Obviously after the 3-0 defeat to Brentford we’re going to see a lot of reactive posts over the international break. Talking about our defence, recruitment, sporting directors, Xabi Alonso, players, writing off our season and so on. People are absolutely entitled to their views and to be frustrated. No one likes seeing performances like the one against Brentford, and we just capitulated after they scored their first goal. Its simply not good enough. Xabi Alonso didn’t make excuses either, he called out the lack of standards, poor mentality and inability to perform over a 90 mins, and didn’t even hide behind injuries.
But the defeat by Brentford was a wake up call for me as a fan too.
I think that I, like many, got seduced into believing we could jump straight from one of our worst seasons for decades, awful mentality, low confidence, poor performance, fragile belief, awful squad build to immediately finish in the top 2 or 3.
Despite not signing a midfielder we did overall improve the squad in the summer in my view. The personnel in attack and defence, and in goal, is stronger. We also added some much needed experience and leaders, vocal players who’ve won it all to reset the culture. And of course we hired a proven elite manager in Xabi Alonso.
But what happened is what often happens with us - and I’m guilty of it at times too - anything positive, we immediately think we’re gonna win the title, and all the problems are gone. When issues like we’ve had don’t get fixed overnight.
People talk about winning the title under Conte when we finished 10th with one game a week - the difference then was we had a squad of winners and elite players, who’d won the Premier League only 12 months before. The winning culture was established at the club and we had leaders and winners through the squad.
The reality is we had a LOT of work to do after last season and it was never realistic to do it all in one summer. Part of that work wasn’t even on the pitch, it was rebuilding confidence, changing the culture of the club, changing the mentality, essentially rebuilding us as an elite club. That can’t be done in one summer.
What the Brentford game - the second half especially - showed me is that it’s going to take more time than many expected to reset the culture and build belief back into some of these players.
Levi Colwill showed this most of all for me. In his post match interview he looked as depressed and downbeat as I’ve ever seen a player. Head down, monotone, no confidence, no energy, no belief, not even frustration or anger. That said to me that that underbelly of low confidence and heads going down from last season, is still there. Part of the cultural reset is rebuilding these players’ confidence, belief and developing some toughness and character, and its clearly not a quick job.
There’s still an underlying lack of confidence and belief, fear it could all go wrong, and a tendency to lose our heads in certain situations. Looking at that in contrast to several other teams, some with less talent than us, you can only conclude that although we have a lot of talent, that character, those foundations of belief and mentality, still aren’t there.
This would be more of an issue if we didn’t have an elite manager and proven winner like Xabi Alonso, or experienced winners and leaders like Jordan Henderson, Danny Welbeck, Maxene Lacroix and Emi Martinez. These will all be absolutely key, and a massive difference from last season. These players have been through tough times, bad form and big defeats, and come back from them. They’re leaders and will be able to shepherd the younger players through. In time they can help develop more belief, character, resilience, unity and fighting spirit in the younger players, which is key into making them winners.
Henderson, Welbeck and of course Xabi himself will be there during the next 3 weeks of the international break. Players like Levi, Moises Caicedo, Joao Pedro, Estevao Willian, Reece James, Marco Palestra, Pep Chavarria (another experienced head) will all be there too. Even if they can’t train there’s a chance to do some real work in terms of character building, coming back from setbacks, building up confidence and belief, and changing the culture.
There’s that old maxim that you learn more from defeats than success, and although no one wants to lose games, this is an opportunity for everyone to assess where we really are, the underlying problems and really get to work on them. I don’t believe the biggest problem is recruitment or tactics - we’ve played 4TB and 3ATB and the same issues have come up - but the character, the belief and resilience of this side, the culture at the club. Xabi Alonso recognised this early on, we signed some experienced heads, so its already being worked on, but it can’t be changed overnight.
In reality, we are probably where Arsenal were in about 2021 under Mikel Arteta. Some good talent, lots of promise, but the winning culture, mentality and toughness still weren’t there. It took time for them to change that at Arsenal, indeed it took 3 years for Klopp to build it at Liverpool. All had an elite manager, all needed to culturally reset their respective clubs, all were given time to do it.
The manager, Xabi Alonso, hinted he recognises all these issues in his post match press conference after Brentford:
“We knew it was a process, it’s five games. In a competitive Premier League, every game is going to be hard.”
There isn’t a magic fix unfortunately. No player or manager is going to come in and provide an instant quick fix to make us title contenders or consistent overnight, not Pep Guardiola, not anyone. As I’ve said many times, the path to being a title winning club is long and requires stability and backing an elite manager, including through tough periods like this.
