🔍 Chelsea's Long-Term Strategy Is Not Working

The original version of this newsletter contained a bit of a caveat. When I started writing, on Wednesday, Liam Rosenior was still manager of Chelsea. Technically, at least. His side had just lost its fifth game in a row without scoring a goal, and the people who employed him were in a meeting. This is not a happy combination.

The caveat was meant to cover me: Rosenior was sort of Schrödinger’s manager at that point. He both was and was not in charge of Chelsea. I wondered if things might drag on for a little while longer. There might need to be more meetings. Maybe he’d even be given this weekend’s FA Cup semifinal to put things right. 

Or not. As it turned out, Chelsea dismissed the 41-year-old around Wednesday lunchtime. The club’s powerbrokers put out a statement saying how sorry they were, how they’d been forced to act, how bad they felt. It was among the most ridiculous statements I’ve ever read. Calum McFarlane, the coach who got a point against Manchester City back in January, will be in charge at Wembley. What a colossal waste of time this has all been. Let’s dig into it.

It’s the contract. More than anything else, the part I struggle to understand is the contract. Chelsea’s decision to fire Enzo Maresca, at the turn of the year, was not incomprehensible. It seemed rash, yes. Short-sighted. Foolhardy. Almost certainly the wrong move. But you could follow the logic that had led the club’s hierarchy to that point.

Appointing Rosenior to succeed him was a bit more of a stretch. He was very clearly undercooked for a job of that scale, that pressure. He was a risk. Even the club’s executives seemed to accept that. Again, though, it was possible to make the case. His work at Strasbourg had been relatively brief, but impressive. The connection to Chelsea – the French club’s parent team – meant the decision was being made with eyes wide open. Chelsea had seen Rosenior up close. If they felt he was ready, maybe he was.

But the contract. That’s the bit that I just cannot grasp. Chelsea appointed a young manager, one who had never worked at such a rarefied level before, fully aware that doing so represented at least something of a gamble. The club could have offered him a two-year deal, see how things went, as it had done with Mauricio Pochettino.

Or three: that’s pretty standard. Even four or five are not out of the ordinary. Graham Potter had a five-year deal, one that would have in theory made him Chelsea manager until 2027. So did Maresca, who was under contract until 2029. The fact that both of those are so fresh in the memory, you would have thought, might have encouraged Chelsea to err on the side of caution.

Nope. Rosenior was offered a contract that was not due to expire until 2032. That’s five and a half years, the best part of six seasons. It is a far more long-term commitment than most managers would expect. On Wednesday, he was fired roughly three and a half months into it. 

My primary reaction to this, being honest, runs along the lines of: “What a spectacular waste of everyone’s time.” Chelsea’s owners – Behdad Eghbali, Todd Boehly and their partners in the BlueCo consortium that runs the club – have effectively derailed not only one club’s season, but two: Rosenior was doing very nicely at Strasbourg, the other team the group owns. Chelsea looks likely to miss out on the Champions League. Strasbourg may well fail to qualify for Europe altogether.

More poignantly, they have effectively turned Rosenior’s career into collateral damage. It is comforting to think that he will not be tarnished by this one misadventure, that a bright, articulate 41-year-old coach will be excused blame when so much of it clearly lies elsewhere, that he will in some way turn out to be richer for the experience. In a spiritual sense, rather than a financial one.

But it is also a lie. The image of Rosenior as a figure of fun, a jargon-addled combination of vapid high-performance culture and the ethos of LinkedIn, was never really fair.

Yes, he maybe overdid it on the coach-speak a little; yes, he does seem to have struggled to command the respect of the players once results started to curdle; yes, Chelsea has not beaten a Premier League team since the start of March. Rosenior’s work at Strasbourg, at Hull and even early on in his brief time at Chelsea indicate, though, that he is a coach of some promise. He has some aptitude for this.

The problem is that image is everything. The Premier League, like most sports entertainment products, functions almost entirely on storyline, on characters, on narrative devices. And Rosenior was cast – possibly as early as that clip of him talking about the etymology of the word manage – in a very specific role. He will find it hard, in the court of public opinion, to escape that.

It would be nice to think the same might prove to be true of the people responsible for the mess he found himself in. Eghbali, Boehly and the others made no secret when they arrived in English football of their belief that they were just the right people to shake up a moribund industry with their daring, creative ideas. They swaggered through conferences and interviews, flashing everyone a glimpse of their great genius.

Four years in, we can say pretty comprehensively that they are bad at this. Has Chelsea been able to appoint a manager who has survived more than a season? No. Has its on-pitch performance been improved by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on some of the best young talent in world football? No. But do the underlying figures of BlueCo suggest that the club is in rude financial health? Also no.

That their grand bet on Rosenior collapsed so spectacularly, so quickly should be chastening for them: a shock to the system, a wake-up call that their approach has to pivot, and pivot fast, if it is to work, even an acknowledgement that some of the old truisms they wanted to upheave might have existed for a reason. That is not, sadly, how the billionaire class appears to operate. They work on the assumption that they are right. It must be reality, over and over again, that is wrong.

