Marcel Desailly exclusive: Xabi Alonso must 'erase' Chelsea flops to be a success | OneFootball

Interview: Blues legend has offered his advice to the incoming manager amid concerns over Enzo Fernandez

Chelsea legend Marcel Desailly has told Xabi Alonso that he must take a philosophy-first approach if he wishes to succeed at Stamford Bridge.

The season was characterised by a lack of consistency, which many have blamed on a lack of experienced players in the team, with Chelsea boasting the youngest squad in the Premier League this season with an average age of 23.7 years.

Desailly believes this will be the biggest problem for Alonso to overcome, has he looks to implement his football philosophy on a bloated squad of players.

“How do you allow a coach to define and organise his philosophy around the specific players he wants to put into the system?”

Xabi Alonso will start work on July 1

Getty

The World Cup offered an extreme but potentially effective solution to this unique problem. Alonso must consider which players can match the way he wants to play football and “erase” those who don’t.

He continued: “He really has to sit down with himself and erase the players who do not match his philosophy. But it is super difficult with Chelsea because they have so many players already. How do you get rid of them to build your system?”

Chelsea struggled to see success last season in using a big squad of young players, fielding a different starting line-up almost every week.

This is where, Desailly proposed, Alonso needs to make a change and have a group of experience first choice players who can lead the younger talent and mentor them in game management and curate one style of play.

“For Chelsea to become truly successful again, you need three to four first-choice, experienced players to start matching with the talented players you already have in the system. So it's a huge task to bring them back,” Desailly said.

“The request of this new coach is to build up a team that will have consistency in its performance. Right now, they don't have consistency. Why? Because there's no experience in the team. You go out, you play, but you don't identify the key moments—the moment to drop back, or the key moment to press the accelerator to put the opponent into trouble.”

Enzo Fernandez is keen to leave

Getty

Enzo Fernandez was arguably Chelsea’s standout player this season accumulating 15 goals and assists whilst also occasionally wearing the captain’s armband. He is a workhorse in midfield and has, alongside Moises Caicedo, been the engine room of the Chelsea team.

But despite this, Desailly thinks this is symptomatic of the problem that Chelsea are having - forcing Fernandez to play a role that he shouldn't be required to - playmaking and goalscoring were not his remit pre-Chelsea and he would be better served playing alongside Caicedo rather than in front of him.

Desailly said: “The way they've been using Fernandez, I disagree completely. They use him in a 4-2-3-1 system, and he's deployed as the playmaker of the three. He is not a playmaker. The problem you have with him is his goal statistics. I think he scored something like 16 goals [sic] this season, which is okay, but you lose more than what you gain with him there.

“Somebody else should be able to handle the offensive animation in that system. It feels strange for me to say that, because I'm nobody, but Chelsea have had two or three different coaches come in and they all made him play in that same playmaker position. He's not that. He has to come deep into the midfield with Moises Caicedo to protect the defensive block of the team and bring that high-level expertise and experience.”