I know many have said “we’ve spent £1.8b in 4 years under these owners, we should be competing now”. Yes, we have and we should. But that project of 2022-2026 failed. Tons of money was wasted and poor managerial hires made. A new manager can come in and suddenly make us into title winners in one summer because we spent a lot of money.
Indeed, this summer just gone, was a tacit admission that the project of 2022-2026 failed. To me, that’s over. They messed up, they made ton of mistakes, they set the club back from where it should be given the investment. Sadly that can’t be fixed overnight. That’s just the reality.
This summer, this season, is starting almost from scratch. 14 of the current squad weren’t even at the club in 2024, and the youth only policy has been scrubbed. We also hired our first proven elite manager under these owners this summer. So to me, you can only judge this squad from this summer, based on it being 3 months into a new team, under a new manager and new strategy. And 5 league games in, with 3 key players out injured, isn’t the right time.
The previous project already failed, and the club at least recognised this. It’ll take time to undo a lot of that damage and Xabi has had to come in to do part of this. So perhaps we should have expected a rougher start.
Previous managers under this ownership didn’t have the track record to suggest with time they’d get it right. Xabi Alonso, however, has the track record. It took him a while to get the defence sorted at Leverkusen, but when he did, it was the best defence in the league and he went through a domestic season unbeaten and won two major trophies with a squad that wasn’t the strongest in the German league. At Real Madrid his win percentage was 71%, at Leverkusen 63%. This is a top manager, you aren’t finding a better manager available right now. There will be more casualties, but these should be players not the manager.
It’s not just a matter of who we sign - and we need at least 4 or 5 players in my view, a CB, two midfielders and another attacker at least. We needed a LOT of players last summer. I think we’ve signed well and although its early doors, I don’t yet see any of this years signings being moved on next year. I think given the extent of rebuild that is needed, we were never getting all we needed in one summer.
The bigger change though, has to be building stronger character, winning mentality, and belief in this squad. We’re still way too fragile mentally and teams know it. That’s been an issue under multiple managers, and we saw it last season. No amount of recruitment will matter if we don’t get that right.
One thing about Xabi Alonso which is reassuring in this situation, is he is a pragmatic manager. He has shown at other clubs he can and will adapt to get results. He’ll know recent results and performances aren’t good enough, and I’m confident he’ll get things right.
He’s also clearly recognised what we can all see, and again, his post match comments bore this out:
“We have dropped our consistency, our competitive mentality needed in the second-half. The small details can be decisive. You don’t have to give advantage in these kinds of games. It’s about 95 minutes and we have not been able to keep that level and we will have to do better.”
Basically he said here we’ve not yet performed over a full game yet, and that we have to, and that our mentality needs to be better and more consistent. No bullshit about “the boys gave everything”, or toxic positivity or excuses, but actually calling this stuff out as he sees it.
We can all criticise and scapegoat players, the manager or Sporting Directors, or talk about tactics and formations, and although those things are important, but to me that’s all just the surface level stuff compared to the deeper issues. The culture at the club and that underbelly of low confidence and belief is a real problem. It pre-dates Xabi Alonso and all the players who arrived this summer.
For those advocating changing the manager again, if we did that, we might as well stop having ambitions to be a successful club. We will never win or challenge for the PL again until we allow a manager time to build not just a team or way of playing, but rebuild the club. If we keep sacking managers, we’ll stay also rans for good.
The manager - Xabi Alonso - has to get the DNA, the character, the belief of this club and this squad back as it should be. As sad as it is, that’s something only time and hard work can fix. A new manager, new formation or new players aren’t a magic wand which changes it all quickly, especially not in today’s game. In every successful PL club, stability and allowing a top manager to build and go through teething problems is how you get success. Chelsea fans have never experienced this with a manager, but if we want to get back to the top, we simply have to. As tough as it is.
Just to be clear though, NONE of this means we can’t get frustrated or criticise Xabi Alonso, for sure, that’s completely different. No manager is above criticism. But if we constantly keep changing managers, or demand constant change every time we lose a few games, we can forget being a title winning club again.
The simple fact is so much damage has been done to our club, and its mentality and character - and that’s the fault of many people, not just one or two - that its going to take time to rebuild the character, belief and mentality back to where it should be.
That’s Xabi Alonso’s task, and the only way this problem will be solved is time.
The Score