Frank Lampard and now Thomas Tuchel have helped create perfect conditions for homegrown players to flourish
There was Josh McEachran and Ola Aina. There was Dominic Solanke and Gaël Kakuta. There was the season under Maurizio Sarri when he did not give a single debut to an academy player. There was the Chelsea manager who argued in a presentation to the technical director, Michael Emenalo, that the club should scrap or scale down its academy as it was costing too much and producing no tangible benefit to the first team.
For all of them, and all of this, Chelsea’s third goal against Juventus on Tuesday night was an ornate kind of closure: Reece James peeling away towards the back post with his customary menace, Ruben Loftus-Cheek twisting and shuffling in the area, Callum Hudson-Odoi applying the finish. A goal made in Chelsea, conceived at Cobham: perhaps the fullest vindication to date of Roman Abramovich’s frequently ridiculed, frequently wasteful vision of a Chelsea first team brimming with academy talent.
