How Cesc Fàbregas left his backstory behind and found a home at Chelsea.

On Sunday Cesc Fàbregas comes up against his former club Arsenal and the player that made the Gunners decide they did not want him back, Mesut Özil

Cesc Fàbregas has made a huge impact at Chelsea since joining from Barcelona in the summer. Photograph: Carlos Rodrigues/Getty Images

Home has always been a portable concept in football but it is still hard to recall a more complex collision of domestic loyalties than Cesc Fàbregas’s first Premier League reunion with Arsenal at Stamford Bridge on Sunday afternoon.
It is in its own way a very modern kind of tongue twister. Here is a footballer playing a home match against the home-from-home club he left for his home club back home three years ago. But who has still rarely looked as at home anywhere as he has in the last six weeks in Chelsea blue. Confused? You should be. It is confusing.

What is clear is that Fàbregas has so far made a near-perfect return to London. Eight games into the season he has seven assists and one goal for his new club. Chelsea are in cruise mode at the top of the Premier League. And Arsenal’s former captain is arguably the player of the domestic season so far having demonstrated from his role as pivot and chief metronome the full range of his distribution skills: not just the ability to massage the tempo of a game, but that familiar eye for an incisive, defence-cleaving pass.
And yet, Sunday afternoon presents a different kind of challenge for a player for whom notions of home have always been unusually pronounced and unusually present. “I return home after eight years,” he said, memorably, at his unveiling at Barcelona in 2011. “Arsenal is in my heart and always will be,” he told the Guardian this time last year. “I will always feel a Gunner,” he told El País after leaving Catalonia again this summer. In the middle of which public avowals of third party affection Chelsea’s supporters could be forgiven for wondering if their star midfielder is on the verge of playing a vital London derby against his second favourite club while wearing the colours of his third.
This is, of course, more than a little unfair. Fàbregas represents something far more interesting: the first really high profile vagrant of Europe’s elite level academy system, and a genuinely sui generis high-class cross-border footballer in his own right. Given the trajectory of his career there is even a kind of paradox in Fàbregas’s vaguely mawkish dual-attachment to the club teams of his adolescence. It is hard to think of a player with such an illustrious international trophy haul – two European championships and one World Cup by the age of 27 – who is yet to experience a similarly defining moment of success at club level. Fàbregas may love his clubs: but it is at club level that he remains a slightly wandering figure.
Twice Chelsea’s headline summer signing has hitched his fortunes to a champion club in mild but significant decline. At Arsenal his emergence in the season of the Invincibles – already hailed as the best player at Fifa’s under-17 world championship the previous summer – was supposed to signal the start of a decisive red dawn. Instead Fàbregas played through five seasons of congealment, a lingering star of the austerity years, leaving eventually with a single FA Cup winner’s medal to his name.
It is 11 years ago this month since he became Arsenal’s youngest player, making his debut aged 16 in a League Cup tie against Rotherham. The following year Fàbregas threw pizza at Sir Alex Ferguson at Old Trafford and took Patrick Vieira’s No4 shirt. He played brilliantly en route to the 2006 Champions League final and over the next five years made more chances, laid on more assists and scored more goals than either Xavi or Andrés Iniesta at Barcelona. Instead he ended up playing through a period when fourth place and a servicing of the stadium debt became the priorities, and his own departure always seemed to be lurking as an economic inevitability.

 

After which his three seasons at Camp Nou were equally bitty. In true Fàbregas style – this is a statistically prodigious footballer – he still scored 28 goals for Barcelona in 96 matches (Iniesta has 33 in 335) and had 32 assist in his three seasons, almost twice as many as Xavi and only eight fewer than Lionel Messi. But there was a listlessness to Fàbregas at Barcelona, a sense of a player who offered exactly the wrong kind of ballast to a listing team already well-served with ball-playing midfielders; and where he found himself playing as a winger, false nine, or plain old nine under Pep Guardiola and often as a deeper playmaker in the Tito-Tata years.
Indeed if there is a freshness about Fàbregas in his short Chelsea career to date perhaps this is because for the first time in three years he has a settled, defined position. Plus for the first time he finds himself at the heart of a club in the process of an expensive and purposeful refit.
“[Cesc] has made a huge impact,” John Terry said in midweek after another insistent and incisive performance in Lisbon. “I know you kind of expect that from him but most of our chances come from him opening up defences. Not a lot of people can see the passes he does let alone make it. He has been a great addition to us and long may he continue opening up defences.”.
There has, naturally, been some fine tuning required to accommodate this. Fàbregas may offer a degree of subtlety and control that was missing the year before. But the downside has been that at times Chelsea have looked a little undermanned in central areas, most noticeable against Schalke at Stamford Bridge where Nemanja Matic was often the only defensive presence behind a de facto front five. José Mourinho has tinkered since, playing Ramires as an auxiliary central midfielder in the draw at the Etihad, before returning to the 4-2-3-1 that led to Fàbregas make more passes against Aston Villa (144 in total) than Fabian Delph and Tom Cleverley combined.
Either way it is hard not to wonder a little at Arsenal’s reluctance to take up their first option when it became clear Fàbregas had been told to find another club. There were some vague whispers of a chronic knee problem but Fàbregas has looked mobile enough so far while playing all but nine minutes of Chelsea’s Premier League and Champions League season to date. With Arsenal arriving at Stamford Bridge with only the rusty little corporal Mathieu Flamini fully fit in central midfield, and without any player of genuine, seasoned A-list authority in that position, it seems even odder Arsène Wenger passed on the chance to ensure Fàbregas was in red rather than blue on Sunday afternoon.
“They told me now Özil was there, there was no need for me,” Fàbregas has said, and it is a fascinating comparison. Mesut Özil, the A-lister whose presence is at times so diffuse and intangible, versus Fàbregas, whose basic effectiveness stacks up against the best, but who has, until now, often seemed an ill-fitting piece. So far, at a club, finally, without ties or baggage or his own tailored backstory, he has looked entirely at home.