🔍 Chelsea's Managerial Opening Is a Poisoned Chalice

Only for the time being, though. I’m heading up to Scotland tomorrow for what I’m very much hoping will be the highlight of my season. Hearts travel to Glasgow on Saturday to play Celtic, at Celtic Park – home, even for ordinary games, to one of Britain’s best atmospheres — needing to avoid defeat to win the Scottish title. 

This would, as I think I’ve probably mentioned, be a generational moment in a very literal sense. Celtic, or Rangers, have won every single championship north of the border (well, our border) since 1986. The last team to break their dominance was Aberdeen, back in 1985, when they were managed by Alex Ferguson, long before he was a Sir. 

The idea that Scotland was in effect a closed shop has been an established fact for basically my entire life. It was one of those things that we all just accepted. Celtic and Rangers were just too big, too rich, too strong to be toppled. And now, barely a year after Brighton owner Tony Bloom invested into Hearts, there is a slim possibility the streak will be broken. Slim because form, and home advantage, makes it overwhelmingly likely Celtic pip Hearts at the last. But the mere possibility is enough. I’ve not looked forward to a game more for a long time.

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It is not hard to understand what Chelsea might see in Xabi Alonso. True, he might have not even lasted six months at Real Madrid, but that has never been the most objective assessment of a manager’s ability. Besides, that is more than outweighed by the 44-year-old’s achievements at Bayer Leverkusen, where he led a young team to unprecedented success.

Even if that was not enough, there is his impeccable background – a Champions League and World Cup and serial title winner as a player, working under José Mourinho and Pep Guardiola and Carlo Ancelotti – as well as his intelligence, his erudition, even his fame. That’s a factor, too. He has both stardust and gravitas. He is, by any standards, a compelling candidate.

And it is equally easy to grasp why Chelsea might be tempted by Andoni Iraola, too. Look at the work he has done with Bournemouth, taking a team that has the 16th biggest salary budget in the Premier League and guiding them to the cusp of the Champions League. He has a clear, distinct style of play, one that would obviously engage fans, and a track record of developing young talent.

He is, just as importantly, used to working in a hierarchy in which the manager’s power is not absolute; he would not be distressed by the idea that his job would be, to some extent, to coach players identified for rather than by him. Bournemouth sold his entire defense last summer, and his best player in January. He did not bat an eyelid. He is compelling, too.

What is slightly harder to comprehend is why either manager would be attracted to Chelsea. It should, after all, be something of a red flag that both of them are under consideration at the same time. Alonso and Iraola might both be Basque. They might share an agent. They might both be hugely gifted young managers.

But that’s about it. Their styles of football – or, at least, the styles of football they have implemented in their careers so far – are diametrically opposed. Alonso seeks a control derived from Guardiola and possibly Mourinho; Iraola indulges a chaos that can be traced to the time he spent, as a player, under the tutelage of Marcelo Bielsa.

The fact that Chelsea is considering both is a pretty clear indication that this is not a club with a clear vision of what it wants to be. The other names on the club’s long list – reported by some, if not all, of the journalists who should be trusted on these matters – bear that out. Marco Silva, Oliver Glasner, Filipe Luís, and Francesco Farioli: All good managers, but all good in their own ways. What is the common thread? What are the criteria? What is the plan?

Those sorts of questions come up often when thinking about the modern Chelsea; the club, at this stage, looks from the outside like a whole regiment of red flags. There are five sporting directors, or equivalents. The consortium that owns the team has fired five permanent managers in four years. One of them was Liam Rosenior.

They have, in their great disruptive wisdom, turned Chelsea into a trading house for players, most of them young; they have disregarded not just traditional knowledge but basic common sense in building their squad; they have confused their colossal ignorance for free-wheeling insight. Chelsea looks an awful lot like a manager’s graveyard. 

So why would either Alonso or Iraola, or any of the others, even consider it? Part of it is a sort of naive, sunny romanticism that must almost be admired. The sorts of people drawn to management do not have a lot of self-doubt. They believe, because they have to believe, that they alone possess the brilliance to solve even the most knotty problem. They are eager to work, desperate to compete, and they do not really factor in the possibility of failure, even when it is as certain as it would appear to be at BlueCo’s Stamford Bridge. 

And part of it is much more calculating. Alonso and Iraola will know that the rewards greatly outweigh the risks. Not so much the financial ones – although they will have noted just how much Rosenior will end up having been paid for a few weeks’ work; everyone has a price that can be put on their dignity – but the reputational ones.

Succeed at Chelsea and there is glory to be had, bringing with it redemption for Alonso, ascension to the ranks of the elite for Iraola. Fail and… well, nothing, really. Thomas Tuchel, Graham Potter and Mauricio Pochettino will all be at the World Cup this summer. Enzo Maresca is lined up to replace Pep Guardiola at Manchester City. Chelsea is a gamble, but it would appear to be a winning one.

This is the great curiosity of those clubs that are turned, at the whim of their owners, into basketcases. The same was true, for a while, of PSG, and Chelsea under Roman Abramovich, and probably remains true of Real Madrid. These clubs are too capricious, too volatile, too poorly-run to be used as a serious, qualitative gauge of a manager’s ability. 

They are places where failure does not count. They are nothing but upside; they are the game’s free hits. Chelsea, under its current owners, has fallen into that category again. Without a substantial change in direction from the owners, there is very little reason to believe Alonso, Iraola or any of the others will be able to succeed where their predecessors have failed. It is in the nature of managers to have hope, of course. But that is much easier when you know nobody will hold failure against you.

