by Three little birds you say? Three of them, eh? Todd likes birds. Todd likes game changers. How much for the birds? Talk to her family. Double it. Get me the birds, Costanza.
It is now a reflex response to dredge every last note of humor possible from Chelsea’s current model of team-building; and to do so, while paying due attention to the many other shades of US sports tycoon-dom, in the voice of Larry David pretending to be George Steinbrenner in Seinfield.
The reality is a little different these days. That initial splurge of financial incontinence is passed. Todd Boehly has long since retired from his frontline business. But it was still tempting to imagine the reaction of Chelsea’s acquisitions executive to the sudden shift in energy at Selhurst Park on Monday night.
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With Chelsea 1-0 down at half-time and the restart delayed by a shemozzle with the referee’s microphone, the away support began to sing, with a clear note of irony, an endless chorus of Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds as it . he played over the PA, sticking with Conor Gallagher to equalize almost immediately, then returning to the same refrain en route to a late 3-1 victory. Register them. Register them all. Sign all the birds.
Chelsea’s season remains a very broken one, with a 13-point gap in fourth place and some invertible performances in recent weeks. But as Mauricio Pochettino prepares his squad for Saturday’s trip to Manchester City, there is at least some joy to be had from a second straight win, a nice moment in the Croydon drizzle, and perhaps even the vague description of what to lay work of. the current collection of squad numbers may look like an actual team.
The transition after the break was instant, with the midfield triangle of Caicedo-Fernández-Gallagher controlling the ball, and Cole Palmer providing a familiar note of cool accuracy to help set up Chelsea’s two late goals.
Palmer will provide a clear narrative peg in the run-up to Saturday’s game, which marks his first professional return to the club he started at the age of eight. It will be tempting to wonder if City made a mistake in selling him given his fine form, which includes six goals and four assists in 10 games since Christmas Day.
Indeed this feels like a rare no-fault divorce, a move that benefits everyone involved. City, already the strongest attacker in Europe, get £40m of FFP fuel to the bank. Palmer has been proven right: he just needed to play. Chelsea, meanwhile, have their most convincing creative addition in Cesc Fàbregas, and a footballer who also provides a very useful parable as to why the talent funding model is so obviously flawed.
This is the paradox of Palmer. Even his success feels like a kind of cosmic joke at Chelsea’s expense, a punchline to half a billion pounds of random overspending. He was the last of Chelsea’s golden-quote stretch, a £42m target day slipped away towards twenty-somethings still in front. At the time it felt like a bit of a head scratcher. Why now, after buying six other promising young attackers, would you work so hard to land this one too?
But Palmer is, so far, the only signing that has really worked. At the end of the silver rainbow, after your future has already been staked with a smattering of players on seven and eight year contracts, after any coherent notion of team building has been shredded, here’s the good, timely signing you’ve been looking for all that time.
That is the capricious nature of the talent of youth, the impossibility of gambling on the market, to really know if, say, Mykhaylo Mudryk really goes any good; especially with the added self-interference of lumping them all into one pot. This turns out to be what you get for £1bn. One young player who performs without argument, the last one in through the doors when all the fish have already been sold.
In another blow to more traditional forms of squad-building, it helped that Joe Shields, City’s former head of academy recruitment, had real sniff-sniff test knowledge of Palmer’s ability. It may also have helped that Palmer was able to find his feet in the Premier League somewhere less orderly than City’s slotting machine. One advantage of Chelsea’s less functional situation is that a young player with Palmer’s extraordinary skills occasionally has room to make mistakes, eat up minutes, work out how to do all this in his time own.
Palmer will likely have a chance to spend Saturday afternoon chasing the ball on the rim. At the moment his goal and assist tally seem to be evidence of an even greater impact as those interventions often came from a vague sense of tactics, rather than in a team whose basic task is to follow the pattern and put the finishing touches on supply.
Palmer is generally an unusually creative player, gangly but agile, expert at finding the small spaces between the equally small spaces, able to control and maneuver the ball in unorthodox ways. It seems that the brain is a classic chess planner, scanning by moving forward, making the perfectly weighted passes that matter. These are rare traits in a 21-year-old, but none as rare as Palmer’s relaxed air.
Gareth Southgate used him in both England internationals in November, but he remains a long shot for a spot at the Euros, if only because of things like hierarchy and entrenched positions. International football is about playing part of the game up the hump, and not completely in the moment. Palmer wouldn’t need to be told, you think, that he’s good enough to be out there.
For now a meeting of these two teams provides another opportunity to compare City’s steady upward curve with Chelsea’s chaotic spikes. It’s been two and a half years since they met Porto to compete in the Champions League final, the last significant date for Roman Abramovich’s version of Chelsea, Billionaire Disruptors Mk1.
Only three members of Chelsea’s winning 23-man squad remain at the club, Reece James, Thiago Silva and Ben Chilwell. City still have seven of their starting XI, same manager, same ownership, same trajectory. For Chelsea, hope is now in the hands of the last man through the door, the signature of the paradox that shows, in the end, the flaws and not the merits of the team to build through excessive numbers.
