New-look Chelsea a puzzle for Champions League opponents Borussia Dortmund

Dig around the margins of Chelsea’s vast squad, and you find two of the good reasons why Borussia Dortmund are considered modern masters in the business of buying and selling. They are Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Christian Pulisic.

In successive winter transfer windows, Dortmund sold those two strikers for combined fees of more than €120 million ($129m) and upwards of €100m in profit.

That was a few years ago, before the sales by Dortmund of Jadon Sancho and Erling Haaland and just after they had drawn €140m out of Barcelona for a young Ousmane Dembele. It was a period when €120m was far more than might be routinely paid for a deep-lying midfielder with only six months experience in a European league, like it was last month for Enzo Fernandez. But that’s how inflation in the transfer market works.

Chelsea, who visit Dortmund in the Champions League on Wednesday, are the drivers of the latest bout of it, the €120m Fernandez, their recruit from Benfica, just one of the huge new pricetags in their catalogue.

The Chelsea team selected by Graham Potter, a manager whose debut in the knockout stage of the European Cup is bound to be judged on what use he makes of expensive new signings, will not include Pulisic, who is coming back from a knee injury.

It cannot include Aubameyang, whose fall down the Chelsea hierarchy is one knock-on effect of the spectacular splurge on talent the London club have made in the last six months. Aubameyang, who joined Arsenal from Dortmund in 2018 and Chelsea last summer from Barcelona, has been left out entirely from Potter’s Champions League squad and now finds himself in the logjam of stars feeling suddenly surplus.

The frenzied turnover of personnel at Stamford Bridge makes Chelsea a puzzle