Alonso's task at Chelsea: 46-player squad, baffling transfers and confusing hierarchy

Xabi Alonso knew perfectly well what he was signing himself up for when he agreed to become the next Chelsea manager.

"I had a view of Chelsea from the outside," Alonso told reporters while on Chelsea's pre-season tour of Australia. "I could see the positives and my concerns so I addressed them.

"We had the same ideas, the same analysis, to start building momentum together. That is why we are taking these steps together and making decisions to build a good team."

We don't need to ask Alonso what view he had of Chelsea before he arrived, because the picture has been painted very clearly over the past few years. It is one defined by muddied thinking and a chaotic approach, which comes together to create the biggest circus in the Premier League.

Alonso is only in the early stages of his Chelsea career and will obviously need time to stamp his authority on things and turn around a side which finished a lowly 10th in the Premier League last season. Yet, despite having the title of manager, rather than head coach, he will have to do so within the same parameters of his predecessors Enzo Maresca and Liam Rosenior.

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In the post-Roman Abramovich era, of which Todd Boehly has become the gormless face, Chelsea have become the most puzzling of entities where more confusion and baffling mismanagement is only around the corner. After all, this is a club that, defying convention, have five sporting directors.

It is a club, that at the time of writing, have 46 first-team players listed on their website. A club who have, despite their vast swathes of players, spent approximately £336million in the summer transfer window so far, with more no doubt to come.

And a club which has, partly on Alonso's say-so, changed their youth-first transfer approach to sign 35-year-old Danny Welbeck and 36-year-old Jordan Henderson.

Welbeck's arrival means Chelsea currently have six senior strikers. Of them only Joao Pedro is assured of his position. Liam Delap, a £30m signing last summer, could be shipped out, Nicolas Jackson is looking for a new team after spending last season on loan at Bayern Munich and Marc Guiu is on the transfer list having been recalled from Sunderland last season due to injuries.

It is a muddled picture entirely in-keeping with Chelsea's modus operandi. Last summer, Maresca felt he had no other choice than to create a 'bomb squad', featuring the highly-paid group of Raheem Sterling, Axel Disasi, Joao Felix and Ben Chilwell.

This summer it is Alonso who has the unenviable task of trying to work out which players he wants, which ones he doesn't and how to create some kind of squad unity amidst it all. Marc Cucurella may be gone after his frank criticism of the hierarchy, but senior players Enzo Fernandez and Moises Caicedo - who both publicly flirted with rival clubs during the slide under Rosenior - remain.

"You need the right balance of personalities and stages of maturity, with players in their early 20s, early 30s and everything in between," Alonso has said of his squad. Yet the list of new arrivals shows the complicated squad picture the Spaniard has inherited from owners BlueCo:

Geovany Quenda (Sporting CP, undisclosed), Denner (Corinthians, undisclosed), Dastan Satpaev (Kairat Almaty, undisclosed), Emmanuel Emegha (Strasbourg, undisclosed), Marco Palestra (Atalanta, £47m), Morgan Rogers (Aston Villa, £117m), Maxence Lacroix (Crystal Palace, £52m), Danny Welbeck (Brighton, £5m), Jordan Henderson (Brentford, free), Valentin Barco (Strasbourg, undisclosed).

Good luck getting your head around that, Xabi. Oh, and your ranks have been swelled even further by the return from a doping ban of Mykhailo Mudryk, the Ukrainian winger who has not played competitive football since November 2024.

Keeping everyone happy will be an impossible balancing act, given the lack of European football means fewer matches. Perhaps more so than any other elite club, Chelsea is a dog-eat-dog environment where team spirit has been sorely missing in recent years.

Off the pitch there are more factors to try and get your head around. The £10m fine a suspended ban from registering new players for two transfer windows for historic off-the-books agent payments. The fact they are still yet to find a front-of-shirt sponsor, continuing their baffling commercial failure which stretches back to 2023.

Yet, this being the ultimate club of contrasts, they have still splashed out six figures on a top-of-the-range private jet to whisk their players around during pre-season.

Chelsea have 20 days until their begin their Premier League campaign. The size of the task facing Alonso is such that it would be surprising if the picture appeared any clearer by then.