Mauricio Pochettino has been sacked by Chelsea just days after concluding the season with 5 wins on the bounce and the first signs of a team coming together.
How did it come to this? The Daily Mail’s story on these events claim it all came down to 3 meetings between Pochettino and senior figures in the days since the campaign concluded. Tensions had been rising without doubt – the fact that he himself wasn’t clear about his future was hugely damaging to his authority, and created increasing awkwardness as the weeks passed and no clarity was found.
Three meetings to seal the manager’s fate
A dinner with Todd Boehly on Friday night came first. That meeting was first mentioned by Pochettino in his press conference on Sunday after the final game of the season, and it’s interesting to revisit his comments in hindsight. The coach seemed to say that the fact that it was a dinner rather than a coffee was proof that it was a positive meeting rather than a sacking. But now he’s gone.
Was he deliberately misleading the press, or was he being sarcastic and calling out the ownership for their actions? It’s still not clear. In that same presser, Pochettino denied knowing when the “performance review” that was supposed to be taking place was. He simply said “my phone is on” for when they wanted to speak to him.
It didn’t take them long. According to the Mail’s story, Pochettino then met sporting directors Laurence Stewart and Paul Winstanley on Monday and then Tuesday for the crunch talks that sealed his fate. It seems it wasn’t so much that he didn’t meet the objectives so much that both the club and the coach could see that issues were starting to emerge which would only grow worse.
The idea of “mutual agreement” is always a little dodgy, but in this case it does seem like both parties were happy to get out of the arrangement early.
