No more excuses, Chelsea must fight for the title this season
No more excuses, Chelsea must fight for the title this season
Matt LawMon, August 24, 2026 at 5:00 AM UTC
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Xabi Alonso has arrived at a club looking to be Premier League challengers rather than underachievers - Andrew Couldridge/Reuters
No more excuses. No more jam tomorrow. It is time for Chelsea to fight for the Premier League title this season. Anything else should be deemed a disappointment.
This is Chelsea version 3.0 under BlueCo, who bought the club four years ago. First there was Todd Boehly’s trolley dash, then came Behdad Eghbali’s youth club. This summer the focus has predominantly been on being Premier League-ready.
Off the pitch, the timing might be right for Boehly to be discussing the sale of his shares to Eghbali’s Clearlake Capital. But on it, Chelsea look better equipped to re-enter the title conversation than at any point in the BlueCo era.
Boehly values Chelsea at more than £5bn. There may be sound business rationale behind that, but the club must fix the football to truly make it realistic.
Both Todd Boehly (left) and Behdad Eghbali have deployed their own strategies in attempts to build a title-winning Chelsea team - Chris Brunskill/Getty Images
There is absolutely no reason why Chelsea should not put up some sort of title challenge this season. They are better rested than most of their rivals, with key players such as Cole Palmer, João Pedro, Willian Estêvão and Levi Colwill missing the World Cup. They have no Europe to worry about and they have signed players – and even a set-piece coach – who can make an instant impact.
“We’ll have more time to prepare each game, that’s a fact,” said Xabi Alonso, Chelsea’s manager who was also brought in at the beginning of the summer. “Afterwards we need to prove that we use the time in the right way.”
Morgan Rogers is the third player BlueCo have spent more than £100m on in 3½ years. That alone should bring with it a weight of expectation for the club to justify such an outlay, however much they may recoup in sales.
The signings of Chelsea “pensioners” – 36-year-old Jordan Henderson and 35-year-old Danny Welbeck – underline that this incarnation of BlueCo’s project is about the here and now.
“I’m really happy [with the squad],” said Alonso. “We have made many right choices. Very good balance in terms of quality, in terms of personality, maturity, different stages of the career. We’ve got good momentum and we are in a good position.”
Welbeck is a player who can bring together different groups, young and old, and is seen as the glue in the squad. Henderson is somebody who drives standards and demands the best. Thomas Tuchel left the pre-match speeches to Henderson before England’s World Cup play-off game against France and he will be an important lieutenant to Alonso.
In Alonso, Chelsea have a manager who produced a Bundesliga miracle with Bayer Leverkusen and knows exactly what it is like to work under a weight of expectation having played for Liverpool, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and Spain.
Enzo Maresca and Andoni Iraola will be expected to fight for the title at Manchester City and Liverpool. So why not Alonso and Chelsea? Forget any talk we might hear about Alonso and his players needing time, this being a “different” Chelsea to the Roman Abramovich era or the amount of ground the Blues have to make up on their rivals.
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It is three years since Telegraph Sport reported that Eghbali and Boehly were “continuously thinking about what a 100-point team looks like”. The closest they have got so far is 69 points and they have achieved a top-four finish just once.
That is not to say Chelsea’s underwhelming League finishes started with the arrival of BlueCo. It is approaching 10 long years since the Blues last won the title and since then the club have not finished higher than third or ended a season within 15 points of top spot. They had become a cup team long before Abramovich’s sale.
When BlueCo first turned up at Stamford Bridge, Chelsea were battling against Jürgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola but both have now left the Premier League. Liverpool and Manchester City start the season with new managers, while Manchester United have the Champions League to contend with once again.
Alonso and Chelsea will not have failed if they do not win the title but they will have fallen short if they do not put up a fight for the first time in a decade. That has to be the goal.
It feels like an eternity since Antonio Conte walked into Chelsea in 2016 and took a Chelsea squad that had finished 10th – 31 points behind shock champions Leicester City – to the title.
Alonso’s arrival this summer followed after another season in which Chelsea finished 10th, 33 points behind champions Arsenal. His ambition should match that of Conte, who in his first press conference as head coach said: “Only one team can win the title, but we must stay there at the end of the season, to fight for the title.”
Before Chelsea’s first game against Fulham, Alonso was more circumspect and said the “ambition is to be as high as possible”. Hopefully, he is being more bullish behind the scenes.
Simply targeting Champions League qualification would be setting the bar too low. It should be the bare minimum for Chelsea, who cannot pass up an opportunity to aim higher when so many conditions are in their favour. If it is not the right time to challenge for the title this season, then when will it be? Supporters are sick of waiting.
Just as Conte took over Chelsea at a time when a number of their traditional rivals were in a state of flux after Leicester’s miracle season, so too did Alonso. Arsenal rightly start the season as title favourites and are settled under Mikel Arteta, but nobody knows what to expect from the rest.
Chelsea have finally strengthened the centre of their defence with the arrival of 26-year-old Maxence Lacroix – another player with Premier League experience. The club even activated the release clause in Austin MacPhee’s Aston Villa contract to add one of the best set-piece coaches in the business to Alonso’s staff.
Having secured Champions League qualification twice and won the Europa League with Villa, MacPhee has presumably not moved to Chelsea simply to repeat his achievements in the Midlands.
No more mediocrity. No more dampening expectations. No more promising a brighter future. Chelsea have to make themselves part of the conversation once more. It is time to at least talk about the title.
Source: “AOL Sports”
