Matt Maher: Can’t have too many good players? Let’s ask Chelsea

The comment was greeted with chuckles from those supporters inside the Villa Store, who had arrived for Wednesday’s signing event to find themselves in the middle of a breaking news story.

Yet you suspect for some, the rather late confirmation of Martinez’s number change will have been the cause of some grumbling.

Just as well, then, they do not support Chelsea, where it is not so much the numbers at risk of altering as the identity of the players wearing them.

Pedro Neto, for instance, will make his return to Molineux on Sunday with the No.7 on his back, just a week after making his debut for the London club wearing 19.

Confirmation of the Portugal international’s rapid promotion to single figures came with no mention of the man he has replaced in the shirt, Raheem Sterling, who in the space of a few days went from thinking he was a big part of the plans at Stamford Bridge to training in his own back garden.

Sterling’s omission from Chelsea’s squad for their 2-0 defeat to Manchester City last Sunday became the big story of the Premier League’s opening weekend, admittedly in part because of the statement put out by his advisors before kick-off claiming they would be seeking “clarity” over his future.

Those words smacked of entitlement and the simple response from many that Sterling, below par for much of last season, simply had to start playing better seemed entirely fair. On the other hand, as defenestrations go, his has been particularly savage.

Sterling played in every pre- season match and would have had every right to think he was part of Enzo Maresca’s plans, before being pulled to one side by the head coach last Saturday and told he wasn’t. Much like everyone else, he never saw it coming.

It is at times like these you wonder whether Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali’s ownership of Chelsea over the past two years isn’t a deliberate attempt to disprove two long-established football truisms?

The first of those is you can never have too many good players. Quite clearly, as Chelsea are demonstrating, you can. Since taking the reins from Roman Abramovich, Boehly and Eghbali have signed 36 of them, Joao Felix this week becoming the latest when he rejected an offer from Villa to become the latest man to deprive someone else of their parking space at the club’s Cobham training ground.

At time of writing, which always feels an important to include when writing about Chelsea, they have more than 40 senior players on the books. As Ally McCoist yesterday pointed out, there is a more than handy core of a decent team in the group which, along with Sterling, has now been banished to train elsewhere, Ben Chilwell, Trevoh Chalobah and Romelu Lukaku just for starters.

Admittedly, there are a few any casual Chelsea supporters would need to Google; Brazilian teenager Deivid Washington – signed for £17million last summer but with just two substitute appearances to his name – being a case in point.

Washington’s fee represents just a fraction of the £1.1bn spent on players over the last two years and the other accepted truth Chelsea seem determined to blow out of the water is that in football, money will eventually talk.

To this point, it certainly hasn’t. Competing in the Europa Conference League is not the position Boehly and Eghbali expected to be when they purchased the two-time Champions League winners. “Circus” is the word now being more commonly associated with Chelsea than champions.

The “bomb squad” is believed to have been purchased at the cost of more than £300m, while it emerged this week the club’s policy of handing out long contracts, in an apparently canny bid to get around profit and sustainability rules, mean the playing staff as a whole have a combined 191 years remaining on their deals. Good luck in moving out any player happy to sit on the sidelines, or finding another club willing to take on the burden. As a means of running a business, you’d hardly call it efficient.

Football, of course, is a sport decided on the pitch and Chelsea, one of the most successful clubs over the past two decades, have rarely gone in for the standard convention that stability breeds success.

Both of their Champions League titles were won under managers who arrived after the predecessor had been sacked midway through the campaign. The first case, famously, saw them taken to glory by Roberto Di Matteo, a caretaker boss.

Perhaps the trouble now is the uncertainty permeates throughout the dressing room and not just in the manager’s office.

Yet you look back at last season, when Chelsea’s form over the second half of the campaign was that of a top-four team and you hesitate to dismiss them too easily regardless of the latest off-field mess.

Clearly, there is talent in the ranks and while moving on from Mauricio Pochettino just when he seemed to be finding momentum felt strange, it’s much too soon to say how Maresca might fare.

The club’s seemingly scattergun transfer policy has not helped him. Chelsea’s approach should not work and for the general good of the game, it would be better if it didn’t. Yet there is still a chance it could and any laughter at the apparent off-field chaos and negative headlines might best be strangled, at least for now.