When you're building a soccer team, there are three main principles to keep in mind.
The first: How good are your players and how good are the players you're trying to sign? The second: What do these players do and how do they fit together? The third: Given all of that, how much are all of these players worth to your team?
Two years into the era of Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital owning Chelsea, it has become quite clear that the people running the club only have a tenuous grasp of the first one, are pretty much completely ignoring the second one and have totally misunderstood the third one.
Although I've been quite critical of the new processes -- if you can even call them that -- at Chelsea, I've at least been holding a little space in my mind for the possibility that there is some sensical grand plan. It's not like the rest of European soccer is particularly well-run. Perhaps the never-ending churn of player transfers would eventually form into a superteam of young players with impossible depth that no one else in the world would be able to match. Maybe the financial rules of the sport would suddenly change or maybe the rules were both too byzantine and too subjective to say for sure that Chelsea could not, in fact, keep getting away with this.
But rather than cohering things into an identifiable plan, the club's decisions this summer have left me even more confused. With each successive maneuver, it looks more and more likely the people running Chelsea really don't know what they're doing.