Lads it’s still Chelsea, but they SHOULD be title contenders for three reasons

Hope you’re ready for the sheer molten bravura of this take, but Chelsea should be really, really good this season. They’ve bought incredibly well, and have brought in perhaps the most sought-after young manager in the game to pull the whole thing together.

In a season with no European football, allowing a laser focus on domestic matters, Chelsea could and should be challenging right at the top given the doubts and distractions and greater workloads everywhere else you look.

Counterpoint: this is Chelsea, and nothing at Chelsea is ever as it seems. It could obviously just be crap again.

But it just shouldn’t be. A Premier League where uncertainty and the unknown abound everywhere you look could play perfectly into Chelsea’s hands. They’re used to it. They’re used to starting every season wondering whether the vast number of new signings will gel into anything vaguely approaching a cohesive whole, or whether the new manager is really all that, and whether he’ll still be there when the music stops in May.

What is for several other clubs this season a daunting if exciting step into the unknown is something that at Chelsea they simply call ‘August’.

We’re not about to pretend BlueCo have ripped up their Player Trading Facility playbook and decided to run Chelsea as a football club again, but there has undoubtedly been a shift since the appointment of an elite and uncompromising manager in Xabi Alonso, one who will push back against egregious nonsense rather than just be enormously grateful for the opportunity to put ‘Chelsea manager’ on his LinkedIn.

There have been plenty of transfers that fit into Chelsea’s existing strategy. Even the headline nine-figure move for Morgan Rogers isn’t out of character for Chelsea given his age and profile. And of course there’s been the mandatory waving through of a previously completed deal for a Strasbourg player that must have featured some intense and difficult negotiations. Bonus points for the fact said player is World Cup pantomime villain Valentin Barco.

And the usual speculative, low-risk and high possible reward signing of some younglings has gone on as per, with the explicit understanding now that the high reward is about making a profit rather than the idea they might actually benefit Chelsea’s first team.

But there have also been lots of transfers of an entirely different type. That don’t fit the existing pattern of Chelsea’s post-takeover business at all.

In Maxence Lacroix they have signed someone who is a good centre-back but isn’t going to be raking in profits on any spreadsheets in years to come. The only possible and alarming conclusion to reach is that he’s been purchased to strengthen the actual football team rather than a balance sheet. Which is disconcerting, really.

And that’s before we even start on signing proper actual veterans in Danny Welbeck and Jordan Henderson. Welbeck has very much proven at Brighton that he still absolutely has it and could be one of the shrewdest bargain buys of the summer at a club that doesn’t really do that kind of thing.

As for Henderson, well, you just never know when there’s an advertising hoarding that will need jumping over or some cones that need putting out. But there’s a valid argument that as well as a proper coach the thing this confused, confusing, disjointed and lopsided collection of footballers needed to make it an actual working squad was the presence of some Good Pros around the place.

They have that now, along with one of the best midfields in the league (possibly with Martin Zubimendi to come) and a defence that should be far less pathetic than last season’s with the addition of Lacroix and the return of LANS Levi Colwill from long-term injury.

Winning the actual title itself still seem like a stretch target – although if there’s one Premier League club with previous for going from mid-table embarrassment to champions in a single bound under an inspirational new manager it’s Chelsea – but they really should be there or at the very least thereabouts.

Proper transfers for a proper manager and no pesky European football to get in the way? Blue really might be the colour.