Chelsea quiet on transfer front as Mourinho loudly taunts rivals

You can generally tell when Jose Mourinho feels a little antsy about life in general.

As a basic rule any time you actually notice him – talking, gesturing, spreading his own special Mourinho voodoo – then something is probably up.

And Mourinho has been talking this week before the Community Shield match against Arsenal at Wembley. Just when you thought he’d gone quiet. A creak of the coffin lid. Jose’s back. And he’s going on about stuff.

In among the pot shots and wisecracks, Chelsea’s manager has had two main areas of interest in the last week of pre-season. First the overly lavish spending of others, a mischievous line of argument given Mourinho’s own status as the highest-spending manager in world football over the last decade. And beyond that the strength of Chelsea’s own playing core, most notably Eden Hazard’s claim on having had a more successful season than Cristiano Ronaldo which, for all the slight sense of double take, is based on an unarguably decisive contribution by Hazard to Chelsea’s title win.

It is not hard to find the real sore point here. Winning back-to-back English league titles is a huge challenge even at the best of times, a feat only two managers – Alex Ferguson and Mourinho himself 10 years ago – have achieved since Bob Paisley in 1983.

Recruitment

When it comes to recruitment,

Chelsea

have not had a productive summer. This may or may not matter – analysing the likely worth of millions spent is one of the more brain-manglingly pointless summer activities – but Mourinho has been fairly open about the need to add to his squad.

And yet entering the final month of the window, Chelsea are €14 million or so in the black having lost Petr Cech, Filipe Luis and Gael Kakuta, with the only arrivals being Nathan, who has four years on loan in Belgium written all over him, Asmir Begovic and the silhouette of the footballer who used to be Radamel Falcao.

Not that we should be surprised by this. The last Premier League champions to retain the title were Manchester United in 2009, tribute both to the relative competitiveness of that stodgy oligopoly at the top, but also to the recent habit of spending badly in the immediate aftermath of triumph.

Last summer Manchester City reinforced their champion status by signing Eliaquim Mangala and Fernando. The year before, Manchester United lost Ferguson, Ryan Giggs and, ultimately, Nemanja Vidic, and added David Moyes and a panic-bought Marouane Fellaini.

The last really major star-name champion spend came in 2010, when Chelsea burped up €130 million on Ramires, David Luiz and Fernando Torres (all of whom, lest we forget, now have a Champions League winner’s medal). Beyond that, a refusal to splurge on established stars has been the trend.

Prudent Chelsea still do a lot of business – eight players from the last time they played the Community Shield in 2012 have moved on – but it is generally pretty good business.

If Mourinho bought the title last year he bought it for loose change. With players coming in and out, Diego Costa and Cesc Fabregas arrived for a combined total summer spend of €7 million, the most demonstrably successful month of pre-season business in Premier League history.

One-season fix

And yet fast-forward a year and it was perhaps a one-season fix.

The Costa-Fabregas axis may have been the defining note in Chelsea’s early kick away from the pack but the title season split neatly in two: the giddy times up to Christmas that brought 21 wins in 27 matches; and the sticky patch after it when Chelsea won seven out of 17, manned the defence and became a team driven by their hind quarters in the second half of the season.

This week Fabregas said the only way to improve on last season is to win the Champions League. This would certainly require reinforcement in his own position, with memories fresh of how Chelsea’s midfield was overpowered by Paris Saint-Germain.

Chelsea’s starting team against Arsenal tomorrow will probably be as close as possible to the first-choice team from last season. And yet, for all his sniping, Mourinho’s knows his players.

Watching Mourinho manage, shuffle his pack, and wring the most from a fine, if rather slight squad promises a fascinating start to the season. Guardian service