Chelsea's €600m splurge has echoes of Real Madrid's misguided 'galacticos' era

Champions League defeat at Bernabeu shows London club's huge spending under Boehly failing both in Europe and at home

Chelsea's record €121m signing Enzo Fernandez after his side's 2-0 Champions League quarter-final first-leg defeat against Real Madrid at the Santiago Bernabeu Stadium on Wednesday, April 12, 2023. AFShow more

Tens of thousands of madridistas, those with two decades or so of loyalty stamps on their season tickets, departed the Bernabeu on Wednesday night having glimpsed a piece of their own past.

They had just watched a club bearing the weight of record spending on players look impotent in a Champions League knockout. They had heard some bravado from one of that club’s senior executives before kick-off.

But these older Real Madrid fans could smile about it. The spectacular underachievers they had been watching was not their team but Chelsea. The boasts that soon assumed a very hollow ring had come from Todd Boehly, who heads the consortium that 10 months ago took ownership of the London club. He had forecast a 3-0 away win. Madrid finished as 2-0 winners of the first leg of the quarter-final.

Whatever calculations went into Boehly’s mistaken prediction, it was not recent form. Chelsea, under the fourth different head coach – including a caretaker, Bruno Saltor, and the current interim Frank Lampard – of Boehly’s short period in English football, have not scored any goals at all in their last six and half hours of trying.

It is one of the many poor returns on the €611m Chelsea have committed in transfer fees since last June.

Twenty years ago, Madrid were carrying around a similar reputation for extravagance. They spent the first years of the 21st century shattering individual transfer records. First on Luis Figo, then on Zinedine Zidane. But after that pair had featured in the victorious Champions League victory of 2002, Madrid’s hiring strategy lurched ahead with very little sense of balance.

Madrid teams of that era became known as the "galacticos", so starry were the names bought into the club, so many Ballon d’Or winners – Zidane, Figo, Brazil’s Ronaldo and England’s Micheal Owen – could they cram into the forward line.

Yet as the front half of the team became ever more stellar, and coaches flitted in and out of the club, Madrid’s runs in the Champions League became shorter and shorter.

Between 2004 and 2010 they were unable to go beyond the last-16 stage. At times, their recruitment looked not just haphazard – focusing on attack, neglecting defence – but comically clumsy. At one point Madrid signed too many players in a winter to get them all registered with Uefa for the Champions League.

Chelsea did the same this year. And how. Seven newcomers came into the club during Boehly’s great winter splurge. Only three could be added to the squad for European games, and so Enzo Fernandez, the most costly purchase at around €120 from Benfica, Mykhailo Mudryk, an initial €70m from Shakhtar Donetsk, and Joao Felix, who is only on loan from Atletico Madrid, were registered.

To include them Chelsea had to cut Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, who only joined last September and has scored more career goals in European club competitions than anybody else on the club’s swollen roster.

Since Chelsea won the Champions League in 2021, with Thomas Tuchel as head coach, the decline has shifted from gradual to ever sharper. They sit in the bottom half of the Premier League. The slump in Europe could very soon look far worse than that of Madrid’s galacticos.

The only viable route to Chelsea being in next season’s Champions League is to qualify as holders. And going into the Stamford Bridge leg of their quarter-final two goals down to Madrid is hardly the best platform for that.

“We’re realistic,” admitted Lampard after the first leg, “but we want to change the tone, change the story.”

He wished the first leg story had been different in moments besides the sending off of Ben Chilwell, Chelsea down to 10 men when they conceded the second goal. A late Mason Mount effort would be brilliantly blocked. “Mason’s chance might go in, and the tie feels completely different,” Lampard speculated.

He would have noted who made the athletic block to deny Mount: Antonio Rudiger, a defender who left Chelsea last summer.

Lampard may also have spotted than while Wesley Fofana, the defender signed by Boehly’s Chelsea for more than €80m was struggling against Madrid, a young centre-back Chelsea let go in 2021, Fikayo Tomori, was helping to steer AC Milan to an advantage – and to a third successive clean sheet in Europe – in their quarter-final against Napoli.

Lampard will have noted, too, that Inter Milan on Tuesday stretched their first-leg win over Benfica to 2-0 thanks to a goal from Romelu Lukaku.

Lukaku is only on loan at Inter. He is still owned by Chelsea, who paid around €115m for him less than two years ago – a time before that scale of fee became their norm and before their goalscoring crisis stretched across several changes of manager.