Regular readers will know two things about my relationship with Real Sociedad. One: I was in San Sebastián a few weeks ago, watching Pellegrino Matarazzo’s side reach the final of the Copa del Rey by beating Basque rivals/friends Athletic. And two: I am adamant that La Real currently boast the best song in football, a reworking of Bad Bunny’s “Café Con Ron” in tribute to the Icelandic striker Orri Oscarsson.

It’s probably not a massive surprise to learn that I’ve watched the videos of Oscarsson leading tens of thousands of fans in a rendition of that song as part of Real Sociedad’s celebrations for winning the cup – overcoming Atlético Madrid on penalties last Saturday – several dozen times already. 

It was a precious, meaningful win in lots of different ways. It made Matarazzo the first American coach to win a major honor in one of Europe’s major nations. It gave Real Sociedad’s fans a chance to celebrate only the club’s second trophy since 1987, and the first that could be shared with the public (the club also won the 2020 Copa del Rey, but the game was delayed by a year and played behind closed doors because of the pandemic.)

And, most broadly, it provided yet another example that variety is football’s strength Just as Crystal Palace winning the FA Cup last year – and Newcastle lifting the Carabao Cup a few weeks earlier – showed that these competitions are enriched by being won by teams that care about them, so Real Sociedad showed that the game is at its best when the joy is being shared out, just a little.

Those scenes would not have been nearly so delirious if Barcelona or Real Madrid had added yet another honor to their overstuffed cabinets. It’s not a lesson that the game can really afford to ignore.

Rog and Rory break down a seismic Premier League weekend, headlined by Manchester City’s 2–1 win over Arsenal — a clash that could define the title race. Plus: Tottenham’s deepening relegation fears, Chelsea's looming existential crisis, and what it all means for the run-in.

Watch on YouTube or listen here.

I’ve been thinking this week about how one generation’s perspective can be different to another’s. To me – early to mid 40s, British – Coventry City returning to the Premier League is natural. The Sky Blues were a fixture of the league in my youth; the club’s promotion feels like a restoring of order, just as Nottingham Forest’s did a couple of years ago.

To anyone under the age of 35, though, that would be bizarre. They would have no memory at all of Coventry being in the Premier League. The idea that in some way the Premier League should include Coventry instead of, say, Stoke City or Swansea City would make no sense at all. Coventry, to successive generations, is just another EFL side.

It works with games, too. The biggest league game of the weekend is in Italy, where AC Milan plays Juventus. To me, that is one of Europe’s true marquee occasions. Given the demise of Serie A, I suspect plenty of people would regard it as very much a second-rate sort of a fixture, no different to Tottenham against Manchester United or something.

The most intriguing, though, is in the FA Cup. To anyone my age or older, the idea that Leeds against Chelsea is a derby is self-evident. Obviously it is a derby. One of the more toxic and bilious on offer in England, in fact.

To anyone younger, that would seem absurd. The two clubs have barely encountered each other for a couple of decades. They have rarely been competing, head-to-head, for honors. They appear to inhabit different worlds. Why would anyone care about what happened 56 years ago? At Wembley on Sunday, though, us old people get to be right for once. The rivalry between Leeds and Chelsea might seem outdated. It might not make much sense in the modern game. But that doesn’t mean it’s not real.

A great question – by which I mean “something that I have also been thinking about” – from Matt Klein, who is also charmingly worried that he is being a bit too American about things. That’s not a drawback anymore, Matt! If you convinced world football that getting rid of VAR was American, they’d do it in a heartbeat!

Anyway. “My question is about the scheduling of the Champions League quarterfinals,” Matt wrote. “Why on Earth would the powers-that-be schedule the games to kick off at the same time, so you have to pick one to watch? Not that I’m trying to Americanize things, but why not do it like the NFL playoffs and start at different times? Maybe a 7pm and a 9pm start? The whole world would watch both games!”

The short answer, Matt, is the one that explains why so many things are as they are. That is the way it has always been. You don’t get anywhere by questioning it. You can’t be changing things just because you’ve got a better idea. 

The longer one is, well: yes. They should absolutely do that. There are some difficulties in terms of ensuring fans can get out of work and to the stadiums on time – and that should be a consideration, at the very least – and I am personally of the view that the 6:45 p.m. (European time) kickoff is a bit too early, but I don’t see why you couldn’t at least stagger them, if not give each one its own time-slot. It doesn’t seem to me that anyone loses, really, if that happens. 

That’s all for this week! Thanks, as ever, for all the emails with thoughts, ideas, questions and the rest – please do keep them coming right here. We love reading all of them. Especially those, like Matt’s, that appear to have come straight from my own brain/reinforce my own ideas.

Take care,
Rory

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