When Chelsea committed £106m for Enzo Fernandez, it was not for his prowess as a one-man defence. And yet, for the club who have spent too much and are achieving too little, there was something sadly symbolic about the sight of Borussia Dortmund’s winner.
There was the most expensive signing an English club has ever made. And there, accelerating past him, was Karim Adeyemi, perhaps the next example of the smart recruitment that Dortmund have been indelibly associated with for years. Chelsea were supposed to be the seasoned European campaigners, the Champions League winners two years ago, but there was a certain naivety as they left Fernandez alone on the halfway line when they had a corner. It was hard to imagine Thomas Tuchel’s battle-hardened winners gifting a goal in such circumstances in their glory run in 2021. Graham Potter’s flaky team, however, found a way to lose.
And when the electric Adeyemi broke, he had only Fernandez to beat before he could round Kepa Arrizabalaga and slot the ball into the empty net. It had already been raucous in the Ruhr Valley but the volume went up. Chelsea made plenty of noise in the transfer market but Borussia Dortmund did so in their giant backyard. Their seventh straight win positions them to reach the Champions League quarter-finals. It is often said that Chelsea’s £600m outlay cannot buy them a win, but here it could not even purchase them a draw when there was a case for arguing a stalemate would still have represented one of their best results of the season.
But even that eluded them. They have two victories in 14 games now. It would be a wretched return for a side with much lower outlay and talk of long-termism should not obscure how lamentable their present is. Fernandez looked the fall guy, caught in the wrong position when he should have had support; otherwise, he was far from the problem and, with a curling shot, he threatened an injury-time equaliser.
But he has signed for a club where standards have slipped. There is a case for arguing this was one of Chelsea’s better performances in the last four months, and they still lost. They denied Dortmund a shot on target for almost an hour and had seemed in the ascendancy in the second half until Adeyemi struck. They could rue the finest of margins, when Joao Felix hit the bar and when Emre Can executed a magnificent goal-line clearance as, between them, he and keeper Gregor Kobel stopped Kalidou Koulibaly’s shot from crossing the line.
Yet the fact is that Chelsea have now scored four goals in their last nine games. Without at least one, probably two and ideally three at Stamford Bridge in three weeks’ time, their season will be destined to end in failure. The Champions League will not provide a silver lining if Chelsea cannot find the back of the net.
An inability to apply the final touch has been the recurring theme. They did not test Kobel for 55 minutes, until Reece James’s free kick was parried. And yet it was not uneventful. Chelsea had the ball in the net before then. Thiago Silva touched in an earlier free kick from James but his hand was soon up in apology; the handball brought a booking.
Dortmund had urgency and impishness, the impudence of Julian Brandt allowing his to show his tricks, the elusiveness of Jude Bellingham meaning he was invariably available, the ambition of Edin Terzic apparent in his tactics. Dortmund kept trying. Sebastien Haller fired a shot into the side netting. Adeyemi skied one. Marius Wolf whipped his effort just wide.
Chelsea came closer before the break. They could call upon the eliminated all-stars – both Mykhailo Mudryk and Felix were knocked out of the competition in the group stages before changing clubs – and they combined. Felix released the electric Mudryk and Nico Schlotterbeck was required to make a wonderful last-ditch challenge.
The Ukrainian brought raw pace to the left flank, the Portuguese direct dribbling to his duties as a number 10. All he lacked was the precision of finish, blazing over after a one-two with Hakim Ziyech and latching on to Kai Havertz’s pass to lash a shot against the bar. There was a period when he looked the best player on the pitch.
But he was not the decisive one. Bought from RB Salzburg at 20, Adeyemi is the type of signing Chelsea are trying to make as they attempt to identify the stars of the future. But at Dortmund, they can be the stars of the present, too. A team captained by the 19-year-old Bellingham are a clean sheet away from the quarter-finals of the Champions League. A club who have burned their way through more than half a billion in the transfer market are a defeat or a draw away from failure on all fronts this season.
