I played with 250 players at Watford – it must be absolute lunacy to be a Chelsea star right now after transfer splurge
IT must be crazy to be a Chelsea player right now — absolute lunacy.
Imagine being at a club where they have spent more than half a billion pounds in seven months since billionaire Todd Boehly took over.
A club where there are not just two or three quality players for every position but five or six.
Some long-serving Chelsea players might be feeling despondent — certainly concerned about their futures.
Two players come in and you think, ‘That’s good, we’re strengthening’. Then it’s eight players and you’re worried.
If you’re at Nottingham Forest and they have brought in 30 players, you must be feeling dizzy.
READ MORE IN FOOTBALL
For Chelsea to make eight signings in January, for almost £330million, having spent around £275m in the summer is a hell of a statement.
It also makes for confusion in the dressing room.
But sometimes a club which looks completely mental from the outside can be successful.
There was a lot of noise around Watford after we won promotion to the Premier League in 2015.
Most read in Football
The club brought in 16 players that summer and we had 25 different nationalities in our first-team squad.
BETTING SPECIAL - BEST FOOTBALL BETTING SITES IN THE UK
But it worked — we never even looked like being relegated that season.
And that wasn’t our maddest transfer window, which came when the Pozzo family took over in 2012.
I’d just come out of jail and on my first day back, we had FORTY FOUR senior players at the training ground.
There was a full-scale 11 v 11 game going on and 11 more working on team shape with the manager, Gianfranco Zola, and several others who were injured or recovering.
I reckon I shared dressing rooms with 250 players during a decade at Watford and played for 14 managers.
I was club captain for a lot of that time but, some of those players, I couldn’t tell you their names.
Not because I am forgetful but because I never knew them in the first place.
Recently, I was watching Brighton on the telly and their left-back was having a good game.
“Hang on,” I thought, “I played with that bloke in a friendly once.”
It was Pervis Estupinan, the Ecuadorian World Cup player.
I Googled him and realised he had been a Watford player for four years while I was there — but he’d never made a single competitive appearance for the club.
I met him once and he looked a good player but he couldn’t speak English and we never conversed.
He’d been on loan at four different Spanish clubs then they’d sold him to Villarreal for £15m.
At Watford, you’d often be in the gym and look up and see some random new player and just nod or ask them who the hell he was!
The Pozzos owned a few clubs, such as Udinese in Italy and Granada in Spain, so that first season or so, Watford might have 15 players on loan from those clubs before Ian Holloway went mad about it and they changed the rules.
Towards the end of my time there, I asked the club secretary who this ‘Cucho’ bloke was at training.
“I never saw him being announced on social media,” I said.
He told me: “That’s Cucho Hernandez, we announced him four years ago when we signed him. He’s been on loan ever since.”
I’m not saying this with disrespect to Estupinan or Hernandez, both really good players, or any other team-mates who passed like ships in the night.
It’s just reality at certain clubs.
And by winning promotion to the Premier League, staying up for five seasons and reaching an FA Cup final, we enjoyed one of the most successful spells in the club’s history — despite the apparent chaos.
Importantly, there was a core of long-serving players who held it together and gave the team an identity. Chelsea had that during the Roman Abramovich years.
Not just British players like John Terry and Frank Lampard but imports like Didier Drogba and Petr Cech too.
If you have that spine of a team, then you still have a ‘soul’.
And that is what Chelsea need to be careful of conserving now.
All of their January arrivals are quality players.
Enzo Fernandez has just won the World Cup and Mykhailo Mudryk is extremely exciting.
The concern is Chelsea may end up selling the likes of Mason Mount, Reece James and Trevoh Chalobah, who’ve come through the youth system and then may struggle for identity.
The team won’t have roots.
Also, I’d be worried about the seven and eight-year contracts the club are dishing out, so they can spread out the cost of huge transfer fees over several seasons to comply with Financial Fair Play.
I’m not sure what Graham Potter thinks of it but if I was a manager, I’d want players on three-year deals, ideally. Then after 18 months, you’re already looking to renegotiate.
Long-term contracts can take away a player’s hunger. They know they are made for life and don’t need to prove themselves.
To me that’s not healthy and Chelsea may end up with some very expensive players hanging around for years, not playing.
Also, Potter will be looking at his bench and seeing nine world-class players staring back, all demanding game time, while knowing he can only use five.
It’s a good problem to have and when you sign enough good players you usually end up successful.
READ MORE SUN STORIES
But first things first.
Potter needs to get them all together — and make sure they all know each other’s names.