“I look at Chelsea and it is just a mess” – 3 pre-season CFC predictions that look very silly now, but one transfer risk set to prove costly

It’s early days yet, but those pre-season predictions writing Chelsea off look very silly indeed now after a terrific start made by new manager Maurizio Sarri at Stamford Bridge.

The Blues have played some superb football and sit joint-stop of the Premier League alongside Manchester City and Liverpool – even managing to score three more goals than their rivals in Red, who supposedly had the front three to end all front threes in Mohamed Salah, Roberto Firmino and Sadio Mane.

That just goes to show how quickly things can change in football, with the obsessively innovative nature of some modern managers at the highest level meaning a change to the man in the dugout doesn’t just mean a different man in a tracksuit barking out orders to his players, but a complete overhaul of the way every single member of the squad plays.

No club illustrates this better than Chelsea – with Antonio Conte having a similarly transformative effect at the club just over two years ago, taking largely the same group of players that had finished 10th, demoralised and directionless under a combination of Jose Mourinho and Guus Hiddink in 2015/16, to runaway champions playing in a stylish 3-4-3 system that no one else in the league knew how to handle just 12 months later.

Then (almost) the same thing happened again – Conte’s methods went stale, players got fed up and the Blues finished 5th after a disastrous run of just three league wins, three draws and five defeats between new year’s day and mid-April.

Maurizio Sarri has made a great start at Chelsea

Now, the team is unrecognisable once again, with Sarri very quickly implementing a possession-based game on a par with Manchester City and Barcelona at their best. Perhaps it’s harsh to point out just how few pundits saw this coming, but it feels as though some of the old heads still commentating on the game haven’t quite caught up…

Three Chelsea predictions that look very silly now…

‘I look at Chelsea and it is just a mess, isn’t it? The whole thing,’ said your grumpy old uncle Mark Lawrenson as eloquently as ever on BBC Sport.

‘What Sarri saw in the Community Shield (defeat to Man City) will have told him a lot about what his players are capable of, in terms of fitting into his system or reaching the required standards. He has issues to tackle right through his team and, with Thursday being the transfer deadline for incoming players, there is not much time to decide whether to address them in the transfer market,’ said Matthew Upson after watching Chelsea’s first game under Sarri in the same BBC Sport season preview.

‘It is very much an unknown quantity in Sarri and you never quite know how it will go at Chelsea, it could go one of two ways. But with Sarri trying to change the structure of the team, it will take time,’ said Sky Sports pundit Alan Smith, who predicted the west Londoners as finishing 6th in his pre-season final table prediction.