It is with a smile that Laurence Stewart says “I was waiting for this question” when he and his Chelsea co-sporting director Paul Winstanley are asked to explain the club’s policy of handing out eight-year contracts.

During an exclusive hour’s chat with Telegraph Sport in their temporary office at Chelsea’s Cobham training ground, Stewart and Winstanley have already covered their rebuild of the squad, navigating “some turbulence”, the club’s plan to achieve lasting success and signing Cole Palmer, before we get to contracts.

We will come to changing head coaches, Enzo Maresca, selling academy graduates and profit and sustainability rules (PSR) later. But first, I press Stewart and Winstanley on the long contracts that have prompted so much debate.

After Stewart has asked for my view on them, Winstanley says: “People always sit and think ‘well that’s what we’ve always done, so that’s what we’ve always got to continue doing’. But without forward thinking and progression, everyone will stand still. So it’s a clever concept the owners implemented in the beginning and what they believed in. Once we looked at it together in isolation, we were like ‘yeah, you can definitely see how this can work’. And we believe in it.”

‘You were always going to get some turbulence – then you get the upward trajectory’

On the accusation that long contracts were introduced to try to circumnavigate PSR, Winstanley adds: “Well, you’re not getting any benefit from a PSR position on it any more and we’ve still continued with it. So if it was just for PSR, we’d have stopped doing it. That was never at the forefront of the owners’ minds when we spoke to them about how we see it working, how we all see it working as a club.”

Nobody is doubting the wisdom of Chelsea extending Palmer’s contract to 2033 and other clubs have adopted similar approaches to player contracts. Destiny Udogie signed a seven-year deal at Tottenham Hotspur and Jhon Duran penned an extension to 2030 at Aston Villa.

“It’s because the players, the talent and the value they have over the long term is really important to the clubs,” says Stewart. “Really, it is the biggest nod towards the ability to identify talent. You’ve got to get that right if you’re going to put players on these long contracts and then it’s your ability to develop players and develop talent, and that’s one of the key things that we talk about internally, is to make our players better, across all of our teams.”

Stewart and Winstanley agreed to give their first newspaper interview to Telegraph Sport shortly after the start of the season, but scheduling issues dictated it took place in the October international break amid a favourable run of results for Chelsea.

The plan that Stewart and Winstanley are in charge of delivering has become easier to identify over recent weeks, during which Chelsea’s young team have climbed to fourth in the Premier League table and the atmosphere at Stamford Bridge has improved. Perhaps that indicates a growing connection between the coach, players and fans.

“This is a club that needs to be in the Champions League, it’s a club that needs to be competing to win trophies consistently and we want to do that with a certain way of playing football as well. So that absolutely is the ambition. And then the plan has been how do we go on a path to make that possible. And that’s been around investing in talent, committing to develop talent and developing a way of playing, the way we want our teams to play,” Stewart says.

“One of the messages the owners gave us from the beginning is that this is not about a short-term win or a short-term project, it’s about long-term success and that’s been one of the driving things on all of the decisions that we’ve made. That, absolutely, is the idea, to try to make the club long-term successful.”

It has taken the last four transfer windows, three permanent managers during that time and an unparalleled turnover of players for Chelsea to reach a position where supporters can see the club emerging from some of the chaos of the past two years in a healthy position.

“When there’s the changes that have happened, new ownership and what we walked into, you were always going to get some turbulence in the middle – there’s been some changes here, staff, players – and then you get the upward trajectory and that’s the place that we feel like we’re in at the moment,” says Winstanley.

Stewart takes up the theme by saying: “I think there was an acceptance there was a lot of work to do. You always want to come out of that as quickly as you can do. So I think you are seeing, after four transfer windows, there has been a period of time for that regeneration of the squad.”

Winstanley adds: “We’re out of that now, we’re completely out of that. We’ve had to make some brave decisions. But we feel the squad and the staff here at Cobham, the manager, and the playing staff are in a really good spot.”

It would have been understandable if doubts had crept in when Chelsea failed to qualify for Europe at the end of the owners’ first season at the club. Or after Gary Neville branded the squad “billion-pound bottle jobs” following last season’s Carabao Cup final defeat by Liverpool.

But Winstanley says: “We’ve had total belief from the start. We discussed this long and hard, right at the beginning, on the right strategy and the journey we need to be on. So we’re under no illusions that success is not on a straight line. There’s going to be hurdles to overcome. But we’ve had total belief in it, ownership, the staff, the club and the manager all have total belief in it. So it’s important to keep going on that journey and we’re excited about what the future holds.”

