Football agent Jon Smith’s column for Caughtoffside always has some interesting perspectives from inside the game.
Today he opened up writing about Enzo Maresca and the risk Chelsea were taking by hiring him.
He called the decision “really brave” from the sporting directors, and called it “the last chance saloon,” for them, ominously. He doesn’t seem too convinced by it, noting that “Leicester fans don’t seem overly upset.”
He notes that it’s the “fashionable and loud voices” that say you need a young coach “from the Pep school,” implying heavily that he doesn’t share that view.
Basically he thinks it’s a bad idea – but he backs Paul Winstanley as someone he knows to make the right, risky call: “when you look at what’s happened at Brighton, and it’s where Paul came from, they pick people out that they’ve done their research on and they’ve worked [out].”
Different types of bravery
We have no problem with Chelsea being brave – as Smith says, it’s something that should be praised. But bravery need not come at the expense of success, and perhaps it would have been equally brave to risk another season with Mauricio Pochettino in charge, knowing there was going to be friction over transfers to some degree.
Is bringing in someone to work under you because they’re less likely to challenge your authority brave? Not from where we’re standing. If anything,
In any case, all will be decided with what we see on the pitch. Chelsea fans are frustrated now, but a strong start to the season will cheer them up. But Smith is right to include some dark warnings in his column. The sporting directors know that each coach they cycle through is another black mark against their name, no matter the reasons for their removal.
We’re not sure how many more of them they can survive.
