Chelsea manager, Enzo Maresca, recently noted that the likes of Raheem Sterling, Trevoh Chalobah and others wouldn’t see a single minute of action for the first-team, and they’d be well advised to seek alternative employment in the current transfer window.
It was as direct an instruction as it’s possible to be.
There’s no grey area in what Maresca said and it leaves no room for doubt, which could be taken as a positive in that he could’ve just left them to rot on the sidelines. At least this way, the players are being given the opportunity to get out.
However, it’s a ‘bomb squad’ tactic that doesn’t sit at all well with Stan Collymore. So much so, that he’s not far off advocating that players sue their current employers if something similar keeps happening.
Chelsea’s ‘bomb squad’ criticised by Collymore
“Football back in the day effectively mirrored the army in terms of training methodology and behavioural methodology. Often football teams would literally go and train at army camps […] the whole thing was about team discipline,” he said to CaughtOffside for his exclusive column.
“The Army is very closely aligned to football in the sense that playing football in front of 50,000 people is quite an extreme thing to do just as being in the Army is extreme.
“Football apprentices had to spend seven or eight hours sweeping the stands and it felt like a punishment. You got punished too if you didn’t clean the dressing rooms properly, or if you didn’t clean your pros kit properly.
“The bomb squad, as it was known across football, was another example of that. ‘If you don’t do this right, you’re going to get the army discipline treatment.’
“Of course, things have changed greatly and for the better, so that we now are very aware that if you sign an employment contract, you should be signing an employment contract for the duration of that contract and be what you were bought as, which is a senior professional footballer.
“When players are told by clubs that they’ll be banished from training and won’t play again so it would be best they were sold – Chelsea is the perfect recent example – those players have now stood up and said that’s not right. Clubs can’t be doing that and they couldn’t get away with it in any other industry.
“I think that unless the PFA come out and say ‘we need to stop this practice and if you are at a professional football club and are surplus to requirements, that’s fine, but you still train with the first team until you are sold,’ and make it almost a dictat, then there might be a situation whereby a player says ‘this is restriction of trade, this is workplace bullying, and I’m going to sue the club.’
“My preference would be that the PFA now step in, they sit down with the Premier League, the FA and the EFL, and they all put statements out next week saying the long standing and old practice of the bomb squad is now finished.”
Collymore also alluded to the fact that if players were being treated properly, if a club then decided they were surplus to requirements, the players themselves might be more amenable to moving on, rather than digging their heels in.
Chelsea seems a rather extreme case in point at this moment, though one can hazard a guess that Financial Fair Play has much to do with why there is a consistent churn of players in and out of the club.
Frankly, having a squad of almost 40 despite all the movement of players, is ridiculous.
