Delap is shiny new toy but uncut gem Jackson offers rare point of difference

ROBBIE JAY BARRATT/ AMA/GETTY IMAGES - Liam Delap comes on for 

Nicolas Jackson in Chelsea’s opening Club World Cup match against LAFC

If Delap is the known unknown, Jackson is the known known: the gifted forward who scores plenty and misses more

24 Jun 2025 - The Guardian

Jonathan Liew

'They are quite similar,” Enzo Maresca said last week of Liam Delap and Nicolas Jackson, but of course nobody wanted to take any notice of that bit. Already battle lines are being drawn, positions entrenched. Delap or Jackson. Jackson or Delap. One must survive. One must go reluctantly on loan to Serie A. Those are just the rules.

On these terms alone, it’s been a very good week for Delap. Against Flamengo in the Club World Cup on Friday, he was preferred up front, and played with bristling, controlled aggression for more than an hour before making way for Jackson. He then watched as his replacement lost possession with his first touch, went studs-up with his second, was sent off and scapegoated for Chelsea’s 3-1 defeat, and later issued a grovelling apology on social media for his actions.

Beyond this, there is a kind of momentum to Chelsea’s new £30m signing right now. Commentators raise their voices a little higher whenever he bears down on goal. It helps that he is English 12 months before a World Cup, and can thus knock on Thomas Tuchel’s door. He did media duties at the weekend and spoke very well, I thought. Above all Delap is just good and new in a culture where this is all that matters.

Jackson, meanwhile, has been at Chelsea for two seasons and publicly feuding with Mikel John Obi for quite a lot of that time. Indeed such was Mikel’s splenetic reaction to Jackson’s red card against Flamengo that the broadcaster Dazn was forced to apologise for his language. If Delap is the known unknown, then Jackson is the known known: the gifted, flawed forward who scores plenty and misses more, who wears his emotions on his sleeve, a player who could have been cultivated in a laboratory to make Chelsea fans argue with each other on the internet.

This feels like a story with only one ending. Delap is the golden boy, with links to Maresca from his days in the Manchester City academy, recruited by Joe Shields, another City alumnus. He holds the ball up, duels well, throws himself about in a way that makes men of a certain age feel moistly nostalgic.

His rise from Championship anonymity at Hull City, via his revelatory debut season at Ipswich, also has a pleasing narrative arc. From the earliest age Delap seemed to be groomed for stardom: son of a professional footballer, brother of a professional footballer, Derby academy at age six, City at 16, England age groups all the way up. He says the right things. He makes the right movements. He fits.

Of course, these days, the modern elite academy is not simply a form of tactical and technical education. It is also an ambience and an architecture, an articulation not simply of how a footballer should be, but how a person should be. Almost without exception they are quiet, clean, sequestered, clinical spaces. Everything has its place and everyone knows their place.

Perhaps there is even a kind of value system at work here: the idea that order is the only true path to excellence and self-fulfilment. The world out there is complex and chaotic. Here, protected by security gates and privacy hedges, you are safe to thrive.

Clearly this is a tried and proven system. But it is a system. What system produced Jackson? None but his own ingenuity and talent, hard work and occasional luck. He was born in the Gambia, moved to Senegal aged 12, played his football on the streets and fields of Ziguinchor, nine hours south of Dakar. At 17 he was scouted at a national competition among 8,000 players. When Villarreal brought him to Europe he had never played in an academy. It is this organic quality to his football that makes him so compelling to watch.

His record at Chelsea – 30 goals in two seasons – is perfectly serviceable, but tells only part of the story. In February this year Cole Palmer went through his longest drought of the season: seven games without a goal or assist. Was it purely coincidence that Jackson missed those seven games with injury? Perhaps. But curiously Palmer broke his drought in his next game: swinging the ball on to the head of Enzo Fernández while Jackson – finally back from injury – was occupying two Tottenham defenders at the near post. Of course the Chelsea centre-forward position is portrayed in starker terms: essentially a zero-sum game in which one must win and one must lose. Inevitably the klaxons are now being sounded for Jackson, the transfer vultures circling. Potential fees are being mooted. But what if we’re all asking the wrong question?

Perhaps, at a club challenging for five trophies this season, there may just be room for two strikers whose games naturally seem to complement each other. Even if he finds his minutes more limited this season, Jackson still offers a certain point of difference in a team with abundant attacking talent, and yet all too prone to sterility, to the idea that order is the only true path to excellence. In a game trending ever more furiously towards systematisation, can there still be multiple routes to the top? Can there still be room for the late developer, the uncut gem? Maresca was right: as footballers Delap and Jackson share plenty of similarities that belie their wildly differing journeys. I hope they both thrive, and I hope they do it together.