In the race to the bottom, Chelsea are still ahead of Tottenham in the shambles shoot-out on most judges' cards.
Three managers, £600million spent on new players and nothing to show for it, boo is the colour and football is the shame at Stamford Bridge these days. Former Spurs messiah Mauricio Pochettino is waiting in the wings after reaching a verbal agreement to take over as head coach this summer. The escape clauses in his contract should make Colditz, Alcatraz and Shawshank look like picnics.
If Chelsea owner Todd Boehly didn't know it before, 12 months after he slipped into the cockpit following Roman Abramovich's evacuation, the penny should have dropped by now: Throwing money at the first team comes a distant third behind leadership and clear blue-sky thinking in the Premier League jungle.
Even Spurs, whose manifesto for keeping hold of England captain Harry Kane is running out of road like a tired soap opera script, should still be playing in Europe next season.
The Blues won't even get a gig in the Thursday Night Smorgasboard Cup. They are not even mathematically safe from relegation.
It only takes a glance at the back of Chelsea's matchday programme for the root cause of a buttock-clenchingly grim season to be laid bare.
There are 33 players in the first-team pool, and two-thirds of them are unhappy every week because they aren't in the team.
Graham Potter, the hand-picked architect chosen to oversee a “long-term” project which lasted six months, found it impossible to get a tune out of a squad with so many guitars, banjos and ukuleles all demanding a place in the band.
And never, in the field of sporting combat, has so much been spent on so many players when none of them can hit the back end of a bus with a carpet beater.
Raheem Sterling was England's player of the tournament at Euro 2020, but he has had a season more forgettable than amnesia itself.
Mykhailo Mudryk arrived to widespread gloating that Chelsea had gazumped Arsenal to the Ukrainian forward's £89million signature. He is yet to get off the mark after 647 minutes of playing time.
And if Joao Felix, whose loan fee and wages amount to £15million-plus for a four-month stint, isn't the answer, then what was the question?
Under Potter's predecessor Thomas Tuchel, £97.5million striker Romelu Lukaku may have lost his way like a pensioner trying to find the bus home from a day trip to the seaside. But Chelsea starved him of crosses like a Tory clot in a marginal at the ballot box in the next election.
Their joint-third leading goalscorer, after 44 games in all competitions this season, plays for Arsenal. And Jorginho left in January.
The class of 2023 is on course to be Chelsea's worst team in Premier League history. Even in the cluster of 2015-16, when Jose Mourinho's second coming at Stamford Bridge was cut short at Christmas, they managed to reach 50 points.
And after five consecutive defeats yielding just one goal, caretaker manager Frank Lampard's reputation is taking a hit.
Lampard has now lost 13 of his last 14 games as a manager at Everton and Chelsea – nine in the Premier League, two domestic cup ties and two defeats by European Cup holders Real Madrid. He didn't start the fire, but Lampard has been no Red Adair.
After his side's 2-0 win at the Bridge on Wednesday night, Brentford head coach Thomas Frank expressed his surprise that Chelsea's starting XI contained no recognised strikers. In other words, Lampard picked the wrong team.
On another desultory night for the Blues, there was only one Super Frank on parade – and it was the Bees' knees, not the forlorn figure in the home dugout.
Things may get worse before they get better for Chelsea. Four of their last six games are against the top four.
And although Boris Johnson will pass a lie detector test before the patrons of Fulham Broadway turn on Lampard, he needs to get the hell out of a shambles, leave Poch Spice to clear up the mess and rebuild his reputation at a club with more sense than money.
