Chelsea Football Club: FIFA Club World Cup champions.
We’ve won the lot and what an incredible achievement it is for the club, but also for captain Cesar Azpilicueta, who becomes the first – and thus far only – Chelsea player to achieve a clean sweep of trophies.
It’s fair to say Azpilicueta played a crucial role in Chelsea winning the Club World Cup last weekend. With the Blues awarded a penalty with only five minutes to go, Azpilicueta showed incredible presence of mind and great leadership in the few minutes that would decide the final.
He grabbed the ball and with Jorghino, Chelsea’s regular penalty taker, not on the pitch, many supporters wondered if Chelsea’s captain was stepping up from 12 yards.
The Palmeiras players gathered around Azpilicueta to try to get into his head and put him off. But once the referee had booked Eduard Atuesta for unsportsmanlike conduct and cleared the melee around the spot, Azpilicueta handed the ball to Kai Havertz, who up until then had been gathering his thoughts and focusing on the task ahead.
The German stepped up and slotted it past goalkeeper Weverton to score the goal that delivered the Club World Cup to Chelsea.
"I expected the Palmeiras players to come around the penalty taker," Azpilicueta explained after the game. "I already told Kai he was going to shoot. I just tried to release the pressure from him, be calmer. With three minutes to go, it's an important moment. It worked."
Work it most certainly did. But more than that, it showed fantastic leadership and in-game intelligence: what Sir Clive Woodward, England’s 2003 World Rugby Cup-winning coach, called ‘T-Cup’ (Thinking Clearly Under Pressure).
That is exactly what you want from your captain and Azpilicueta delivered it, literally and metaphorically.
Perhaps Azpilicueta’s leadership credentials have been underestimated for too long. Perhaps it’s time he started getting the kind of respect that he deserves, not just as a player but as a Chelsea captain.
I do think he was always was going to struggle coming so soon after John Terry, Chelsea’s original ‘Captain, Leader, Legend’. Terry was a huge personality: he was Mr. Chelsea. To follow that would have been very difficult.
But since being handed the captaincy by Maurizio Sarri, after Gary Cahill was sidelined during the 2018/19 season, he has done it very much his own way.
Azpilicueta has a very different personality to Terry. He’s not the ‘up and at ‘em’, bulldog-spirit captain who urges on his charges on vocally and through heroic deeds. He's a much softer, gentler, thoughtful personality than Terry, but leaders come in all sorts of different shapes and forms.
He is a gentleman, in every sense of the word. If you've ever met him, he's an absolute delight, a very humble, very intelligent, very kind guy. There's nothing wrong with quiet leadership and leading by example as a decent man. But apart from that, Azpilicueta is a fighter. He gives 110% every match he plays and that's leading by example.
And with Chelsea viewing themselves as a global brand, he's the perfect skipper and a good ambassador for the club. He never puts a foot wrong, never says anything stupid, or embarrasses the club publicly.
One word would sum him up: understated. But my hunch is that he is far more influential and far more important in the dressing room than we can ever really know.
A club the size of Chelsea, with the kind of players that we attract is going to be a club with a massive number of egos in that dressing room. Managing egos is one of the hardest jobs in the world, whichever field you happen to be in.
One way to manage that is to have a bigger ego than everybody else, and as captain become the alpha male with a ‘my way or the highway’ approach.
Perhaps Azpilicueta’s real leadership ability lies in the respect he commands and the ability to put his ego to one side for the betterment of the team. Maybe that works to make a club with a lot of different characters and massive egos work in a cohesive way.
Above all that, he has a fundamental solidity about him. Azpilicueta is the man Chelsea can rely upon week in, week out, the one consistent thing in the mix over the last 10 years.
This is a point Jose Mourinho made about Azpilicueta brilliantly in his backhanded compliment in 2013, the year Azpilicueta won the Players’ Player of the Year award. He said" "Azpilicueta is the kind of player I like a lot. I think a team with 11 Azpilicuetas would probably win the Champions League because football is not just about pure talent".
It was fitting that he was the only Chelsea player on the pitch against Palmeiras who had played the last time Chelsea competed for the Club World Cup in 2012. After the disappointing defeat then, how cathartic it was for Azpilicueta to not only lift the trophy Chelsea needed to complete the set, but to do so as captain.
Perhaps winning the Club World Cup and completing the set for both Chelsea and himself should be enough to cement his place as a Chelsea legend, for the trophies he’s won, his versatility and consistency as a player, and above all for everything that he's done for the club.
With 459 appearances to date, he’s seventh on Chelsea’s all-time appearance list and the only foreign player above him is Petr Cech with 494.
You could say this season would be a fitting way to bow out of Chelsea. And while the door remains open to a new contract, rumours abound that Azpilicueta has been offered a two-year deal at Barcelona.
With players such as Reece James threatening his place, and his pace diminishing, it’s hard to know how much longer Azpiliceta has as a player at this level, but I hope he stays for a little while yet.
His experience and influence on and off the pitch are invaluable, as the Club World Cup-winning penalty proved.
If he genuinely believes that he can command a first-team place for another year or two, then I think he'll stay on to fight for his place. If he looks at himself in the mirror and says, 'you know what? I don't think that's going to happen', maybe he'll move.
If he does go to Barcelona, it will be a mark of how far Chelsea have come as a club and the esteem in which Azpilicueta is held that Barcelona can be seen as a retirement club.
Cech summed Azpilicueta up perfectly post-match: "Azpi has now won everything, and that is an amazing achievement. All the credit goes to him. He is one of those players who never disappoints you. He works hard, he does everything. He is an honest player on the pitch, and off the pitch he works hard."
Azpilicueta may be no John Terry but in his own way, he should perhaps be regarded as a Chelsea ‘Captain, Leader, Legend’.
Dedicated to the memory of my father, David Chidgey, who first took me to Stamford Bridge in 1976 and who proudly read every article I've written for football.london. RIP Lord David Chidgey 1942-2022.
