Thomas Tuchel's defensive revolution at Chelsea begins now with Kalidou Koulibaly on the way - The Warm-Up

Solid buildings are built on firm foundations, and the rule holds for solid football teams as well. So how should Chelsea replace a player as fundamentally and demonstratively solid as Antonio Rudiger? Easy. With Kalidou Koulibaly. And, er, Presnel Kimpembe? And Nathan Ake as well?

Three central defenders in one oversized kit should have an advantage at set pieces, though you'd fancy the striker on the turn.

These rumours are all at different stages of squidginess. Koulibaly is, by all accounts, practically a done deal, and might even be unveiled today. This is a fascinating deal for several reasons. We don't doubt his quality, but 31 is quite an age to be switching to The Best and Most Difficult and, Just to Reiterate, Best League in the World. Some fine players have needed a season or even two to really settle themselves into the swing of things; Koulibaly's got about five minutes.

Although, if we're being honest, we'd assumed that this was a transfer that could simply never happen. That Koulibaly would play out the rest of his career in Naples and in the rumour mill. If there's been a player more relentlessly linked to every single big club in the world over the last five years, always linked but never moving, then we can't think of their name.

In fact, we'd come to assume that Koulibaly had some highly specific, totally impossible personal demand hidden among the wages and the image rights. A living, live-in dodo, perhaps. Glassware from Atlantis. Whatever it is, Chelsea have found it and offered it up. Come to London, Kalidou, and this fully-functioning hoverboard will finally be yours.

As for the other two, we're still very much in the land of possibilities, where all is conjecture and nothing is real. Juventus also want Kimpembe since Matthijs de Ligt may be off to Bayern. The Ake move seems more straightforward, and as an added bonus it will give some older Chelsea fans a chance to dig out the dreadlock wigs they wore to welcome Ruud Gullit. Clever stuff from Todd Boehly, making friends right from the start.

And then it's all up to Thomas Tuchel. Chelsea were a comfortable third last season: clearly better than the two north London teams below them, and clearly inferior to the title-chasers above. Which of those gaps gets smaller this season depends, above all else, on this new-look defence. With Arsenal and Tottenham both feeling pretty good in their systems and their business, Chelsea need to click, and click early, or we could end up with one almighty cross-London scrap. Which sounds fun! But teams don't buy defenders to make life fun. Quite the opposite.

Yesterday's helping of Euro 2022 was brought to you by the Letter C. For "Group C". And for "confusing", and "chaos", and "cor, I wouldn't fancy predicting how this one's going to shake out."

Because Sweden are confusing. Against Switzerland last night they were sluggish, perhaps even stodgy, and while they were definitely the superior team they never fully took control. Much credit goes to Switzerland, who were engagingly awkward, and who didn't fall away late in the game as they had against Portugal.

Sweden eventually won thanks to one scintillating moment of rat-a-tat passing, and one highly destructive swipe from Hanna Bennison. Accordingly, we're unable to decide if they are flattering to deceive, or the opposite. (Insulting to convince?) Is this a side that does the job, that does just enough to get past anybody, and so the ideal tournament team? Or is this a limited side reliant on moments that will certainly come unstuck shortly after they limp into the knockouts? Those aren't rhetorical questions, we just don't know the answer.

We'll find out against Portugal, perhaps. But then the Portuguese are also deeply confusing. Four goals in two games is a pretty decent return, and at times they really unsettled the Netherlands defence, in a way that - for example - Sweden couldn't really manage in the first game. Tilt your head one way and they look like they've got a real chance of upsetting Sweden in the final game. Tilt your head the other, and Danielle van der Donk might kick it clean off.

The most important story of yesterday, which will probably roll into today and on for the next few weeks, came from Paris. A preliminary report of the French Senate has concluded that Liverpool's fans were wrongly blamed for the misery that preceded the Champions League final, and has laid the fault instead with various official bodies and the French state.

You knew that on the day, of course; it was blindingly obvious on the day. But that didn't stop a cascade of misinformation: fake tickets, scaled gates, thousands upon thousands of Liverpool fans doing things they were not supposed to do. Like standing in queues. Or getting tear gassed.

And you knew the reason for that on the day too, but it's still refreshing, in a bleak sort of way, to see it spelled out: the policing strategies for the night were "founded on a dated vision of British supporters, harking back to the hooligans of the 1980s".

This, to the Warm-Up's amateur understanding, always seemed one of the more baffling aspects of the whole miserable business. Liverpool have been pretty good these last few seasons. They've been to finals, and those finals have passed off without a hitch. And instead of basing their policing operations on Madrid 2019 or Kyiv 2018, they decided to hold a séance and summon up the ghost of Margaret Thatcher.

It's a miserably familiar process. First the fans get mistreated, and then the fans get blamed. There is some hope, perhaps, to be taken from the fact that the story didn't stick: that the excuses from the police and the French authorities collapsed the moment they emerged. But it remains the case that those with batons, and more importantly those in charge of those with the batons, still don't see football supporters as whole, real people.

As if the actual tournament wasn't important enough, the women's Africa Cup of Nations also comes with qualification for the 2023 World Cup as a reward for the final four. So here's Zambia getting themselves to the semi-finals and also to Australia and New Zealand. With a keeper penalty. That's how you do it.

And while we're on the subject of the WAFCON, here's Nick Miller, formerly of this parish and now at the Athletic, who has been out to Rabat to see just what's going on. A lot of good and a fair amount of less-than-good, but at least the football's coming through.

"More experienced observers say the standard of play has equalised a little this year — in previous editions mismatches were common, particularly in the group stages. In the early days, there were a few double-figure hammerings. This year, the biggest victory was Nigeria’s 4-0 win over Burundi, who were the only team that went home from the group stages without a point … five of the last eight, including the hosts and that thrilling Zambia side, are at this stage for the first time. A surprise could be sprung."

Over to Bookforum, where Leo Robson has been looking back at the revolution that took place in British football publishing at the dawn of the 1990s. The usual story runs that Italia '90 and the Taylor report took football away from the hooligans and into the arms of the television companies and the middle classes. And the books that came out around this time - most famously Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, but also Pete Davies' All Played Out, Simon Kuper's Soccer Against the Enemy, and many more - stand as both signposts and accelerants of this trend.

This version of events isn't exactly incorrect, as a broad brush explanation, but Robson brings out some interesting wrinkles. Citing the greats of American sports writing, Brian Glanville was calling for a new "idiom" of football writing back in the 1960s: something to bridge "mandarin indulgence and stylized stridency". And as Robson puts it, "Italia '90 didn't change the reality of English soccer. it simply altered the public reputation."

"Pete Davies told me that the soccer-as-pariah narrative had always been 'an incredibly 2-D view of things.' … that all along there were people 'who just enjoy the game, think about the game, care about the game, understand, both instinctively and intellectually, why it matters'—in the words of All Played Out, as 'soul food for billions—a kind of particle accelerator for the emotions of the world'."

Italy will look to make amends for that hammering by France, with Iceland the intended victims. And then France will look to humiliate another neighbour when they take on Belgium in the evening. In the background, there's some Europa Conference League qualifying. It's time for the second legs of the second qualifying round, and Bruno's Magpies take a one-goal lead to Crusaders.