THERE’S METHOD IN TODD BOEHLY’S TRANSFER MADNESS

the first team. If you didn’t make it, you were gone. Now there is scope to develop players, through loans or agegroup football, and sell them on for pure profit.

There is method in the apparent madness at Stamford Bridge, then, but that doesn’t change the fact that the overhaul is a gamble – a massive one –because it all rests on the players forming a good bond with the manager. The better the squad, the more chance they have of success, and Graham Potter certainly can’t claim that he hasn’t been given a good enough group. They are good enough to be up there and challenging for the Premier League.

Can Potter get the chemistry right on the pitch? That remains to be seen, but second round matches set for Saturday and the big guns joining the semi-final line-up on 7 and 8 January before the final on 11 February. he may need some time to get to know his new arrivals better. He may not be as familiar with some of them as we think because managing a Premier League team is so consuming.

Most games start at 7pm GMT and all matches are being streamed live in the UK on the world governing body’s OTT platform Fifa+.

This looks like being one of the last Club World Cups in its current seventeam format, with Fifa eager to beef it up into a money-spinning summer spectacular.

Those plans suffered a hitch during the pandemic, when the first proposed 24-team edition, to be held in China, was cancelled because of the pandemic.

Undeterred by that and the concerns of players’ unions, Fifa announced in December that the Club World Cup will become a 32-team affair held every four years from 2025.

Fortunate

Some of Chelsea’s high-profile summer signings, like Raheem Sterling, Marc Cucurella and Pierre-Emerick Aubmeyang, haven’t delivered yet, although they were brought in under Potter’s predecessor Thomas Tuchel. Boehly had just arrived and it feels like a different club now.

Potter must have known this was going to be the club’s strategy when he replaced Tuchel. Equally, the club must have felt he was suited to building a new team. He will not be im- mune to results-based judgements but will surely get this season to show what he can do.

Chelsea fans, meanwhile, must be excited by some of the talent coming in. They have been extremely fortunate to benefit from the unprecedented investment of first Abramovich and now Boehly’s group.

Speaking as a football fan, I find it so detached from where the game has come from. But the Premier League is 100 per cent business nowadays and the gambles are too big for many people unless they are billionaires.

@TrevorSteven63.