Enzo Maresca is out at Chelsea, and of course talk has already turned to who might be coming in to replace him.
But there’s an argument that, no matter who it is, they are set up to fail.
Chelsea trapped in bad manager spiral
The club model of buying young players and selling them as they develop means there will always be a lack of experience in the team and a lack of reliable depth. The demands of playing in the Champions League and Premier League mean that rotation is a necessity.
The logical conclusion of that is that the manager simply won’t be able to get the results he needs to keep his job long term. You can’t win two games a week against the best teams in the world and also run a player trading operation at the same time.
So who would take a job where you’re set up to fail, and also have to be the public face of this backwards project? Not a top manager, that’s for sure. They will stick to places where they know they have a chance of succeeding.
That restricts us to up and coming coaches who want to prove themselves. And what will they do once they’ve shown they have something about them? Just what Maresca did: flirt with other big teams and jump ship as soon as they can.
In other news…
Maresca’s departure means Chelsea are looking for a 5th permanent manager in the BlueCo era. The sporting directors have made another bad appointment, and are surely under pressure now.
There were countless issues behind the removal of Maresca, but ultimately it was the bad results which turned the situation critical. Wins can paper over a lot of cracks, dropped points make small issues a lot bigger.
Sorry, but this isn’t about “player trading,” SuperFrank. That dog just don’t hunt.
This business of sacking managers when the going gets even slightly tough goes back decades at CFC. Look up the last manager to make it five years or longer and you’ll have to go back to before the Earth cooled! Even Mourinho, at the height of his powers and popularity didn’t make it to 3 years, lol!
And it’s all because there is an insane culture surrounding the club that has nothing to do with this ownership (though they deserve blame for succumbing to fan pressure). It’s a culture of toxic negativity that demands a scalp whenever we hit a patch of bad form and it has everything to do with the fact that we can’t keep a manager for more than 18 months. And when you have young players and you fire the manager you are essentially hitting the “reset” button and setting the whole project back by a minimum of six months every time.
It’s one thing to be passionate, but it’s beyond childish (indeed it’s insane!) to shout “you don’t know what you’re doing” at a manager who won the Club World Club and who is apparently wanted by City to succeed Pep Guardiola. That’s not “player trading” to blame for getting the manager fired. That’s fans hitting the self-destruct button at their club because they can’t manage their emotions any better than a toddler throwing a tantrum.
And in the end you have to feel that we kind of deserve what we get — a good manager who’s had enough, a team that can’t seem to find consistency from one half to the next (let alone one match to another), and a club that’s in chaos because much of the fan base confuses “support” with a license to spew vitriol regardless of the consequences.