Chelsea’s treatment of young players slammed by major Athletic piece | OneFootball

The Athletic have published a piece today about players and their treatment during the transfer window.

They use Chelsea player Ishe Samuels-Smith as an example of the way that players are treated just as assets on a balance sheet, shuffled around without much thought for them on a personal level.

ISS moved on a permanent deal to Strasbourg in July. But by the end of August, Chelsea had trigger the purchase clause to buy him back, and had then loaned him to Swansea.

Bomb squad culture needs to end

Chelsea players in preseason training. (Photo by Darren Walsh/Chelsea FC)

We agree that the treatment of players purely as assets needs to end, and the “bomb squad” concept is pretty cruel and demeaning. It feels legally dodgy too.

“Behind all these executive decisions are players who care about their professional lives,” Amy Lawrence writes.

“There is also more than that at stake: where they live, their family circumstances, the needs of children and parents. It is all part of the picture, and a good salary is not a justification for bad treatment.

Samuels-Smith move was to help player as well as to help Chelsea

But ISS isn’t necessarily the best example. The fact he was shuttled around so unceremoniously this summer was as much about him as Chelsea’s balance sheet.

The word is he that he was homesick living in France and wasn’t settling. It sounds like he was pretty happy to return – playing for Swansea every week is certainly better than being unhappy in a new country stuck on the bench. Of course Chelsea do it because they want their asset to get more minutes and increase in value, but we’re sure the player’s feelings came into the equation too.

So while the bomb squad can be excused as something of a necessary evil for Chelsea given the vast turnover in players as the new owners transformed the squad, we don’t want to see it become a yearly feature.

We feel that battle is lost though – if anything, we are going to see more and more clubs applying that tactic.