Chelsea will never be the club they seem to want to be if they continue this managerial policy
Mauricio Pochettino leaves Stamford Bridge having partially rescued what was looking like a second dismal season for Chelsea, but will the club give his replacement the time to get it right?
To an extent, the sound emanating from social media upon the news breaking that Chelsea and Mauricio Pochettino are parting company was one of relief. After all, this had been a calcified season in the Premier League, and schadenfreude over the fortunes of Chelsea and Manchester United has been all that many of us have had to live on.
And over the last few weeks of the season, it did look as though Pochettino and Chelsea had turned a significant corner. This wasn’t just a matter of them winning their last five consecutive matches to claim sixth position and a place in the Europa Conference League for next season. The shrillness of the reactions to each dropped point could have convinced otherwise and it wasn’t a smooth upward trajectory, but Chelsea had been looking increasingly coherent since the new year.
So it looked like there could be tough times ahead for the sickos.jpg among us, Chelsea have thrown us all a potential lifeline by parting ways with him so soon after the end of the season. It has become increasingly clear since the news first broke that this was a mutual matter in which neither side was pressing the issue more than the other. Pochettino, it has been reported, was simply unhappy with the structures within Chelsea, didn’t have a great reaction with the sporting directorship arm, and couldn’t make it work. Chelsea, by the same accounts, seem happy enough to pay the severance clause as per his contract.
But still. It might have been understandable had they offloaded him on, say, Christmas Day, when their league record was appreciably worse than exactly twelve months earlier despite not having any European football to distract them throughout the first half of this season. It would have been savage, but it would also have been a very Chelsea thing to do, and if we accept the premise that they have a long and glorious history when it comes to needing little excuse to sack a manager, then this would have at least been a half-way understandable one, if again slight incoherent.
But Chelsea only lost three times in twenty games after Christmas, and two of those defeats came against Arsenal and Liverpool. They reached the final of the EFL Cup and only lost that match in extra-time to Liverpool. They reached the semi-finals of the FA Cup and were only narrowly beaten by Manchester City. Over the course of those twenty matches they won twelve, including beating Newcastle, Manchester United, Spurs, West Ham and Brighton. Those last five games, if anything, obscure an improvement that had been underway for quite some time.
It looks like it might be a chaotic summer in the managerial transfer market, with Brighton and Chelsea having already decided to offload theirs. That it should have been Pochettino and Roberto De Zerbi muddies the waters of who might be where by the end of next season. Nothing will be said before the FA Cup final, but might the availability of these two highly-rated coaches make Erik Ten Hag’s position at Manchester De United even more vulnerable than it already is? And what about Bayern Munich? They’ve been rejected by everyone they’ve approached so far, but consider either of these two to be a good fit.
Where Chelsea go from here is, of course, up in the air. There are two clear favourites as of the here and now; De Zerbi and Kieran McKenna. De Zerbi is now suddenly and relatively unexpectedly available. The conspiracy theorists among us can make hay with Pochettino leaving Stamford Bridge a few days after the De Zerbi announcement was made by Brighton. But Brighton’s downturn over much of this season can only have damaged his reputation, and while his team got through their Europa League group unscathed they were comprehensively outplayed by Roma in the next round. Liverpool either lost interest, or never had any in the first place.
The second horse in this race is Kieran McKenna of Ipswich Town. This would, of course, be a huge step up for the EFL’s current managerial golden boy, but any move for him would come with considerable caveats. He’s completely inexperienced as a manager in the Premier League, and it might be worth also mentioning whether a young manager with such an excellent reputation would want to put that on the line by going to renowned basketcase Chelsea, whose trigger-happy attitude towards managers—whoever replaces Pochettino at Stamford Bridge will be the sixth to have had a go since Clearlake bought them out of Russian occupation a couple of years ago—will hardly make the brightest and best more likely to want to go there.
Below those two, the field really starts to open up; Ruben Amorim, Thomas Frank, Jose Conceicao, Thomas Tuchel (!!!), Andoni Iraola and Hansi Flick all feature. And then, of course, you just have to scroll down to the very bottom of the list for the lulz, and there are plenty to be had among those who will never, ever, ever be the Chelsea manager (in one case ‘again’); Erik Ten Hag, David Moyes, Graham Potter or Jurgen Klopp, for example.
There has to come a point at which you start to wonder whether the issues surrounding the club might be a little more far-reaching than just the manager or head coach. That the club spend a billion quid assembling a squad that looks like a Dali painting that was pointedly not painted by Dali is not the responsibility of the new head coach (at least until it becomes so, which is immediately), while whatever new signings the club wants to make will have to be balanced against PSR and FFP regulations. Add to that the expectation levels of a fan base who seem a little bit sick and tired of not qualifying for the Champions League already, and there remains a potentially combustible mix for whoever lands there.
Of course, the money and the prestige may grease many palms, so finding what they want is unlikely to be that much of a challenge, but it seems likely that Chelsea will also expect this progressive, young, attacking, etc etc etc coach to also arrive at Stamford Bridge fully formed. Clearlake want a coach to fit what they consider to be the ‘image’ of their club, but why would that profile of coach want to go to a club with a reputation for sacking managers like they’re passing through a revolving door? The fix to that may only really come with a change in culture behind the scenes at Stamford Bridge, but whether that’s achievable remains as up in the air as ever.