While Chelsea's mass influx of signings over the past couple of transfer windows have been heavily criticised, it's clear to see the club's ambition with young players.
It's approaching 12 months since Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital completed their takeover of the west London club from Roman Abramovich and in that time, over £600million has been spent on new signings at Stamford Bridge. Only five of the 17 new signings have been over the age of 23 when putting pen to paper.
Chelsea's focus on youngsters
Below are the players Chelsea have signed over the past 12 months that are 23 years old (at the time of signing) or below:
Enzo Fernandez (22), Wesley Fofana (21), Mykhailo Mudryk (22), Benoit Badiashile (21), Noni Madueke (20), Malo Gusto (19), Carney Chukwuemeka (18), Andrey Santos (18), David Datro Fofana (20), Joao Felix (23), Gabriel Slonina (18), Cesare Casadei (20).
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Some of the above players have started better than others, while a handful of them haven't been given a fair shot in the first team just yet. Either way, Chelsea are planning for the future with their recruitment but some of them are deemed strong enough to help the first-team now.
Recently, interim head coach Frank Lampard has been choosing some of his more experienced players, like Cesar Azpilicueta and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, although they can be put down to injury troubles for Reece James and Kai Havertz. In Graham Potter's last game in charge of the club – the 2-0 defeat at home to Aston Villa at the start of last month – the average age of the Chelsea XI was 25.1 and that was with the likes of Kalidou Koulibaly (31), Kepa Arrizabalaga (28) and Mateo Kovacic (28) all playing.
The average age of Chelsea's 32-man first-team squad (as per the squad listed on Transfermarkt) is 25.4, which considering the sheer amount of players they have available to them is quite remarkable. In order to get the best out of the young contingent within the squad, the decision over who becomes the next permanent head coach is absolutely crucial.
At the moment, it looks as if that man will be Mauricio Pochettino. The Argentine has held multiple rounds of talks with Chelsea over the vacant managerial position at Stamford Bridge and those negotiations have been described to football.london as positive and full of progress. No deal has been agreed yet between the two parties but there is a confidence from both sides that the 51-year-old will be sat in the Stamford Bridge dugout by the time the 2023/24 season gets underway.
Pochettino has been out of a job in football since departing Paris Saint-Germain last summer. In that time, he worked with some of football's biggest names, including the likes of Lionel Messi, Neymar and Kylian Mbappe. To get the best out of such egos, you have to have a bit about you in regards to man-management and Pochettino has expertise in abundance in that area.
However, it's his work with young players that has caught the eye over the years, particularly at Tottenham. The Argentine coach got the very best out of Dele Alli, who has since fallen from grace under different managers at Spurs and Everton. How to approach different people with different personalities is imperative for Pochettino, as he explained back in June 2020 when asked about how he goes about his work with younger players.
"First of all, you need to know the young lad you have in front [of you]," Pochettino said on the High Performance podcast almost three years ago. "Because they all come from different backgrounds. You need to inspire Dele Alli, for sure, in a different way than you would inspire Harry Kane or Hugo Lloris because they're different ages.
"When you know and have the capacity like a group to identify the profile of the player, to know every single situation that happened in the past. When they were a child, when they were growing up they came from Brazil, they came from Ireland, they came from Korea. You cannot inspire all in the same way.
"The circumstances are so important because all of them are in a different circumstance in the moment when you are going to face them and to talk with them. The reality changes every day and you need to be updated every day about what is going on inside them.
"That is why genuinely we spend more than 12 hours on the training ground. It's how important, not only my closest staff, but all of the staff. The first thing when we arrived to Espanyol or Southampton or Tottenham was to work with the club's staff.
"The club's staff need to understand us; how we are, how we need to work. We need to listen to them, how they love to work or the habits they have. We need to centralise or to try and create our own philosophy. If not, it's impossible because the kitman, or the chef, or the physio, or the doctor, like the assistant manager or the manager need to believe and be in our own way. If we believe in different ways to work or to do things then we are going to crash at a certain point."
Such comments make good reading for Chelsea's young core of players. The likes of Madueke, Mudryk, Fernandez, Badiashile and so on, who look as if they have the talent to be a first-team player at the club for years to come. There is also set to be a huge clear out of players at Stamford Bridge which is likely to see some of the older and more senior squad members leave the club.
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