We’re probably at the stage where we don’t really need any more discourse on what will, I think, come to be thought of just as The Decision, complete with portentous capitals. West Ham’s Pablo probably did foul David Raya, the Arsenal goalkeeper; Callum Wilson’s goal, one that would have wholly transformed the Premier League title race, was correctly ruled out. Let’s all move on.

Except, of course, for the fact that the decision didn’t exist in isolation. It came at the same time as roughly 203 other fouls were happening in the penalty area, including one on Pablo himself, and it came at the end of a season in which England’s referees have decided that forms of grappling and jostling that look very similar to that committed by Pablo are not, in fact, fouls. 

I’ve written elsewhere that the explanation for why the Premier League came to resemble a rather less elegant version of the WWE is because of the existence of VAR itself, which has relegated on-field referees to what is basically a subservient role. Five days on, though, it’s probably time to think about solutions.

One smart suggestion comes from Darren Cann, a longstanding assistant referee and a kind of encyclopedia of officiating. He would like to see attacking players forbidden to enter the six-yard box before set-pieces are taken; such a move would not only reduce physical contact but disincentivize teams from surrounding goalkeepers in the way they do now.

It’s a good idea, but my instinct is that it is needlessly complex. It would, surely, be easier either to enforce fouls in the way that was the norm until about three years ago, for both attacking and defending teams; if the presence of VAR precludes that, then maybe the simpler tweak would be to abolish the loophole that says referees cannot punish transgressions before the ball is in play. As things stand, the penalty area before a set-piece is taken is a free-for-all. Make that subject to the rest of the rules and we might be getting somewhere.

Rog and Rory recap a dramatic Premier League weekend headlined by Arsenal’s controversial 1-0 win over West Ham and the VAR decision everyone is still talking about. The guys break down the latest twist in the title race after another massive Manchester City win, plus Chelsea and Liverpool’s frustrating 1-1 draw, the relegation scrap and the battle for the final European places.

Watch on YouTube or listen here.

This should be obvious by now; obvious enough that I’m not going to bore you by droning on about Celtic against Hearts again. (Seriously though, you should watch it, these things don’t happen often.) So we are going to pivot, just a little, to those instances where the drama and jeopardy reside not so much in individual games, but in the combinations of them.

The interplay between Tottenham and West Ham, for example, is probably more interesting this weekend than the FA Cup final, where Calum McFarlane looks to maintain his unbeaten run against Pep Guardiola (it’s a run of one, but still).

In Germany, where the Bundesliga concludes on Saturday, the title is long since decided, but there, Stuttgart and Hoffenheim are level on points in the race for a Champions League spot, while the bottom three of Wolfsburg, St. Pauli and Heidenheim can all still avoid automatic relegation. (Wolfsburg and St. Pauli play each other.)

Spain is in a similar situation – five teams, ranging from Alaves to Elche remain in the relegation battle – while the intrigue in Italy is at the top. Juventus, AC Milan, Roma and the insurgent Como all retain hopes of qualifying for the Champions League in the next two weeks; the same is true of Lille, Lyon and Rennes in France. It would be wrong to single out one game to watch. We should be paying attention to, well, most of them.

I had a realization during Leeds’ draw with Tottenham on Monday night. It was not a game that I thought I had any real investment in, given that Leeds’ safety had been secured by West Ham’s entirely uncontroversial defeat to Arsenal. As the game wore on, though, I found myself wanting Daniel Farke’s brave boys to hold out.

This is not because I want Spurs to be relegated. Other than my well-documented interest in the wellbeing of Archie Gray, I have no real preference one way or the other. It is a race in which, for me, there is no horse at all. (Just a pair of donkeys, badoom-tish.) It is entirely because I want the final day of the season to be interesting. 

Which brings me onto Zach Parris’s email. “From where I sit, it seems pretty clear who the goodies and the baddies are in the Arsenal/Man City battle for the title,” he wrote. “At least Manchester City seems pretty clearly to be the moral/ethical baddies. So I’m a bit surprised by the neutral’s apparent distaste for Arsenal.”

Zach posited a couple of theories for this: resentment of a team from the capital in a sport traditionally dominated by two proud, provincial cities; Arsenal being considered an establishment club while City is seen as a usurper; good old-fashioned tribal bitterness, in which the “dynamic could simply be resentment of anyone having success that is not your team.”

I’d dismiss the former, but the latter two have merit. I think the most potent impulse behind supposed neutrals preferring City over Arsenal (as was the case with City over Liverpool last year) is that Man City’s success does not sting quite as much as the more traditional elite’s.

Partly that is a history, or lack of it; very few people grew up hating Manchester City. And partly it is the context of it. Even leaving aside the matter of the 115 charges, the general consensus on City is that it is an exception. It is easy to ascribe everything the club has done to the fact it has effectively bottomless resources, thanks to its ownership; it feels, in that, as though City is not playing the same game as everyone else. City winning does not reflect badly on anyone. With its more familiar model, Arsenal winning does.

But there is one more factor, and it’s the one that I felt during the Spurs game. Everyone without a specific affection/distaste for one of the teams involved just wants the title race to be interesting. And, ideally, funny. We want twists and we want turns and we want both teams, if at all possible, to have at least one pratfall. It is not a matter of bad or good. We just want to feel alive.

That’s all for this week. Remember: all of your queries and questions and thoughts and ideas are welcome at [email protected], on whatever subject takes your fancy. We read and appreciate them all. And if you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, why not send it on to a friend, or a relative, or a colleague, or even an enemy, if you’re trying to build bridges, because you should be. We’d love to have them join us.

Hearts, Hearts, Glorious Hearts,
Rory

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