One year on from his ruthless Sky Sports Monday Night Football assessment of Chelsea’s squad, Jamie Carragher has been made to eat his words after their Club World Cup success
Jamie Carragher has been made to look foolish by Chelsea after his sharp Sky Sports assessment of the Blues’ squad last year. Enzo Maresca’s side added the Club World Cup to their recent UEFA Conference League win on Sunday.
Last summer, Chelsea came under heavy fire for their seemingly endless spending and revolving-door-style recruitment. Multiple first-team players were frozen out of the squad and over £200million was spent on 10 new faces, with their cohort bloating to 43 at one point.
These actions infuriated Sky pundit and Liverpool icon Carragher, who pleaded with the Blues to stop signing players, whilst branding them ‘not a proper club.’ Fast-forward 12 months, however, and they’re world champions.
“Chelsea have just got to stop buying players, and players have got to stop signing for Chelsea,” Carragher began on Sky Sports’ Monday Night Football in August 2024. “If I was a player I don’t know why you would sign for Chelsea, the only reason you would sign is because someone might say, ‘You’re getting a seven-year deal and big money and that’s guaranteed money for seven years.’
“You know what I’d say? Back yourself as a player, sign a four-year deal at a proper club and back yourself to do well, and then when you’re due for a renewal, your money goes up anyway.
“I don’t understand why players are signing seven-year deals. It’s not a young or exciting team. Great football teams need competition, but every football team I played in, there was seven or eight players who knew they were playing every week, and then you’ve got six or seven players who are fighting for the positions.
“Then you’ve got another six or seven who know they’re squad players. That is a healthy squad. If you’ve got 40 players, how are they all in one dressing room, how are you putting a training session on?”
Though they only managed a fourth-placed Premier League finish, Chelsea won the Conference League and added the Club World Cup to their cabinet on Sunday, upsetting Champions League holders PSG 3-0 in the final.
Chelsea co-owner Todd Boehly, who helped orchestrate a lot of the business last summer that riled up Carragher, opened up to talkSPORT after the win, admitting that this project has always been trusted.
“Well, we couldn’t have wished for a better outcome for our boys, who have done such good work and trained so hard, really came together in America under Enzo’s leadership and his direction,” Boehly began.
“No one gave us a chance to beat PSG, and the boys really thrived and grew on that. Watching them come together over the last couple of weeks in America has been very special. I think the form that you’ve seen is everything we hoped when we were putting this together with [co-sporting directors] Laurence [Stewart] and Paul [Winstanley].
“We always knew that, whatever happens on any given day. The odds that we thought we had and were able to round out with a piece or two… the boys, really understanding what Enzo’s been doing. We’re big believers, we knew all along in the value of the project.
“So I think, obviously, it came together brilliantly, and those are just odds that you can’t predict. But we’re hopeful that every day we wake up, the odds are that Chelsea are going to win something big.”
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