Thomas Tuchel's £112m Chelsea transfer request will help replicate Man City £306m gold standard

Thomas Tuchel’s defensive model works, but Pep Guardiola’s works much better.

I’m not talking about Manchester City's style of fluid attacking play, I’m referring to their £306m backline.

Chelsea has spent near the same amount of money on their attack and it just doesn’t seem to have paid off. We can only look to the Premier League leaders to figure out exactly what it is we’re missing.

A star-studded defence has kept Manchester City ticking. Yes, they have the beautiful football and the manager to match, but the beginning of every attack comes from their defence. Something Chelsea could look into before spending more money on an already bulked-up attack.

Over the years, Man City have built up a menacing squad. Despite their consistent run at success, Pep Guardiola continued to build his team season by season focusing on the defensive personnel.

So far into Guardiola’s six-year reign, they have bought Joao Cancelo, Ruben Dias, John Stones, Nathan Ake, Kyle Walker, Oleksandr Zinchenko among others. The Spaniard finally seems to be content with his backline having added the brilliant Dias to the equation last season.

In the time that Manchester City bought all of these defenders, Chelsea has only spent money on three. Antonio Rudiger, Ben Chilwell and Malang Sarr.

Thomas Tuchel’s arrival helped several fans forget about Chelsea’s previous defensive woes. The Blues struggled to keep the ball out of their net under ex-boss Frank Lampard and were not so steady under Maurizio Sarri. We’re now seeing the same pattern that we saw with Antonio Conte.

Chelsea lacked defensively at the beginning of Conte’s reign, however, following a 3-1 loss and a rude awakening from their London rivals Arsenal, the 3-4-3 system was born.

The