It is a big week for Ange Postecoglou and Ruben Amorim. Champions League of Buste would be the best way to fill it together for the Europa League final next Wednesday in Bilbao.
But the managers of Tottenham and Manchester United – clubs with 37 Premier League -Nedragen between them prior to the Friday evening matches – cannot be won and loses with much by the fall of the football dice this next week.
What about Cole Palmer?
If things are not going well for Chelsea if they play United on Stamford Bridge on Friday and are then confronted with Nottingham Forest for what could still be a top five shootout on the city ground on Sunday, a third season without Champions League football will be for the 23-year-old.
Is that what he left Manchester City for? To be the leading light on the Thursday evening undercard? Palmer is one of the most talented football players in England. A transforming and generation enhancer in the making that may turn out to be central in the World Cup of Thomas Tuchel, even hopes Jude Bellingham.
His way to fame has traveled incredibly fast since he moved to the south of the Etihad Stadium at the beginning of last season. But in November 2022, Palmer only started one Champions League match in his career, for City Against Sevilla. If things do not go in Chelsea for the next nine days that strange and potentially harmful break will continue in his life.
During the last two seasons – when Palmer illuminated the Premier League before a recent fall in the form – the debate about the Mancunian was only one way framed and it revolved around the wisdom or otherwise of Pep Guardiola's decision to let him go.
But now we can look at it differently. It is a debate with layers suddenly. The city is not the city they were last season, but this weekend they may win the FA Cup. Moreover, the Guardiola team is in the middle of a sudden and urgent creative rebuilding.
Kevin De Bruyne continues and can be followed very well by Jack Grealish. Bernardo Silva and Ilkay Gundogan are not the players they were. Even Phil Foden has had trouble.
Almost at night his creative emptiness opened in this city team. A road blocked for as long is now open. If Palmer had hanged around for a while longer, he would not have been in the Guardiola team, the big city coach would have built it around him this summer. Now there is a thought.
Palmer never stands out as a player who lives with things. It is part of its beauty. His football is instinctive and of course. It is part of what makes him so enchanting to look.
Nevertheless, his drop-off form has been surprising since the turn of the year. His sentence against Liverpool two weeks ago was his first Chelsea goal since January.
And maybe we should not be surprised. It feels no coincidence. Palmer had carried the team of Enzo Maresca long enough, just as he had worn the Mauricio Pochettino version to a sixth placed Premier League who finished the year before.
Things like that take a toll from a player, especially when they play such a weight of games for the first time in a career. If Palmer is exhausted by his attempts with one hand to drag Chelsea back to real relevance, we cannot really blame him.
He was boyish and Coltish when he arrived in London. Not callow, but inexperienced. In the meantime he will know exactly what Chelsea is – a football club where the land constantly moves under your feet, a place where nothing can be considered and where the potential for chaos always seems to be in the shade.
The wisdom considered is that Maresca will stay in the club what will happen in the coming days. Chelsea is also in the Europa Conference League final, when things like that turn on a big club.
Nevertheless, Churn never feels far away at the bridge. Will Palmer play for the same manager next season? Maybe. Will he look up on the first day in August and see the same attacking teammates dressed in blue? That is more unlikely.
In this area he is expected to grow and that is a lasting problem for players at Chelsea. All football players benefit from stability and a sense of clear direction. Palmer has to do without it and as such he can only hope that this campaign ends at Chelsea in the top five.
A £ 100 million Champions League pot together with the cache that the competition brings when it tries to attract new players, Chelsea de Fillip that the club needs so badly would. It could shoot them forward. They should really beat a united team with other things in their head and if they do, they will get the feeling that they have a foot firm in the door.
But last weekend's defeat in Newcastle was limp. If it comes to a do-or-die game in Forest next weekend, I wouldn't put a lot of money on blue.
And if they didn't make it, what now? Is Palmer really expected that he drags Chelsea through the slurryput of Thursday evening football, while six other English teams – almost a third of the Premier League – bathe on the sunny uplands of the only European competition that really matters?
Maybe a while. But certainly not long.
The big shock in my team of the season
Together with my podcast co-gastheer Chris Sutton I slowly put together my team of the season in the Premier League and here it is.
Sels (Nottingham Forest); Alexander-Arnold (Liverpool), Van Dijk (Liverpool), Milenkovic (Forest), Ait-Nouri (Wolves); Rice (arsenal); Szoboszlai (Liverpool), Rogers (Aston Villa); Fernandes (Man Utd); Salah (Liverpool), Isak (Newcastle).
There is room for the debate right through that team – especially on the left and in the goal – and I am sure you will not be shy.
I noticed one thing when I type it out. A team of the year without a player in Manchester City. What an extraordinary season it has been.
Goodbye, goodison
I used to go to Goodison Park with my father quite often when I was younger. Everton is not my team, but it didn't matter. It was 35 minutes from our front door.
I saw the Great Howard Kendall team Sunderland with 4-1 dismantling on that incredible afternoon in 1985. I saw Jim Beglin breaking his leg on a foggy night in the winter two years later and Efan Ekoku Score four for Norwich in 1993 with a boy named Sutton who also grabbed one.
But when I think of Goodison, I will always think of the day when a break in play during a match against QPR that same season led the big Ray Wilkins to cross, to samper with his leg up and to fall into conversation with the front rows of the lower bumens road stand.
Reports say that he also signed a signature while waiting to take a corner. He could probably have done both knowing the late Wilkins at the same time.
It's strange, the things we remember, right? I wish everything on Goodison on Sunday an afternoon to remember.
It was inevitable, Harry
Harry Kane is a Bundesliga champion and we are happy for our captain of England.
But his first season in the club last year was the first time they had not won it since 2012.
So, well, you know … it came, right?