Why Chelsea Are Wrong to Send Lewis Baker out on Loan Again

Lewis Baker has become one of the first Chelsea players to leave the club on loan this summer with his move back to Vitesse Arnhem confirmed last month. Given the Blues' reliance on the loan system to develop their young players, we can expect many more to join him.

In 2015/16, Chelsea had over 30 players at clubs across the continent. Made up mostly of young, aspiring players, that number also featured some senior names, including Victor Moses, Marko Marin and Papy Djilobodji.

Baker is 21 now. That youth tag is becoming less relevant; he's entering the realm of being a senior pro. He's entered that make-or-break period of his development. It's at his age when clubs tend to make their final decisions on players and whether they have a future with them.

For Baker, the signs aren't promising after being sent away so early this summer.

Having him play regularly while on loan with Vitesse does carry wisdom. Baker is at a club he knows after spending a season there, and featuring every week is better than him sitting in the stands at Stamford Bridge, training Monday to Friday.

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It's more the timing that shocks. Here is a player who just helped the England Under-21s win the Toulon Tournament this summer. He scored four goals for his country to win the Golden Boot award in France.

His stock was on the rise, with Baker showing the sort of role he can play for Chelsea going forward. He's an exciting attacking midfielder, and what do Chelsea need to freshen up their squad right now? Well, an exciting attacking midfielder, among other things.

When Antonio Conte took charge of his first game against Rapid Vienna at the Allianz Stadion on Saturday, the team's performance wasn't the important thing. It was the first game of pre-season against a side who will start their own campaign this coming weekend.

Conte had only been in the job since Wednesday, his players back training for less than a week. Losing to Rapid 2-0 was expected but not important. The reason the majority of Chelsea fans and observers were tuning in or traveling to Austria was to see how Conte set his Chelsea squad up.

We wanted to see his changes to give a hint of how 2016/17 will develop. We saw a massive change in system, with a 4-2-4 deployed, incorporating wingers and two strikers. Given a reliance on 4-2-3-1 since 2011, that was significant for Chelsea.

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It didn't work like Conte would have liked, which mainly came down to the personnel. Ruben Loftus-Cheek, a midfielder, was the second striker to Diego Costa, while Nemanja Matic and John Obi Mikel anchored midfield. Aside from the fitness issues, it was the midfield partnership that hindered Chelsea. It wasn't dynamic enough, and it meant the team looked disjointed.

Chelsea struggled with Mikel and Matic, as they're both the same player. Neither could get the ball forward efficiently enough or quick enough because they lack those attributes. It's not their game in the same way it is for Cesc Fabregas.

While Chelsea are training in Austria, the big problem Conte has is that the majority of his key players are still on holiday after Euro 2016. Without Fabregas, there isn't another player at Chelsea who can build attacks. Without Eden Hazard, they lack that creativity in the final third.

Chelsea knew all this would be the case given the schedules, so why allow Baker to leave so early and even before Conte had arrived? It was in the club's, the player's and Conte's interests to have someone such as Baker around to fill in before the stars returned.

After all, isn't that how young players develop anyway? Isn't their role supposed to be to fill in for the first-team regulars when they're unavailable? Isn't it their job to help a team function by playing that back-up role?

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That's where Chelsea's youth development has failed in the past. The young players can do everything asked of them in junior football—indeed, Chelsea are dominating at home and in Europe—but the level of trust for them to compete in the first team just isn't there.

It's only right the Blues don't want to suffer at the highest level if they're relying on youngsters, yet they haven't even attempted to integrate enough of them to see if it works. Only Loftus-Cheek is in the first-team squad, with Chelsea having sent so many others away.

That's what we've seen with Baker now. It doesn't matter what he did with Vitesse last season or with the England Under-21s; Chelsea sealed his fate even before he could be offered an opportunity to impress the new manager.

Not only is Conte missing out on watching a player such as Baker at close quarters this summer, but he's missing out on getting his system fine-tuned ahead of Chelsea's first game of the season against West Ham United in exactly four weeks. For Chelsea to be as effective as the new manager hopes, it's going to take plenty of time on the training pitch to get it sorted.

It all helps if the players who are available can carry out specific roles that are needed. With Mikel and Matic, for instance, they're both trying to defend, not get Chelsea forward. Until Fabregas returns, Baker could have been that man.

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The impression right now is that Baker's lack of personal development at Stamford Bridge could also impact the rest of the team in the short term.

Looking further ahead, his lack of opportunities only suggests they're not going to be forthcoming. Even struggling the way they did last season, Chelsea are using their cheque book to correct their mistakes rather than looking at what they already have.

Garry Hayes is Bleacher Report's lead Chelsea correspondent. All quotes were obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted. Follow him on Twitter @garryhayes.