Chelsea Face A New Transfer Reality

With a new financial climate knowing who will next wear the Chelsea shirt is difficult to predict

The failure to sign Steven Pienaar this week is highly embarassing as an only slightly above average Premier League player has chosen to join our bitter rivals Spurs. However this embarrassing saga should not concern Chelsea fans as much as our fraility in our transfer prospects that it exposes.

The recession and the maturing of the relationship between Chelsea and Roman Abramovich has seen a period of austerity at Stamford Bridge, which combined with a new transfer landscape lead by the new billionaires leaves the club with some difficult decisions in the coming transfer windows.

Without unlimited funds from Abramovich or a 70,000 sell out crowd  to provide the revenues to support the extortionate wages and transfer fees in the Premier League, we are now back facing the economic realities of running football as a business.

The realities of competing against sides with unlimited funds whose actions distort the dynamics of the  transfer market is not as much fun when you are on the receiving end.

Things used to be so different, we used to be the villians of the transfer market peace, at the beginning of the Roman revolution we embarked on a spending spree that enraged the football world as we put together the squad that would win the Premier League three times in six years.

Chelsea were linked to nearly every player in Europe and beyond and even when the big names were snaffled expensive flops such as Adrian Mutu, Andriy Shevchenko and Sebastian Veron proved that there is more to football than your transfer fee.

The new transfer reality is hitting Chelsea hard, the number of quality players is small and with so many clubs chasing glory wages and transfer fees continue to escalate as the clubs compete for the top talent. Even players that are solid Premier League players like Steven Pienaar are able to demand wages approaching £100k a week.

Without the infrastructure to compete on merit financially with the top clubs in Europe the reality is that we will either need Roman to open the purse strings and fight a battle of the billionaires or readjust our expectations that may anger the legions of fans who have grown used to unadulterated success.

The investment in the youth team in the past decade is desperately required to start  bearing fruit in the next few years and players such as McEachran, Bruma and one or two others could find themselves with opportunities that were denied other talented youth players who grew up in the wrong period of th club’s history.

The new transfer reality is here but Chelsea fans may not like what they see.