Juan Veron was very close to getting on my list of 10 Players Who Stole A Living From Chelsea. He cost a lot, barely played and left with his once stratospheric reputation brought decisively back down to earth. So why is he is on this list rather than that one? The first is that he actually managed a couple of decent performances for Chelsea, but saw his season cut short after picking up a particularly nasty injury. He bore the considerable brunt of manager Claudio Ranieri's abysmal decision to bring him on in a crunch Champions League game against Monaco when he was clearly unfit, resulting in the club crashing out of the competition despite being in a strong position with opposition Monaco down to ten men. More unpleasantly, in the middle of his stay in London, his family home was broken into and he and his children threatened with machetes by robbers, a traumatic event which supposedly spurred his desire to leave England. In other words, while he was undoubtedly a terrible signing, picked up for £15 million despite having failed abysmally at Manchester United the season before, it seemed rather unsympathetic to say he 'stole' a wage from the club when circumstances never gave him much of a chance to do any better. This one feels more like the result of the manager making a lousy call, with Ranieri specifically pinpointing the Argentine as a player he wanted and convincing him to try one more season in England after Sir Alex Ferguson expressed a willingness to let him go. While his first appearance proved a great success with a goal in Chelsea's 2-1 victory at bogey ground Anfield, that ended up being the only goal he scored during his time at the club and only one of seven league appearances before seeing out the remainder of his contract on loan at Inter and Estudiantes.
28-year old English writer with a borderline obsessive passion for films, videogames, Chelsea FC, incomprehensible words and indefensible puns. Follow me on Twitter if you like infrequent outbursts of absolute drivel.
