Chelsea's defective £1 billion squad has been brutally exposed amid their alarming mid-season slump - and the Blues could pay with top-four failure

There is no doubt that Chelsea are suffering the consequences of their most recent transfer business, continuing a negative trend under the Clearlake-Boehly ownership and their sporting directors to date.

Although the unprecedented squad rebuild they have overseen over the past two years has been punctuated by unquestionable success stories, most notably signing Cole Palmer and bringing in a handsome profit from player sales, those are far outweighed by their failures in the transfer window.

Things have become particularly messy since the summer; of the eight signings who were immediately integrated into the first team, three were angling for an exit by the time the mid-season transfer window rolled around having grown frustrated over a lack of game time under Enzo Maresca.

Renato Veiga has already joined Juventus on loan, while Joao Felix - a £44.5 million ($58m) arrival who always seemed like an odd signing - is open to a move and Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall - a £30m ($38) purchase who was supposedly a perfect fit for Maresca's system - has been told he is surplus to requirements.

If all of that wasn't alarming enough, there was also the shameful scramble to bring Trevoh Chalobah back to the club amid a defensive injury crisis - a Cobham graduate who was quite literally forced out of his boyhood club in the summer, put up for sale and made to train with the academy before Crystal Palace took him on loan. Chelsea came crawling back, of course, with Winstanley even calling the defender to convince him to return.

In terms of outgoings, the highly-unpopular decision to let another academy graduate leave in Conor Gallagher has also backfired, as the now-Atletico Madrid midfielder would be an incredibly useful asset in their current predicament, with Romeo Lavia struggling to overcome his injury problems and Dewsbury-Hall clearly not considered good enough.

Although it didn't attract as much attention, ditching goalkeeper Djordje Petrovic off the back of an impressive debut campaign and sending him on loan to sister club Strasbourg in favour of making Robert Sanchez No.1 now looks incredibly misguided, too.

Indeed, Sanchez is the embodiment of a wider problem; much of the ire directed at the Chelsea hierarchy stems from the belief that two very obvious problem positions in the squad still haven't been addressed after more than two years under their stewardship.

Although Edouard Mendy impressed for a while, the Blues haven't had a consistently world-class goalkeeper since Thibaut Courtois left for Real Madrid in 2018, and current incumbent Sanchez is arguably the worst option they've had over the past the six-and-a-half years. The situation is made all the more laughable by £72m ($91m) signing Kepa Arrizabalaga's impressive displays on loan at Bournemouth of late.

At the other end of the pitch, Chelsea haven't had an elite goal-scorer for even longer - not since the days Diego Costa roamed the frontline and terrorised Premier League defences. There has been a succession of big-money failures in the years since, from Alvaro Morata to Timo Werner, and although cost-effective Nicolas Jackson shows signs of promise, the Blues still haven't found a reliably prolific hitman.

It was as though their chickens came home to roost in the dismal defeat at Man City; at one end, Sanchez made his fifth error leading to a goal this season alone as Erling Haaland bagged the winner by lofting the ball over the stranded goalkeeper's head, while at the other, Jackson was largely anonymous as his goal-drought extended to seven games.

Chelsea's sporting directors - hailed as two of the best in the business - should surely have the nous between them to realise that an elite goalkeeper and striker should have been transfer priorities numbers one and two for the club for some time. As Sanchez is showing, these are positions that can win and lose you games.

The problem Chelsea have is that their issues now run deeper than two positions, with the defence becoming a real issue. There were the signs of a budding centre-back partnership between Levi Colwill and Wesley Fofana, but another potentially season-ending injury for the latter has laid bare some significant problems.

Perennially unconvincing Benoit Badiashile is sidelined, too, and Axel Disasi is another recent signing who seems destined to depart in the near future. That makes Chalobah and Tosin Adarabioyo the most senior centre-backs at Maresca's disposal, highlighting a dire lack of obvious, experienced leaders at the back following Thiago Silva's summer exit.

Colwill is the club's great homegrown hope in central defence and has captain potential, but he is still just 21 and prone to both lapses in concentration and rash rushes of blood to the head.

The policy of targeting younger players across the board has left Chelsea with a group of six first-team centre-backs who are all flawed in different ways; unreliable, injury-prone or inexperienced. The newly-restored Chalobah might be a fan favourite, but he was eaten alive by Haaland at the Etihad. It's another area that wasn't properly addressed in the summer and now must be at the earliest opportunity.

Chelsea famously have the most expensively-assembled midfield on the planet on their books in Moises Caicedo, Enzo Fernandez and Romeo Lavia, but they are woefully short of quality options to underpin that trio following the decision to push Gallagher out of the club. Despite the obscene amount they've spent, Lavia's incessant injury problems have often left the Blues with the bare bones in the middle of the park as Caicedo and Fernandez run themselves into the ground.

As we've mentioned, Dewsbury-Hall is clearly not considered a viable option, while Carney Chukwuemeka and Cesare Casadei have been overlooked for the entire season, with the former likely to follow the latter in leaving before the end of the January window.

Given their first-choice options set them back close to a combined £300m ($372m), it's truly absurd that Chelsea find themselves in a situation where their head coach doesn't feel he has adequate back-up options.

In attack, Chelsea generally haven't had too much of an issue finding the back of the net, but their collective recent struggles have certainly exposed an overreliance on talisman Palmer to deliver in key moments.

Wingers Jadon Sancho, Pedro Neto and Noni Madueke have provided a combined 19 goals and assists in the Premier League this season - one fewer than Palmer has weighed in with all on his own. After a fine first half of the campaign, Jackson has suddenly seen the goals dry up, too, enduring a seven-game drought - the worst of his Chelsea career to date.

It is probably little surprise that this dismal spell, where the west Londoners have collected just one win from seven league games, has coincided with a slight dip in their No.20's usually ridiculously high levels.

Palmer's overall influence may have waned somewhat, but to his credit he has still impacted the scoresheet with goals against Fulham, Crystal Palace and Bournemouth. Chelsea need more from their other attacking players.

For his part, Maresca bizarrely believes Chelsea are in a better place than they were two months ago, when he was regularly fielding questions over a potential title challenge.

He certainly deserves some criticism for his in-game management at certain points and will face questions over whether he could have used the likes of Felix and Nkunku more effectively. Despite the fact the Blues have slipped to sixth in the Premier League, the head coach believes the experience will be invaluable.

"I always said we are ahead of my expectations in terms of the way we are playing, and our results," the Italian said recently. "Since we started, we have been top four almost all season which is something that in the last two years hasn’t really happened. We are getting better and for sure we need to do many things."

Following the chastening defeat to City, he added: "In my opinion, we are a better team that one month ago or two months ago because in this kind of moment, these kind of games, for sure they are going to make us better because we need to live this experience. I said two weeks ago, from now on, we can be third, we can be fourth, fifth or sixth... The games until the end [of the season] now can change [our position] a little bit."

Chelsea fans have every right to question their club's sudden decline and the state of the squad as the January transfer window draws to a close. The signs are that many of the players brought in by the sporting directors are at odds with what Maresca wants, either not good enough or ill fits for his system, and consequently - despite the fact they have spent more than £1bn over the past two years or so - the Blues are dearly lacking strength in depth.

The head coach had managed the situation with his so called 'A' and 'B' teams between league and cup, but it's now evident that the drop-off in quality between the two is too significant; this is not an ecosystem where players can be seamlessly rotated in and out.

Down in sixth, Chelsea are back to square one, and they somehow find themselves in a position where they are going to need to spend a hell of a lot more to achieve their long-term goals.