Any manager who bemoans gaps in his playing squad off the back of a £1 billion outlay inevitably faces some rather ruthless ridicule.

Mauricio Pochettino isn’t daft, he’ll have known what was coming his way when he chose to press home a need for Chelsea to sign their way out of the ‘many problems’ facing them come January, insisting that what they currently have assembled is not enough to challenge for the Premier League title.

As mad as that sounds following perhaps the most egregious spending spree in Premier League history, he’s probably not wrong. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that the most kamikaze use of funds that a division already long addicted to hyper-spending has seen might also be among the poorest. It all started, you’ll remember, with the arrival of US billionaire Todd Boehly to sweep Chelsea up from the messy conclusion to Roman Abramovich’s stewardship.

The repercussions of Russia invading Ukraine resulted in sanctions placed on the club’s long-time owner, and he was forced to sell up. A club facing consequences of a literal war may not seem like the most functional to take over, but Chelsea were actually in a really good place on the pitch when Boehly arrived.

They finished third in the Premier League under Thomas Tuchel, one of the game’s most sought-after young coaches, and were reigning Club World Cup winners, having won the Champions League the previous season. There are no guarantees in football, obviously, but there can’t be many alternate universes out there where pumping a further one billion pounds into that team leads to the disastrous outcome we are currently witnessing.

It wasn’t long before Boehly and Tuchel were butting heads, with the new owner reportedly also keen to play sporting director during that first summer transfer window. The manager was jettisoned a few months into the season, and replaced with Graham Potter on a five-year contract, an appointment that Chelsea loudly proclaimed as proof of their commitment to a long-term plan to wrestle back the league title.

Potter was furnished with several wildly expensive signings in January this year, including the likes of Mykhailo Mudryk and Enzo Fernandez for a combined cost of just under £200m, only to be fired himself in April, a mere seven months after arriving. More eye-catching, somehow, was the decision to dish out eight-year deals to players, a strategy aimed at allowing Chelsea to spend heavily without running afoul of UEFA’s Financial Fair Play regulations, all thanks to amortisation – spreading the transfer fee over the length of the contract.

The approach has now been banned – but not backdated – following a vote from Premier League clubs this week, although it doesn’t feel like there was going to be a rush to copy Chelsea any time soon. Several of these 17 signings since the change in ownership have failed to fire, and Pochettino’s team currently sit 12th in the table, already 14 points adrift of the Champions League places.

There’s a glaring contradiction at the heart of how Chelsea are operating, one that makes it difficult to see how they unravel this mess in any short order. The aim appears to have been to frontload their spending to quickly become league winners once more, and yet such sweeping levels of change will almost always require time in order to bear fruit.

The risk was always that if the transfer strategy didn’t pay off in the short term, the club would be left with a bloated squad of handsomely paid players sitting on ridiculously long contracts. You can, of course, attempt to sell. But, for example’s sake, is anyone out there going to get near the £88.5m that Chelsea shelled out on a now badly struggling Mudryk?

A cursory glance back at Tuchel’s squad after the 2021/22 season shows that all it was really in need of was a regular goalscoring striker and a reliable goalkeeper. You’d think a cool billion would be able to get you that with a few quid to spare. And yet, Chelsea spiralled from being a few tweaks short of genuine title contention to languishing in the bottom half of the table. Out with Manchester City, they had been the most consistently successful English side of recent times, even despite Abramovich’s tendency to empty the dugout a little too readily for most fans’ liking.

The point is, it shouldn’t have been this difficult to take over Chelsea and do a decent job. Instead, they’ve splurged an unholy amount of money to still find themselves with a manager agitating for a January overhaul. Yes, many of the last year’s signing predated Pochettino’s arrival, and it’s inevitable that a head coach will want to sign his own players, but to have so many issues all over the pitch that it’s difficult to pinpoint just one as the most urgent speaks to an overarching strategy that is just not working.

Chelsea aren’t scoring goals, and can’t keep them out at the other end. In eventually beating nine-man Tottenham last month, they might be the first team ever to win 4-1 and still find themselves mercilessly panned in the post-match press. Pochettino has proven himself capable of building good teams over time, of getting more from a group than the sum of its parts, but he seems borderline baffled by the job he has taken on.

And as has been proven with Tuchel and Potter, he might not get much more time to come to terms with it. It is surely unthinkable that a club which has spent so much in pursuit of short term success could find itself back at the drawing board for the third time in two years, but unless there’s a rapid turnaround, that may just be where they’re heading.