansea, who enticed Andre Ayew to the Liberty Stadium despite the presence of more fashionable suitors; or Xherdan Shaqiri rocking up at Stoke.
That general rising of the tide makes it harder for the West Londoners to bully their way past Swansea and their ilk with the same starting 11 week in, week out, especially when your top scorer’s hamstrings are made of biscuit and your back-up is Radamel Falcao. But luckily for Chelsea, and Jose, Roman Abramovic still has remarkably deep pockets. And with less than a fortnight of the transfer window to go, the purse strings are being loosened: Barcelona winger Pedro is on his way to Stamford Bridge as we type, while a drawn-out pursuit of Everton’s John Stones is thought to be nearing its conclusion.
Can Chelsea overcome their lackadaisical start to the season? Of course they can, almost certainly starting with a brutal backlash against West Brom this weekend. But they’ll need to strengthen a squad too shallow to challenge on multiple fronts year-in, year-out, and re-instill that winning hunger within their senior players if they want to win back-to-back Premier League titles.
Chelsea’s money men look like they’ve started work on remedying the former; only time will tell if Jose Mourinho himself has the motivation to address the latter.
