Gary Neville and Graeme Souness have reached the same verdict on Todd Boehly's spending spree at Chelsea this summer. The Blues' new owners welcomed eight players - one of whom has returned to their former club on loan and another who arrived on loan - to Stamford Bridge in their first transfer window, amounting to nearly £270million.
The aforementioned fee was spent on signing Raheem Sterling, Kalidou Koulibaly, Marc Cucurella, Wesley Fofana, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Carney Chukwuemeka, Gabriel Slonina and Denis Zakaria (loan fee). However, while Thomas Tuchel is now armed with a far stronger squad and closer to rivalling Liverpool and Manchester City, Neville and Souness aren't convinced by the west Londoners' latest acquisitions.
In his latest column for the Daily Mail, the former Liverpool defender and Sky Sports pundit detailed his confusion at Boehly spending big on 'bang-average players'. Souness wrote: "Unless you have a bottomless pit, the money they have spent on Marc Cucurella makes no sense, considering Chelsea already had Marcos Alonso, Ben Chilwell and, at a push, Reece James in the same position.
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"Is Cucurella that much of an upgrade on them? I don't think so. Chelsea only seem to have taken him because Manchester City wanted him."
"It generally takes new owners such as Boehly, who think they know it all, a couple of years to realise they actually don't," he added. "By which time they've spent hundreds of millions of pounds on bang-average players because they've been listening to the wrong advisers."
Souness' general take on Boehly spending at Chelsea falls in line with Neville's standpoint - signing players for the sake of laying down a marker to fans and rival clubs alike. Earlier this month, speaking on Sky Bet’s The Overlap, the former Manchester United defender said: "The American guy [Todd] Boehly, looks like he wants to play Football Manager.
"He’s wandering around a little bit and they’re a bit panicky now. They’re almost like bouncing around because it feels like he has to do something. You’re wondering, ‘Oh they’re coming in for [Frenkie] de Jong this morning’, because he feels like he has to do something, that pressure is on him.
"He wouldn’t have had that pressure if he’d have kept the people that have been there before and just let them operate for a year or two, but it’ll be an interesting season for Chelsea. I’m hearing his [Boehly] name too much.
"It feels like, it’s not to be disrespectful, you know he’s a prominent guy, he’s just bought the club and everything. He’s fronted a fund that’s paid two and a half billion quid, but to get rid of all that football operation that’s been unbelievable for that many years and come in and do it yourself, it does feel like Ed Woodward that to me. We’ll see it develop."
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