Wanderer Fabregas finds himself at home in Chelsea

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 Fabregas's first Premier League reunion with Arsenal at Stamford Bridge tomorrow 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 Fabregas 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, tomorrow 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 said this time last year. "I will always feel a Gunner," he told El Pais after leaving Catalonia this summer.

In the middle of which public avowals of third-party affection, Chelsea’s supporters could be forgiven for wondering if their star is on the verge of playing a vital derby against his second favourite club while wearing the colours of his third.

Unfair

This is, of course, more than a little unfair. Fabregas 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 Fabregas’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. Fabregas 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 Cup the previous summer – was supposed to signal the start of a decisive red dawn.

Instead Fabregas played through seven 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 Fabregas threw pizza at Alex Ferguson at Old Trafford and took Patrick Vieira's number four 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 Andres 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 Fabregas style, he still scored 28 goals for Barcelona in 96 La Liga matches (Iniesta has 33 in 335) and had 32 assists in his three seasons, almost twice as many as Xavi and only eight fewer than Lionel Messi. But there was a listlessness to Fabregas 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 Fabregas at Chelsea perhaps this is because for the first time in three years he has a settled, defined position. Plus 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 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. 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 1-1 draw with Manchester City at the Etihad Stadium, before returning to the 4-2-3-1 that led to Fabregas making more passes against Aston Villa (144 in total) than Fabian Delph and Tom Cleverley combined.

First option

Either way it is hard not to wonder a little at Arsenal’s reluctance to take up their first option when it became clear Fabregas had been told to find another club.

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 that Arsene Wenger passed on the chance to ensure Fabregas was in red rather than blue tomorrow afternoon.

“They told me now Ozil was there, there was no need for me,” Fabregas has said, and it is a fascinating comparison.

So far, at a club, finally, without ties or baggage or his own tailored back story, he has looked entirely at home. Guardian Service