Liverpool legend Graeme Souness has delivered a brutal verdict on the transfer business conducted by Chelsea.
The Reds had a relatively quiet transfer window compared to their Premier League rivals. Darwin Nunez, Calvin Ramsay and Fabio Carvalho were all signed by mid-June, while loan arrival Arthur Melo was brought in late on.
Chelsea, on the other hand, signed 11 new players under the new ownership of Todd Boehly, spending close to £280million. Raheem Sterling, Marc Cucurella, Wesley Fofana, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Denis Zakaria, Carney Chukwuemeka, Kalidou Koulibaly, Cesare Casadei, Gabriel Slonina, Eddie Beach, Omari Hutchinson and Zak Sturge have all been signed by the London club this summer, with some going back out on loan or being added to the academy ranks.
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Souness, who made 347 appearances for Liverpool and won 11 major trophies, has taken aim at several of the deals conducted by Chelsea. The 69-year-old went on to criticise the decisions taken by Chelsea’s new owner, Boehly, as well as explaining why he thinks some deals didn’t need to happen.
“Abramovich went on to be a hugely successful football club owner but on his first day at Chelsea, a few months after our encounter, he surrounded himself with so-called experts who knew nothing about football. He wasted a lot of money because of it,” Souness wrote for the Mail Online .
“His successor, the American Todd Boehly, seems to be making the same mistakes. In his hurry and enthusiasm to get Chelsea supporters onside, he has just spent the thick end of £300million in the summer transfer market, appearing to do all the business himself. I do hope I'm wrong in that assessment.
“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.
“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.
“I get that they needed centre backs because of Antonio Rudiger and Andreas Christensen going and having 37-year-old Thiago Silva, an age when your game can fall off a cliff inside a month. But £70million for Wesley Fofana? At 21, he only brings potential.
“The upside to signing Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang on deadline day is that Chelsea now have a striker who has scored goals in the Premier League, something notoriously hard to find.
“The downside is that he's 33 and has a dodgy gene somewhere. Mikel Arteta did very well for Arsenal, and for his own longevity as manager, by getting Aubameyang out of the building and seems to have found an upgrade in Gabriel Jesus.
“If you want to indulge Aubameyang, then you risk heading down the same road as Arsenal did with that fool Mesut Ozil, who got in his armchair the minute Arsene Wenger put him on a ridiculously inflated salary.
“Boehly certainly seems convinced he knows what he's doing, even though Marina Granovskaia and Petr Cech, who provided the football knowledge for Abramovich, have had enough and are off.”
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