Ask Chelsea fans how they feel about this season and they will put some blame on Antonio Conte, but they will also squarely place a lot of responsibility with the players.
Plenty of fans have been saying that they would happily lose 10 or 15 players from the squad this summer, and there’s no doubt the team needs a huge amount of change.
That’s the issue with losing Eden Hazard and Thibaut Courtois. The club might be able to survive losing two of their top players, if they spend big to replace them, but that then prevents them from realistically reshaping the rest of their squad.
They can’t change their star players and their squad players together in one summer – that would mean changing the entire squad. So either they can replace their stars with stars and keep the dross in the squad, or they can force their stars to stay while they refit their supporting cast.
What will be almost impossible is doing both in the same summer.
