The big news at Chelsea this week has been the removal of Mauricio Pochettino and the imminent arrival of Enzo Maresca to replace him.
The Argentine was immensely popular with the players, even when his relations with the fans were strained, and there seems to be some unhappiness about his dismissal.
In his exclusive column for Caught Offside, Ben Jacobs revealed a little about how the dressing room had reacted to the sudden change:
“It’s true several players were disappointed to see Mauricio Pochettino leave,” Jacobs wrote.
“Although…. there is already excitement at what Maresca can bring.”
Not only were players connecting with Pochettino in a very clear and obvious way, there’s also the general impression of chaos that’s given off by the club appointing a 4th coach in little over two years under this ownership.
Let’s face it, that doesn’t smell like a club with a plan in place, where everything is going smoothly. It makes it seem like we’re just thrashing around trying to figure out what works, rather than building some grand project with careful planning.
Unease and unhappiness a recipe for disaster
We’re not at all surprised to hear these players are a little disappointed, and we’d not be surprised if their feelings went a little deeper than that. We wrote something similar ourselves in recent weeks – some of these players have only been here for two years and have already been through a worrying slew of coaches. If this carries on, it’s natural they’ll start to have doubts about the overall project – if they don’t already.
Their careers are on the line here, and many of them have 6 or 7 or 8 year contracts. They want stability, not chaos, and they will quite understandably be worried about the way that each successive coach seems less thought out than the last.
Why does “Chelsea News” keep posting pictures of Todd Boehly with these headlines when your own reporting (not to mention the reporting of about half a dozen other outlets) shows he wasn’t a central player in this drama? All accounts focus on the roles of Eghbali and the two sporting co-directors in giving Poch his walking papers and yet you guys stil trot out Boehly’s mug with most of your headlines. Why? There’s certainly no journalistic basis. It looks more and more like “Yank-baiting.” You’ve spent two years painting Boehly as a villain, fanning the flames of nativist resentment about “an American ruining Chelsea FC” and now is apparently not the time to let the facts get in the way of that narrative. It’s pathetic and it’s wrong, but apparently it’s all about feeing red meat to the angry mob. Shame on you.
Eghbali is a Yank, too, if you didn’t know.