Chelsea may have won the Club World Cup, but here’s what Blues must do to become Champions League contenders

Chelsea’s return to the UEFA Champions League after a two-year absence felt well-timed, spending their time away rebuilding and checking off a few important items on the list of wannabe title contenders. A youth-focused squad led by a star talisman, in this case Cole Palmer? Check. Notable silverware in the form of the UEFA Conference League and the Club World Cup? Check again. It felt like the perfect foundation for a young team eager to introduce themselves in the most competitive tournament they have played in – until it all went wrong in a 3-1 loss at Bayern Munich on Wednesday.

Enzo Maresca’s version of the Blues did not leave an impressive first impression in the Champions League, and there is an argument to be made that the schedule did them no favors. Upcoming games against Benfica, Ajax, Qarabag or Atalanta may be less revealing than a match against German juggernauts Bayern, but five games into their season, it is becoming clear that exploiting Chelsea’s weaknesses may not be an activity reserved solely for teams headlined by Harry Kane. The Blues do not have a squad capable of competing for Premier League and Champions League titles at this moment in time, their inconsistent track record to start this season revealing as much.

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In a post-match interview with TNT, Palmer argued that Chelsea were “not coming [to the Champions League] for it to be a learning curve,” but the Blues may need to temper their own expectations. That is not to suggest that Chelsea’s Champions League campaign is doomed from the start or that they are hopeless against Europe’s heavy-hitters – a look back to their Club World Cup triumph two months ago against Paris Saint-Germain would suggest otherwise. Linear growth is no guarantee, though, and nothing is more revealing than a season balancing responsibilities in the Premier League and the Champions League.

The start of this campaign, coupled with a year’s worth of performances under Maresca, showcases a genuine inconsistency for a young team. While defensive mistakes proved costly against Bayern on Wednesday in Munich, it is their attack that perhaps exemplifies their irregularity more than anything else – and showcases their greatest area of improvement.

Chelsea’s unresolved attacking operation

Palmer is the one guarantee in Chelsea’s attack, with Maresca rotating heavily through his front four to start the season. The glass-half-full argument is that the manager has the privilege to do so with the Blues’ bloated squad, but it feels more likely that Maresca is mixing and matching because it is unclear who makes up Chelsea’s best front four, with most of his combinations delivering mixed results. That was true on Wednesday at Bayern, when a quartet of Palmer, Enzo Fernandez, Pedro Neto and Joao Pedro produced four shots between them on an unimpressive offensive outing for the team as a whole. Joao Pedro was particularly ineffective, taking 43 touches in 90 minutes but failing to take a single shot along the way.

Jamie Gittens, Liam Delap, Estevao Willian and Facundo Buonanotte have each notched starts in advanced positions to start the season, but no matter the attacking quartet of choice, the output has been paltry for Chelsea. The Blues have not cracked two expected goals, excluding penalties, in a single game this season outside of their 5-1 win over relegation contenders West Ham United. Outside of Wednesday’s loss at Bayern, in which they posted just nine shots, they have managed 12-plus shots in each of their games, their less-than-ideal expected goals tally along the way suggesting a difficulty generating enough high-quality chances.

That’s without considering the fact that Palmer might be a streaky player himself. The England international has two goals in his last two games but before that, he had just four goals in 36 games for club and country across all competitions. The breakdown is not all that inspiring, either – three of them came during the Club World Cup and the fourth was a penalty against Liverpool in Premier League action. Chelsea slid from a second-place spot on the Premier League table at Christmas to a fourth-place finish by May during Palmer’s cold streak, some of which can be attributed to a lack of cohesion in the Blues’ attack. Palmer’s teammates, though, seem unable to pick up the slack, which leads us to the underlying issue – their transfer strategy.

Chelsea’s scattered transfer approach

Chelsea’s transfer strategy since BlueCo’s takeover has been endlessly entertaining, but whether or not it has been successful is an entirely different story, even when considering their Conference League and Club World Cup titles.

The Blues’ patchwork attacking contingent is a direct result of the higher-ups’ scattered approach to signing new players, which seems more like an excited attempt to scoop up as many players on strangely structured deals as possible, choosing quantity over quality in the process. Each of Chelsea’s newer attacking recruits have their own skills but few of them genuinely make the team better; in essence, they have (perhaps unintentionally) stocked up on depth rather than looking for great complements to Palmer that would take the team to the next level.

Chelsea are not the first team to make this type of strategic error but the risks of this approach are perfectly on display – they have assembled a squad good enough to win Europe’s third-best club competition and FIFA’s flawed new club championship, but not one that can realistically finish higher than fourth in the Premier League. It is also a roster that lives up to Chelsea’s hypothesis that they have laid some of the foundations for a special team in the near future, but one obviously stuck in the purgatory of promise and end product. Climbing out of that in-between will take time – and an actually coherent transfer strategy – but until then, expect Chelsea to keep churning out performances just like this one.