Man United crisis is providing cover for Chelsea’s own dreary descent into abject calamity

Chelsea are getting almost no attention for spending a billion quid yet being rubbish. They can thank their own boringness and more importantly Manchester United for that.

There’s not a great deal to be happy about at Chelsea right now, but there’s one thing for which Todd Boehly, Mauricio Pochettino and the expensively assembled, bloated and misshapen squad of players assembled at Stamford Bridge should be thanking their lucky stars.

And that thing is the existence of Manchester United Football Club.

Because Chelsea are getting away with it, aren’t they? Look at the Mailbox on here. Look at Mediawatch. Look basically at the rest of our site. And then at every other football-adjacent corner of the UK internet.

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Now that’s because Manchester United have been notably and reliably shit on the pitch this season, losing to the three half-decent teams they’ve played and fortuitously beating the two less decent ones. It’s also because the on-field strife is merely the tip of an entire iceberg of frozen shit that the club is currently dealing with in assorted ways ranging from ‘not great’ to ‘permanently brand-damagingly shitbone-appallingly’. But also because it’s Manchester United.

READ: Man Utd and Erik ten Hag are stuck in the cul de sac of dysfunction

Liverpool can give them a decent run, but even they can’t compete with the cultural heft wielded for good and bad by United, a team so ubiquitous that they can still be instantly identified by one name even when that one name is the most common name in football. It’s like someone with the surname Smith being so transcendentally famous and important that ‘Smith’ was enough for everyone to know who you were talking about no matter how much other, less important Smiths bleated on that their name is also Smith actually and in fact has been for longer than the other Smith you won’t stop talking about.

There’s an infuriating smugness to the United (there we go again) refrain of ‘Hated, adored, never ignored’ but there’s also an undeniable truth to it. Look how much we’re talking about them here, in this piece about Chelsea. United sells. If United are making a bollocks of things, and they are making an almighty bollocks of things, then nobody’s bothering to fire up the Photoshop to waste their time and yours cracking anyone else’s badge.

For as long as United are pissing all over their own chips, Chelsea have cover. But by crikey they need it.

There is no greater tribute – for want of a far, far better word – to the scale of both Manchester United generally and their current shitstorm specifically than the fact almost nobody is really talking about the utter shambling calamity that is Chelsea.

But while United outrank any other when the official Barclays Crisis Club mantle is being handed out, there should be a bit of introspection to go with the relief at the lack of attention Chelsea are currently getting.

They’re dangerously close to Oscar Wilde territory here. The only thing worse than being talked about is spending a billion quid on a wonky squad that’s squatting 14th in the league and nobody giving a solitary shiny shite, as he so famously and succinctly put it.

We’ve touched on it – but tellingly only until now in one-per-club type features where we are obliged to talk about everyone – but there really is a dreadful drabness to Chelsea’s brand of awfulness that is almost as bad as the awfulness itself.

If you gave, say, Spurs a billion quid and Pochettino there’s every chance they would be rubbish. But they would be explosively, cartoonishly and entertainingly rubbish. Watching the wheels fall off in new and dramatic ways each week would be appointment TV. Same with Liverpool, or Arsenal or pretty much anyone bar Manchester City who currently appear to have rendered themselves impervious to banter but at the opposite, ‘wildly successful’ end of that particular spectrum.

Only Chelsea could do this so boringly. Only Chelsea could make spending a billion quid on footballers not just Modern Football Is Out Of Control distressing but also dispiriting. Chucking 100 million quid a pop at assorted competent defensive midfielders is just such a humdrum way of mis-spending all that money. Especially when you’re mainly doing it because the American owner who thinks he knows best just wants to show off that he’s head of amortisation and thinks nobody else has cottoned on yet.

They’ve spent all that money and have the sort of striker who, with the very best will in the world, should be scoring six goals a season for Everton not lumbering around at the head of the most expensively assembled yet violently inadequate team ever.

Nicolas Jackson, a player worth 30 million pounds who cost 30 million pounds, makes no sense as the striking figurehead for this team. And that’s in footballing terms and, more damningly, comedy terms. He’s neither good enough nor bad enough to make it work. Unless Chelsea are one of those modern comedies they have now that are too clever to be conventionally funny.

Well we don’t want our car-crash crisis clubs to be clever and thought-provoking and beyond gags. We want belly laughs. We want expensive, overpaid superstars fighting each other on the pitch, not vaguely underwhelming 0-0 draws at Bournemouth and Mauricio Pochettino slowly and quietly questioning the life choices that have led him to this moment.

Chelsea can’t be the crisis club while United remain so determinedly self-destructive, but for all our sakes we’d better hope this United crisis is a lengthy one. Because if they sort themselves out then the only other big club soiling the bed even a tiny bit right now is Chelsea.

And that’s going to be horribly dull for all of us.