“It felt like panic buying”- France legend critical of Chelsea’s summer transfer window

Emmanuel Petit unhappy with Chelsea over panic buying and shares fears for this season

Speaking to Mega Casino (h/t Metro), former Chelsea midfielder and France legend Emmanuel Petit has warned the club over panic buys and shared his fears for the rest of this season.

The Frenchman believes that the club is paying the price for panic buying of players in the summer transfer window, which saw us sign one of the most underwhelming players, Kalidou Koulibaly, to make up for the outgoing Antonio Rudiger and Andreaas Christensen. He also shared his fears for this team in the second half of this season.

Chelsea did buy a number of players in the summer, but a lot of the deals were left hanging till the final seconds, re. Wesley Fofana and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang for example. They were outdone by Barcelona on a few transfer targets as well.

Talking about panic buys and what we can expect from the Blues this season, here’s Petit (h/t Metro):

“The pressure is on Graham Potter because I can’t remember the last time Chelsea won a game, especially against the big guns. We all know that 2022 was a terrible year for Chelsea off the pitch, but I don’t feel confident things will change in the second half of the season.”

“‘I’m not sure what Chelsea will do in the transfer market, but they spent so much money in the summer already. I had the feeling that they didn’t have a vision – it felt like panic buying. It seemed like that if they couldn’t get their primary or secondary targets, they were signing players because they needed to.”

While Petit’s views are right, there was a caveat behind Chelsea’s naive approach in the summer. The club had just been taken over by the new owners, there was no backroom department to handle player recruitment at the highest level.

Chairman Todd Boehly, who has no experience in football transfers, had to work as an interim sporting director at the time. Since then though, the club has appointed a few people to form a transfer committee and a technical director.

So, now we can hope for Chelsea to make better and well-informed decisions going into the future transfer windows. This is a transition period for the club and things will take time.

With regard to performances on the field, we cannot fully judge Graham Potter’s tenure yet because he didn’t have a pre-season with the squad because he was appointed in September.

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So, this World Cup break might have helped the manager to relay his playing style and thoughts to the players on how he wanted the team to play. If things don’t change till the end of this season, then these concerns can be deemed valid.