Boehly’s Chelsea show the distorting effect of money without sense or love

Well, there goes the season. Perhaps summer budget too. Who knows maybe the entire Chelsea 3.0 Blue Sky Project Stage One?

With 28 minutes to go in a Champions League second leg Chelsea always seemed to be losing, even when they were threatening vaguely to win it, the home bench took a deep breath, cleared its throat, and coughed up £260m of randomly assembled attacking talent.

Admittedly Chelsea were 3-0 down in the tie by the time Raheem Sterling, João Félix and Mykhaylo Mudryk came on to the pitch, having spent an hour playing with five defenders and three defensive midfielders, one of them installed as an assiduous and energetic No 10-cum-right-winger.

And yes, by that point this thrillingly overmanned attacking machine had mustered a single goal in its last 510 minutes of football. But hey: Boehly-ball. Go with it. Disrupt. Subvert the dominant paradigm. Storm the dressing room. Anything to keep away the gathering sense of quiet horror around this whole grand, baffling, viciously wasteful football-style project.

This was a strange football match. There is something sad, but also grotesque about seeing this Chelsea team toiling through their patterns, all mangled shapes and blocked talent. Nothing here feels permanent or stitched together, or put in place with any skill or love. We are the hollow men. We are the stuffed men. We are the human spoils of Todd Boehly’s incoherent acquisitiveness, the top down confusion as to how this complex and heavily ritualised sport actually works.

For all that Chelsea did also play well here. Stamford Bridge was boisterously full, those low white midweek lights conjuring the muscle memory of more coherent times, of teams that looked like teams, of some guiding intelligence behind