On the criticism they and the club have faced, Stewart says: “We can’t get too caught up in some of that noise of what’s going on outside, otherwise you’d lose a lot of time and energy to that. We know internally that we’ve been working towards a direction with a long-term plan.”

Stewart and Winstanley will move into their new, refurbished, shared office, a few doors down from head coach Maresca in the coming days. The pair first got to know each other almost 20 years ago, working in match analysis for Hull City and Wigan Athletic respectively, but Chelsea is the first club at which they have worked together.

They laugh at the question of whether one takes on the good cop role, while the other plays bad cop and explain that their responsibilities extend much further than recruitment and transfers. The men’s and women’s teams, the academy, medical, performance, psychology, loans, analysis and data departments all feed into them.

Maresca is not the only head coach Stewart and Winstanley helped to appoint this summer, as Sonia Bompastor took over the women’s team after the departure of Emma Hayes. Filipe Coelho became head coach of the under-21s. Bompastor and Maresca won the men’s and women’s manager of the month awards for September.

“Going back to the plan, we made some really clear decisions on the way of playing, the football style, the identity we want to have and I think that’s been shown in the coaching hires,” says Stewart.

“Clearly Enzo coming in, I think everybody is seeing from Leicester the style of play aspect, but also Filipe… anybody who has seen the under-21s will see there’s a clear playing style developing and evolving there with principles that are connected and similar to the first team. The same with the women’s team as well. Sonia has referenced some things that are consistent about wanting to have possession of the ball, play out from the back and be aggressive in the final third out of possession. So, in terms of the plan, there are really visible elements.”

‘Enzo has got the personality to manage this club’

Winstanley explains that he and Stewart do not need to schedule daily meetings with Maresca because of the close proximity in which they work and as if to prove his point, the Italian opens the door and pops his head into our interview before retreating quickly when he sees it is being recorded.

“Enzo was somebody we admired and were keen to bring here,” says Winstanley. “We were really excited by the way he works, aligned with the club and the playing squad, how it’s set up to move forwards. And we absolutely see him here for the long term, that’s definitely how we see it.

“He’s got the personality to manage this club and coach this team, and he’s got a strong belief in the playing style, as we have. And that’s translating to the pitch, it’s translating to the players. The players have got a belief in that. So, none of us are surprised that he’s grasped it quite quickly, but it’s early days and we’ve got to keep that momentum going.”

Stewart adds: “As Paul said, we do see it for the long term. He has a five-year contract, that’s what Enzo signed and now he needs a period of time to work with the group and continue to confirm his ideas about his way of playing and for the players to understand that. It’s still very early days.”

Other than maintaining constant on-site dialogue with Maresca, there are regular discussions between the sporting directors and Chelsea’s American co-owners, Behdad Eghbali, Jose E Feliciano and Todd Boehly.

“We have regular weekly contact, where we’ll be updating them across all the topics. And they might have specific questions, specific things and that can be game-related, result-related or general. We have regular communication with them,” Stewart says.

‘Misconception’ about selling academy products

Over the course of the past two summers, during the four-window rebuild, Chelsea have sold popular academy graduates Mason Mount and Conor Gallagher, prompting more accusations around the club’s approach to meeting PSR.

But Winstanley says: “We had a significant offer for one of our academy products this summer that we absolutely chose not to take. There’s a lot of misconception out there.

“We’ve had two debuts this year. There’s three or four more players in behind who we think we can push through this year as well that we’re keen to do. The manager’s on board with that, he’s aware of the players coming through. We give them opportunities when we can to make sure they’ve got that pathway.

“It’s not just about PSR, it’s contractual statuses, it’s circumstances. The two players you referenced, there were contractual problems that we walked into. It’s really important for us to bring through players.”

‘With homegrown players it’s always more emotional’

Asked if they see a sign over the heads of their home-grown players who break into the first team promising PSR profits, Stewart answers: “No, we’re seeing a player that’s going to play in the first team and play for Chelsea.

“The reality is that if it was that, there are other players and more players who we could have sold as well. Like Paul said, there’s been interest in other players that we’ve turned down. Every decision has been a performance-based decision, which people have opinions on because that’s football. And, absolutely, with homegrown players it’s always more emotional.

“There’s nothing fans like more than players who are one of our own and they can sing those songs about those players and we certainly appreciate that. That’s why we continue to invest in the academy and try to make sure the first team and the academy are aligned, so the players have the best opportunity to make that step.”