Chelsea will point to his place – Newspaper Kommersant No. 28 (7473) dated 15.02.

Today, in the first matches of the starting round of the play-offs, the most turbulent club in Europe this season, Chelsea, will meet Borussia Dortmund, which has gained a very good tone, and Benfica, from which the Londoners stole the leader Enzo Fernandez in January, will face the sensational drawing of Brugge “.

Everything that has happened to Chelsea in the past few months is already unprecedented in football, because the scale of the transformation experienced by the London team during the season is beyond our heads. In the summer, after the sale of the club by Roman Abramovich to a consortium led by Todd Boehley, it changed owners, and thanks to the zeal and generosity of the new owners, a significant part of the base. In September, coach Thomas Tuchel gave way to Graham Potter. In January, already during the winter window, the next portion of expensive purchases took place and the appearance of such players as Juan Felix, Mikhail Mudrik, Enzo Fernandez in Chelsea. All these perturbations, which required record investments, radically – and repeatedly – transformed the London look, the London style, throwing old combinations and ideas into the trash. But the most surprising thing is that at no point in the permanent restructuring did Chelsea look like a club that could even come close to its former heights.

Anyone who wants to present him as an outsider in a pair of 1/8 finals will find arguments as easy as shelling pears. After all, Chelsea are the tenth team in the current Premier League. Tenth! Moreover, without any reservations, references to bad luck: for example, he is in the tail of the top ten and in advanced statistics, the ratio of his own and others’ chances. At the same time, it is the winter, after the restart of the season, which took a long pause because of the World Cup in Qatar, that the condition of the Londoners is absolutely terrible. In eight league matches, only two victories – over modest Bournemouth and Crystal Palace, plus relegation from the FA Cup after a devastating defeat by Manchester City.

And another fact. Chelsea in this turbulent era is absolutely unable to play against powerful clubs equal in status. In the current English championship against the teams occupying the top four lines in the table – Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United and Newcastle – the Londoners played six matches, taking a single point in them. And the goal difference in these games is 1:10.

Meanwhile, Borussia Dortmund definitely belongs to the category of powerful clubs. Or rather, before the break, she was like Chelsea in terms of instability. But now everything is different. In 2023, Borussia Dortmund won five wins in five matches of the German championship with a total score of 15:6. The game of the German team is fresh, the youth (Jude Bellingham, Karim Adeyemi, Gio Reina) are blooming before our eyes, the veterans (Julian Brandt, Rafael Guerreiro) are reaching out for her. The dispatcher Marco Reus healed the injury, the forward Sebastian Alle coped with the oncological disease. In general, there is practically nothing to complain about, everywhere you look, there is a wonderful balance, most likely compensating for the huge difference in the volume of names from applications in favor of Chelsea, which this volume has not helped in any way so far.

In the pair that brought Benfica and Brugge together, of course, I would like to consider the Portuguese club as the favorite. The Belgian club, which has already struck by the fact that it was able to break into the playoffs of the Champions League, is now outside the top three even in its national championship. But there is a nuance. In January, Chelsea famously stole Enzo Fernandez from Benfica for €121 million.

If we start from the simplest figures, then it seems that Lisbon fans have nothing to be especially upset about the departure of the Argentinean. At least four goals scored and six assists in all competitions of the season – so-so performance for a central midfielder. But the numbers, of course, brazenly lie. In the scheme of coach Roger Schmidt, the role of Fernandez was colossal, he was for her a real core element, providing both the strength of the entire structure, and its plasticity and flexibility. At the internal level, the loss does not yet have a strong effect. But the Champions League is, whatever one may say, a different planet compared to the Portuguese championship.

Alexey Dospekhov