Rarely can the head that wears the crown have lain this uneasy. After Chelsea’s title defence got off to the worst possible start on Saturday, their stand-in captain Cesar Azpilicueta suggested that the club’s summer recruitment has not been good enough.

Manager Antonio Conte has been agitating for fresh reinforcements all summer, and now his players are chiming in. “When you see the players we lost, and the players we have signed in, they are not the same,” Azpilicueta said after the 3-2 home defeat by Burnley, in which five of Conte’s substitutes had not started a Premier League game.

Azpilicueta will captain the side against Tottenham Hotspur this weekend after Gary Cahill’s early red card here, and his voice carries a good deal of weight in the dressing room. Chelsea have signed Alvaro Morata, Tiemoue Bakayoko and Antonio Rudiger over the summer to replace Diego Costa, Nemanja Matic and John Terry, and one interpretation of Azpilicueta’s words is that he feels those signings alone are insufficient for the task of defending the Premier League title while also competing for the Champions League.

The other, graver interpretation is that the new players are simply not up it. “Obviously we have very good young players, but we have to know the reality that being champions is even harder the next season. We have experience of that,” Azpilicueta continued, referring to the club’s disastrous start to the 2015-16 campaign.