Chelsea will continue to spend cash like Monopoly money regardless of what their critics or supporters think, writes GRAEME SOUNESS

The conversation where Enzo Maresca told Raheem Sterling he was not part of his plans should have taken place long before the first game of the season. It should not have taken place two days before Chelsea‘s opening match against Premier League champions Manchester City.

Seriously, what reaction did Chelsea expect? ‘Thanks very much Mr Manager, of course I’ll go quietly.’ Really!?

From that moment on there’s only one thing in Raheem Sterling’s head and that is: what’s best for Raheem?

Young footballers today have enormous egos, and so they should have to perform in the Premier League. Sterling has taken that message personally. He’s played in the pre-season friendlies, and from that he has deduced the coach fancies me and I’m going to be involved this year.

Maresca knows Sterling. And from Day One his new employers would have given him their thoughts on who should stay and who should go at Chelsea.

At that point, Sterling, who earns three times what many of their more recent signings earn, would have been earmarked as one of the first to go.

Soon after that, Sterling should have been given the good news…You don’t wait until 48 hours before the season kicks-off, you’re asking for trouble.

It’s also of greater benefit to Chelsea to gain more time in trying to help find him a new club. Timing it the way they have, has simply created more column inches about their mishandling of another situation.

Sterling’s PR people then got criticised for putting out a statement asking for ‘clarity’ on the day of the game. At that juncture, he is an angry, young man. He has little care for what Chelsea are doing on the pitch.

His mind is on where does he go next, where will he be wanted? Unfortunately, there’s little to no market for him here unless Chelsea take an enormous hit, not only on the fee but covering part of his salary to get him out the door. You’d suspect Saudi Arabia is his best option but is he up for it? The initial noise is he wants to stay in Europe and reclaim his England place. Either way, Chelsea won’t be financially happy with the outcome.

The current owners are the ones that bought Sterling. He was their first signing. At 27 years of age, they paid £47.5m and put him on a five-year contract worth around £320,000 a week.

We touched on Chelsea’s business plan last week, so where does this fit?

Their strategy is to recruit young players, not on outrageous money, but, on average, with a basic wage of just under £80,000 per week – still an outrageous sum to the average man on the street. They put them on long contracts and then within three years, hey presto, you have a winning team.

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Except football isn’t that simple and Raheem Sterling doesn’t fit that business plan. Neither did Kalidou Koulibaly when they signed him at 31 for £33m a few weeks after Sterling, or Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang at 33 for £10.3m from Barcelona.

Does this business plan change from week to week, month to month or season to season?

This spending of Monopoly money, collecting players, blowing billions, it makes no economic sense to me, and it must be super difficult to manage.

This is BlueCo’s third season owning Chelsea Football Club, and the scattergun approach doesn’t seem to be ending soon. Ultimately, it may bring success but, if they had had much smarter football advisers from the outset, then it could have been achieved on a shorter timescale and for a lot less money.

Maresca says more than 15 players are now training away from his first team and he says it’s not a mess.

As a manager, we all had situations where five or six players were injured and maybe another five or six weren’t happy with you because they weren’t starting each week, but this is on a different scale and these 15 outcasts are a major problem for Chelsea and the manager.

You’ve got a lot of unhappy bunnies there with a grievance to share. I would imagine their paths don’t cross with the first team group as they would be training at a different time, that is something the manager can control but, what he can’t control, is the mixing and socialising outside working hours.

I actually liked quite a lot of what I saw from Maresca’s team last Sunday. If, after spending over £1.2billion, they had a centre forward who could finish their chances, they possibly could have even won the game. But City just had too much ringcraft, they rolled with the pressure and finished Chelsea off on the counter.

Maybe, instead of paying the small matter of £45m for Joao Felix, who is easy on the eye but gets you one goal in four, they would have been better served keeping all their powder dry and saving for a 25-goal-a-season man. But then money isn’t a problem for Chelsea is it? They want Victor Osimhen who is circa £100million to buy. And, of course, he’s going to accept the average £80,000 a week salary too, just like the rest of them…

Let’s start showing red cards for histrionics  

Look up the definition of simulation and you will see the word ‘deception’. An act of deceit is cheating. And that’s exactly what Southampton’s Ben Brereton-Diaz did last week to get Newcastle United’s Fabian Schar sent off. The way he went down so theatrically, I’d have given him the red card and Schar a yellow instead. The rule has to change.

In any other walk of life, that is classed as cheating, and we wouldn’t put up with it, so why do we do accept it in football? I wrote in my autobiography a few years ago a chapter about what I’d like to see change in the game. If you asked the average fan on the street, they’d say improve VAR and eradicate cheating.

Schar moved his head forward with aggression but he didn’t headbutt Brereton-Diaz. Those histrionics irritate supporters and it’s embarrassing for our game. Start showing red cards for diving and those type of actions and within months it will soon stop and we’ll have a much more honest spectacle for it.

Just rewards for Foden and Palmer 

Two English players justifiably won the PFA player of the year and young player of the year this week. The way Phil Foden and Cole Palmer were utilised by England certainly didn’t light up the Euros this summer, but they were the stand-out players of last season, and I hope they maintain their appetite to keep learning and improving.

Foden will only benefit from the return of Ilkay Gundogan to Manchester City. From the outside, there is no desperate need for him, but Pep Guardiola will know he is a gem for his dressing room. A fabulous player, never any hint of a problem, with a great attitude that rubs off on those around him.

Carlo Ancelotti, the master of man-management  

Real Madrid’s draw against Real Mallorca last weekend underlines how names on the teamsheets don’t win you football matches.

A 1-1 draw against a yo-yo team such as Mallorca was not the start Madrid envisaged with Kylian Mbappe, Vinicius Jr, Jude Bellingham and Rodrygo in their line-up. One game in and their media were asking, are Madrid in crisis? Don’t laugh too hard at that, as that kind of nonsense is on its way to our game too.

More Galacticos mean yet more enormous egos for Carlo Ancelotti to deal with.

The Spanish press have already been referring to Mbappe, Vinicius Jr and Bellingham with the acronym ‘MVB’ which prompted a loaded social media riposte from Rodrygo post-match when he had been the man who scored and spared their blushes. The post was subsequently taken down. And what does Ancelotti do? He gives them two days off and Mbappe, Vinicius Jr and Rodrygo take a bonding trip on a luxury yacht together to Marbella.

It’s a tremendous gift that Ancelotti has to manage these personalities. When you consider the players he has had to handle. He doesn’t say much and, I’m sure with some of those egos clashing, to keep a happy dressing room he is often best suited using a simple nod of the head and an arch of that famous left eyebrow. There’s a definite art to his man-management and few do it better.