Chelsea are spending far too much to accept a parboiled transitional season

Chelsea have now lost a second successive away game against Southampton. Gelling may take time, and that’s the one commodity they don’t have.

Thomas Tuchel – and this should go without saying, really, but here we all are – is not stupid. Speaking after his Chelsea team had meekly surrendered the lead at Southampton and then been unable to recover in the second half, he identified that the key theme of this particular loss was defensive skittishness rather than their much-discussed lack of a number nine.

Chelsea had started their evening relatively successfully, a Raheem Sterling goal midway through the first half coming on top of a couple of decent chances. But not for the first time this season, the cogs in their engine started to seize. Southampton were leading by half-time, and while Chelsea’s second-half performance left no doubt about their commitment, their execution of Tuchel’s plan felt discombobulated and incoherent.

There was none of that feeling of delayed destiny that so frequently comes when a Big Club is chasing a goal to rescue a game, none of that suffocating pressure that makes the score being flipped start to feel inevitable. By the end of the evening Chelsea hadn’t just lost, but they’d deserved to lose it too. And it felt like an evening that wouldn’t be resolved by throwing yet more money around in the last 48 hours of the transfer window.

And what is clear is that this wasn’t some sort of isolated off night. Chelsea have won two of their five Premier League matches this season – against Everton and Leicester – and weren’t especially impressive in either of those matches, while their other three matches were against Spurs, in which their high press was impressive but they ultimately ended up being more heat than light, and now two straight away defeats at Leeds and Southampton, which are exactly the sort of matches that they need to be winning if they’re to challenge in the way that their spending this summer suggests they should.

Might Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang be the answer? Or Anthony Gordon? Well, either could be, although a broken jaw would mean that Aubameyang wouldn’t be appearing for a few weeks even if Chelsea can reach agreement with Barcelona. In a game of fine margins, the arrival of one player can be a catalyst for considerable change around an entire team.

But Chelsea have spent heavily this summer, and there comes a point at which you have to stop looking to the future and start…