Roberto De Zerbi has hinted at his frustration over Chelsea's frequent raids of former club Brighton but insisted he has no extra motivation when Tottenham visit Stamford Bridge on Saturday.
Chelsea have spent more than £300 million ($401m) signing 16 players and staff from Brighton since BlueCo completed their takeover in May 2022.
De Zerbi became Brighton head coach in September that year after Graham Potter left the club to join Chelsea.
During his two-year spell, Chelsea broke the British transfer record to sign Moisés Caicedo from Brighton for £115m ($153.8m), Marc Cucurella for £63m ($84.2m), acquired goalkeeper Robert Sánchez for £25m ($33.4m) and took Paul Winstanley and Sam Jewell in recruitment roles.
Asked how he found that experience, De Zerbi said on Friday? "What do you think? [Not great?], no, not at all," he said. "They bought good players. Caicedo, João Pedro, [Danny] Welbeck now, [Facundo] Buonanotte, [Valentin] Barco, Robert Sanchez, [Levi] Colwill."
"I am always motivated with Chelsea or another team. When you work in Brighton, you work to make the club happy. To make your club happy, sometimes you ned to sell players, the players want and push to leave to the bigger club so it is football, a normal part of football."
De Zerbi instead focused on channeling the frustration from Tottenham's dreadful record at Stamford Bridge, having won just one of 33 Premier League visits there.
"For me, it is one motivation more and I want the players to take this negative record to give us more motivation more mentality, more energy to win the game because we have the quality enough to win."
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Pedro Porro, Andy Robertson and Omar Marmoush are all fit to play at Chelsea.
Lucas Bergvall (knee), Destiny Udogie (knee), Sávio (muscular) remain out while Rodrigo Bentancur is suspended.
James Maddison is a doubt after scoring in his first start for almost 18 months against Coventry City on Monday while Dejan Kulusevski is being assessed after returning to action in the same game after 526 days out.
