Is Chelsea's Youth-Team Success Actually the Club's Weakness?
Even though transfer deadline day is behind us, Chelsea will still scour the market as they attempt to look for reinforcements for a squad in desperate need of fresh faces.
Well-stocked in midfield, head coach Antonio Conte has started the new campaign with just four fit first-team defenders and two recognised strikers. Despite the bright start, winning all four of their matches, Chelsea's imbalanced squad raises questions about their ability to sustain a Premier League title challenge for the entirety of 2016/17.
As well as failing to land transfer targets this summer and last, the ongoing problems of promoting youth-team players has weakened Chelsea's power at the top of the English game. The Blues are used to having one of the strongest squads in Europe, but a more frugal approach in recent years has diluted their strength.
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Without replacing transfer targets by bringing through youngsters, it's meant Chelsea's squad has had a stale look about it. When former manager Jose Mourinho made significant changes in 2014, we thought that was the start of a new era, but failure to continue with that has meant the Blues being outsiders since their title win a year later.
Aside from Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Mourinho wasn't serious enough about Chelsea's youth-team players.
There were debuts given to Lewis Baker, Dominic Solanke and Izzy Brown during his second spell in charge, yet they were token gestures more than anything. Not one of those players was present enough to make an impact.
Mourinho hasn't been the only problem, though. Andre Villas-Boas, Roberto Di Matteo, Rafael Benitez and Guus Hiddink have all been reluctant to give Chelsea's young players their chance. All the while, the Blues have been dominating youth football at home and abroad.
The club's success has been staggering. Chelsea are the back-to-back European champions and have won four of the last five FA Youth Cups. If we go further back, it's five of the last seven the Blues have won since the 2009/10 campaign.
That season was Carlo Ancelotti's first in west London, when he won the Premier League and FA Cup double where it really matters—with the senior side. Despite that success with world-class stars, the Italian had eyes for Josh McEachran, who was coming through the youth team as the flag bearer for the early part of Chelsea's period of dominance.
Involved heavily in first-team training and making 11 appearances for the club, McEachran soon floated off into the ether of Chelsea's loan system. After five such temporary moves, he eventually joined Brentford last summer for a mere £750,000.
Since McEachran's emergence, we've seen the likes of Jeffrey Bruma, Nathaniel Chalobah, Jeremie Boga and Charly Musonda all flirt with the notion of being the next big thing. None of them have delivered on that promise or at least been given a fair enough attempt at establishing themselves.
It's Loftus-Cheek who has usurped them all, but even he is living off scraps in Chelsea's first team these days. Starting out in defensive midfield, the 20-year-old has been moved all over, and under Conte, he is now seen as a midfielder/striker hybrid.
For all their dominance, Chelsea continue to struggle to bridge that gap between youth team and first team. But have we been looking at it from the wrong perspective? Are Chelsea creating dominant sides but not outstanding individuals? Looking at some of their rivals, it may well be the case.
Given their history in youth football, Manchester United's current generation exists in stark contrast. The club has won the FA Youth Cup—the barometer for success at that level—just three times since the famous Class of '92 generation.
Yet the talk of English football right now isn't Chelsea's own strike sensations Solanke or Tammy Abraham, it's Marcus Rashford.
In the same academy year as Solanke and Abraham, Rashford has done what no Chelsea youngster has; he's been an early success in the senior side. The 18-year-old has made it impossible to be ignored at Old Trafford by scoring goals—and plenty of them.
It doesn't matter that he won nothing with United's under-18s as he's producing with the senior team.
Sure, he was helped by good fortune given United's injury problems and poor form last season, but when given his chance, Rashford has made it count. Now he's started this season as a bona fide first-team option for Mourinho and scored the decisive goal to win three points against Hull City.
The same can be said for Raheem Sterling at Liverpool when Brendan Rodgers first took over. In the space of a few years, he went from academy graduate to a £49 million transfer for Manchester City.
| 2009/10 | Winners |
| 2011/12 | Winners |
| 2012/13 | Runners-up |
| 2013/14 | Winners |
| 2014/15 | Winners |
| 2015/16 | Winners |
Just a couple of miles further west from Stamford Bridge, Fulham are having similar success with individuals coming out of their academy system. Patrick Roberts was sold to Manchester City for £12 million in 2015, while Moussa Dembele—the French one—became an established first-team player before joining Celtic this summer after interest from a host of clubs.
The point here is that, as clubs, United, Liverpool and Fulham can't compete with Chelsea's recent success at youth level. Not since the Busby Babes has any team won three FA Youth Cups on the bounce, but the Blues have. They dominate most games they play, yet individual talents aren't emerging—they're doing it all as a team.
That's the key to youth success further up the line. Regardless of what a group of players can achieve collectively, it's the individual that is vital. Aside from those players making waves now, we need only look to John Terry to understand that.
Chelsea's most decorated captain, Terry came through at a time when the club's youth success was non-existent. They weren't winning things or even getting close, but the club were still unearthing gems.
Before Terry emerged, Jody Morris had come through a couple of years before; the generation ahead of Morris saw Chelsea's first team stocked with academy players, too.
Frank Sinclair, Eddie Newton, David Lee and others had all been Chelsea youngsters. Graeme Le Saux was the best English left-back of his generation, and far from the lush pitches we see at Cobham today, his craft was perfected at the old Harlington training ground that was hardly fit for purpose.
It's wrong to suggest Chelsea don't have a history of producing young players. Even as far back as the 1960s and 1970s, the club's success was built around players they had brought through. Peter Osgood, Ron Harris, Peter Bonetti and others are legends at Stamford Bridge, and they were all developed by the club.
In the modern era, it's difficult to promote a collective group of players, especially when they're competing with multi-million pound signings. It's as individuals that these players have to do it, but outside of the familiarity of their team-mates, it's simply not happening at Chelsea.
No single player has stepped up and made himself vital in the way Rashford has at United. No one player has stood out to be the answer for what Chelsea need in certain areas, which is why the search continues in the transfer market.
Loftus-Cheek is the prime example of it. So talented and effective at junior level, it isn't playing under different managers for the first team that has seen his position change so frequently. It's a problem borne more from the fact that Chelsea are trying to find a place for him to fit in, and right now, it's not clear where that is.
Chelsea are creating relentless teams in the junior ranks, but until we see outstanding individual talent, the search is going to continue for the next player to emulate Terry.
Garry Hayes is Bleacher Report's lead Chelsea correspondent. Follow him on Twitter @garryhayes.
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