At last, Chelsea are handed a true opportunity to test out all these wonderful young prospects they’ve had in their Academy over the last decade.
It seems that a transfer ban has done what two UEFA Youth Leagues, six of the last seven FA Youth Cups and over 10 years of acquiring the best young talent in Europe could not. Chelsea might finally be prepared to blood their youngsters.
Reports emanating from Stamford Bridge are that some within the club almost believe FIFA’s season-long transfer ban will have a purifying effect on Chelsea, that left with no alternative for two transfer windows they will have to look within.
This transfer ban could be the moment that will finally prompt them to take notice not just of Callum Hudson-Odoi, the only English prospect who can hold a candle to Jadon Sancho, but the likes of Marc Guehi and Connor Gallagher, talented youngsters whose prospects of a regular chance looked faint before the FIFA whirlwind ripped through Stamford Bridge.
There will be plenty more to come back in from loan spells away next season.
Even before the transfer ban hopes were high that Mason Mount could join Hudson-Odoi in the first-team squad. Reece James and Tammy Abraham’s ought to be ahead of Davide Zappacosta and Olivier Giroud in the pecking order even if they have been in the lower leagues.
And on the line between the Under-23s and first-team lies Ethan Ampadu, whose magnificent matt of hair alone merits a role in the new Chelsea that may well come.
Amid all the fan rancour, the endless debate over whether Chelsea’s 41-strong loan army harms both the players and the English game, really blooding a clutch of these young players would give supporters something to cling on to, a club that feels like more than an expensively-assembled experiment in whichever brand of football is en vogue in this two-year cycle.
Whether with Maurizio Sarri in charge, Gianfranco Zola, Frank Lampard or anyone else handing the reins to the youngsters would surely give some long-term stability to the club. The head coach may well change more than once but if the core remains the same there will surely be fewer Danny Drinkwaters, generously renumerated but so ill-suited to a system that might well be completely overhauled in six months anyway.
Chelsea’s identity would then come from what this talented clutch of young players could make of themselves, not be imposed from on high by a coach who is only ever a 6-0 defeat by Manchester City away from the chop.
And project youth need not necessarily come without trophies. Real Madrid made £79million in profit during their FIFA-imposed transfer embargo. They won two European Cups in the years immediately following it.
One only wonders what could have happened had Chelsea tried this sooner. Might Nathaniel Chalobah have been a perfect fit in the right-sided berth of the trio that N’Golo Kante has been shoehorned into?
Now Chalobah is struggling to get a game at Watford but still there is the promise of what might have been had he not been continually cast out on loan to managers whose concerns were more short-term than developing a young prospect for Chelsea to sell on.
Chalobah is not alone. With the likes of Patrick Van Aanholt, Nathan Ake, Dominic Solanke and Ryan Bertrand one could already form the core of a top-half Premier League team. Some, if not all, of them would be notably superior had they been given greater exposure to the first-team at a younger age.
Of course it is just as possible that Chelsea do not hold their nerve, that Pedro, Willian, David Luiz and Giroud all get new deals, that the club vow to ride out the storm perhaps without Eden Hazard but with the rest of the current squad retained.
That would be a shame indeed, a waste of the fine work academy coaches have done from an early age to ensure Chelsea have a youth setup that few in world football can compete with. It is time to put it to use.