I think, unfortunately, that CFC's era of "dominance" if you will, is coming to an end. Now hear me out. The good old days of Lamps, Terry, Drogba. It's all in the past. Much like how they faded away after our CL win, world football changed as well. You can't really win anymore with a physically strong spine and great defending. It's all about speed, skill, and attacking football now (as much as I loved the old style, if you will). At its core, Chelsea has been known for its physicality, grit, character, and defense. Those things just don't matter as much as they used to anymore sadly.

Also, running the club and continuously pumping money into it is exhausting. With CFC's recent policy of trying to be "sustainable" i.e. Money out must = money in, it seems as if even Roman himself is getting a bit tired, for lack of a better term. The truth is you have to spend big to win. Recently prices have become inflated but the old Chelsea crew wasn't cheap by those day's standards either. Roman's new philosophy of "being more sustainable" means the high moula investments won't be there as much anymore. In effect, we want to buy cheap young players or foster academy products instead of buying world class talent. In effect, this is very similar to Tottenham's policy - Liverpool and Arsenal as well but recently they have started to splash the cash because it wasn't working for them. Have those guys really done anything while we've been gallavanting winning the league and FA cups? No, not really (that's putting it mildly). If you're hedging your bets on young talent to become world class, you have to be either willing to face the disappointments or be a huge club like Real who attract future stars as soon as they're out of the womb. Bottom line is, if you don't want to pay for established world class talent, you aren't going to be world class unless you get very lucky with your prospect pool or are some sort of historical/European behemoth.

What does that mean for us? It depends on what management does this off-season. If it decides to go tit for tat in the transfer market and splash cash, we can have very very high expectations (EPL, CL, etc). Unfortunately, as seems very likely, the management won't do that and will choose to stick with sustainability. If that's the case, we will have to lower our expectations (top 4 as success, FA and league cups) and brace ourselves for Arsenal and Tottenham-esque seasons as our squad just won't be able to compete on the highest level due to the pure skill gap. We will have to give way for Man C and the like as they take our place as big spending giants who are trying to forge their own history, as we did ourselves not so long ago. However, even these expectations are very high if you compare them to how crappy we were way back in the day so there's that.

Either way, we will always be Blue. KTBFFH