Why Michael Olise's loyalty is good for the Premier League

Alisse Cho to stay at Crystal Palace. Does this signal, how can I put this, a bit of a win for the rest of the league really. I mean, we've seen an insane transfer window for Chelsea. Potentially you've got a young player looking at that and what's going on at Chelsea thinking, maybe a bit more development at Palace might actually do my career some good. You'll find it hard to believe it, given you've laid my Palace allegiance bare. But when the news came through, one of the first things I felt was, this is good news for the Premier League. There has to be a level of competition in this division. And if you do have a club, okay, a club that's playing catch up, massive game of catch up with Manchester City and doesn't look as if they're going to be competing for the title anytime soon. But a club that is spending such amounts, I mean, over 900 million pounds since this new ownership came in, in the summer of 2022, three transfer windows. They can't have it all their own way. The rest of the division has to fight back in some capacity somehow. And you can argue that Brighton have done that by getting 115 million pounds for Moises Caicedo. That's one way of doing it. But I use this phrase with certain wariness, but giving Chelsea a bloody nose is something that I suspect a lot of clubs in the division will celebrate. Now I know, and I should also say that I contribute to the Straight Outta Cobham podcast here at The Athletic. And I know that there's a sense that Chelsea's squad building is not complete. They don't have a perfectly balanced squad, even after spending this amount of money. There's still a club that's going to be doing lots of things between now and the end of the transfer window and their supporters, and indeed I imagine Maurizio Pochettino would argue, they still lack a creative number 10 and clearly a number nine that's going to score them goals. And to rectify those issues and those problems with the team, they're going to have to spend a lot more money if they've got no faith in what they have in their squad at the moment. But for everybody else looking in, it looks like stockpiling. It looks like there's a young talent, we'll have him. There's another one, we'll have him. I suspect there is a strategy. There is something quite exciting happening at Chelsea. It's costing a lot of money. A lot of money. Jay, I'm just thinking when you're saying that, you know, you're a young player, you're guaranteed footballer, a team like Brentford, Crystal Palace, but also it doesn't come with the pressure of having to hit the ground running like you would have at Chelsea. I mean, the last resort Chelsea had just showed just how much work needs to be done in that team as attractive as an eight-year contract might look like for you and your agent. The reality is actually, that comes with a lot of pressure to literally, as you're saying, Dom, try and catch up with Manchester City. Yeah, and firstly, I don't know if an eight-year contract is that much of a good thing because you are kind of locked in. The amount of opportunities you have to leave the club if things don't go well are very, very limited. I think for me, I just look at Chelsea at the moment, I don't think it's a particularly stable project. With Caicedo, I think he's one of the few players I can understand why he's joined Chelsea recently because they had a very obvious hold at number six. So he's going to go in and he's going to play week in, week out. Obviously, if we take the Alise situation, prefers to play on the right wing. You've got Sterling there, you've got Madaweki there, you've got Mudrick who can play there as well. So straight away, there's an imbalance in terms of how many players they have in certain areas of the pitch. And you also look at what they've done in terms of, they've got Badr Washila, who's a left-footed centre-back. They've got Levy Colwell, who's a left-footed centre-back. Lewis Hall looked like to be a really good prospect to that. He's gone out on loan and he's joined Newcastle with an obligation, I think, to buy. So they're doing all of these wild schemes at the moment. And it feels to me like there's no real consistent plan. And as Dom said, it just feels like they're picking up players for the sake of it at the moment. And obviously the famous one is Mudrick. It almost felt like they just signed him just to spite Arsenal, really. And going back to what Dom said, Alise knows he's going to play 30, 35 games for Crystal Palace this season. And if you're in Alise's shoes, and you've just been at the under 21 Euros this summer with France, you're probably thinking, okay, how do I get into the Euro 2024 squad? How do I get into the senior squad? Man City, I would have understood a little bit more. Pep Guardiola, Champions League, competing for trophies. You know you can grow at City, right? Competing for trophies. So maybe playing for Man City and getting the odd cameo here and there in elite competitions would have pushed you that further. I don't know if playing for Chelsea every now and then, when they're not in Europe, there's no difference to staying at Crystal Palace. And I also compare it to Jack Grealish a little bit in the sense that, I think we kind of forget, Grealish only joined Man City, I think, a month before he turned 26. Like he waited quite a while to make that move. He probably could have gone maybe a couple of years earlier, but it didn't really do him any harm growing at Aston Villa, making mistakes. Forget he went down with Villa, came back up with Villa. But he had the time to grow. He became the talisman of that team and he really kicked on in other ways. And I don't think there's any harm in Alisse and other players doing that and rejecting Chelsea. I thought you had something there, Dom. No, no, I agree. I agree with that. It is refreshing. That was the sense when it came to Alisse, because we've had this summer where, you know, players have joined Chelsea. You look at them and think, well, you know, you're likely to be playing your first team football at Strasbourg next season, not at Chelsea. And, you know, I'm sure the Chelsea ownership would say, well, look, actually, this is the only way we can revamp this team and provide some kind of long-term stability. But the reality is, you're right in terms of if you choose between Man City and Chelsea for your development, you go to City because of Pep Guardiola. Mauricio Pochettino hasn't been in City long enough at Chelsea to show that there's long-term faith in what he can provide there yet. I mean, I'm sure Beydad Iqbali and Todd Boley would argue that they want Pochettino to do what, and be at Chelsea for as long as Pep's been at City. And that's the idea, that allows the philosophy to get properly ingrained and then they can develop players and bring them through with that faith in the management. But the reality is that their first year in City, when they promised they were going to be very different to the Roman Abramovich regime, they sack managers every 10 minutes. But also on that, I look at the Abramovich era and you look at the ghost of players past, names like Gael Kaku, Ajumpao, Mishi Bachua, I'm sure there are a few others as well. Who were bought in and never really did it. I know Bachua is a bit of a strange figure, but he was bought from Marseille, I think, for about 25, 30 million pounds. And he was seen as, this is someone who could become the Ayrton Didier drug boy and he just never really got the game time, got farmed out on all these different loans. And you can definitely see history potentially repeating itself, even though there's been this massive change of ownership. It looks like the same mistakes are being made. And obviously the rules have been tweaked as well, so you can't stockpile as many players and send them all out on loan. So it's slightly different, but it's still a confusing one. The slight frustration I have with it is that Chelsea have got one of the best, they're a city incidentally, but Chelsea have got one of the best. And yet constantly buying in very, very young talent at vast expense sort of seems to undermine the faith you might have in your academy. Well, like I said, Hall's the best example of that, right? You've now sent him to a top four rival when he was someone who could have potentially deputized to Ben Chilworth. But also, I mean, look, they've got rid of a lot of players who seem to be having a good time other than potentially Mason Mount.