Joe Cole has urged Chelsea to turn to the free agent market and add John Stones and Robert Lewandowski to help Xabi Alonso reshape a squad that finished 10th in the Premier League and will have no European football next season. Alonso is set to take charge on July 1, and Cole says the rebuild needs more than fresh legs — it needs players who already know how to win.
Chelsea ended the 2025/26 season with a 2-1 defeat at Sunderland, a result that killed off their hopes of qualifying for Europe and left them facing a summer where the margins feel uncomfortably small. Cole, who made more than 250 appearances for the club across seven years in west London, said the finances are unclear and that talk of signing every target is meaningless if the club first has to sell. “We don't know what the finances are,” he said. “So it's alright saying that we're going to buy that player and buy that player. We may have to sell players, we don't know.”
That uncertainty is why Cole pushed for a different kind of rebuild. He said Chelsea should avoid wholesale change and instead add experience around the younger players the club has already backed. “One thing we're sure we don't want is wholesale changes because these young players that you had belief in three years ago: they're still the same players,” he said. “They just need what I've been saying for two or three years, where you have experience around them within the group that helps them through games to coach them, whilst on the pitch to give them their wisdom, you know, and build it out that way.”
Cole argued that free transfers could be the most practical way to do that if Chelsea decide to move players on. “Even if you're just selling players, there's ones that are not going to get near it,” he said. “That's not for me to say, that's for them to work out and then and then you bring in your John Stones and Robert Lewandowski and players on a free transfer who don't need to play every minute of every game, but they understand winning, they understand culture and they can still help out in the pitch and do bits.” Stones is poised to leave Manchester City at the end of June, while Lewandowski is poised to leave Barcelona at the end of June, putting both into the market just as Chelsea’s summer begins to take shape.
For Cole, the argument is as much about the dressing room as the transfer list. “And them players that need that, they've got it within the group, it can't be from coaches, all the time,” he said. “All the great teams are coached from within their own dressing room and its knowledge and wisdom passed down over the years. Like, it just baffles me how people just don't understand that.” He added: “But hopefully, they've read the room and that's the way they go. If not, if they don't, then it'll be all much of the same.”
Chelsea are heading into a critical summer after another poor league finish and the loss of European football, with Alonso walking into a job that demands immediate improvement but also patience. Cole said he expects the club to get better, but warned that progress without experience can hit a ceiling. “Chelsea will be better next year and they'll probably say we're on the way up again,” he said. “But you once you get back up, you'll always hit the same ceilings. When you get to elite level, you need experience, you need wisdom and you need quality.”
