Chelsea spent £323 million on eight new players in the January transfer window, but the arrival of a barefoot New Zealander could be the Premier League club’s most important act of recruitment.
Gilbert Enoka is the leadership management and mental skills coach for New Zealand’s rugby team. The culture change he implemented with the All Blacks was instrumental in their remarkable period of dominance. New Zealand were ranked No. 1 in the world from 2009 to 2019, and they are the only men’s team to win back-to-back rugby union World Cups, in 2011 and 2015.
On Feb. 6, a week after the January transfer window had closed, Chelsea hired Enoka on a short-term consultancy deal and challenged him to trigger the same reaction at Stamford Bridge by forging a new team identity.
“Gilbert has been the glue of the All Blacks for a long period of time,” New Zealand great Kieran Read told ESPN. “He’s got a great understanding of who the All Blacks are and he cares so deeply about it. He probably transformed us. And I think, in some ways, the difference between the All Blacks not winning and winning was our mental approach to games. Gilbert was a big part of it.”
Chelsea, Champions League winners for a second time in 2021, are going through a period of upheaval and renewal that is extreme even by their standards. A consortium led by Los Angeles Dodgers co-owner Todd Boehly has spent more than £600m since taking over in the summer, bringing in 18 new players across two transfer windows. The group also changed managers in September, firing Thomas Tuchel the year after he led them to European glory, and replacing him with Graham Potter.
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The overhaul has had an effect on results, though not yet the desired one. Chelsea have won just one and lost five of their 10 matches in 2023, with Saturday’s 1-0 defeat at home to the Premier League’s bottom club, Southampton, a nadir. With the team 10th in the league and a trip to London rivals Tottenham Hotspur on Sunday, and a goal down midway through their Champions League round-of-16 tie, they are in desperate need of a turning point.
With skill set, Enoka wants players to embrace fear and turn it into strength. He focused on the now widely used sporting maxim of pressure being a privilege. Conrad Smith has benefited here.
“I guess it’s pretty common now, but I remember him talking to me back near the start of my career and he was telling me that you can deal with pressure by following a process, and it’s a skill you can develop,” he said. “That made a huge impact on me. We talked about the ‘red head/blue head‘ stuff that’s a lot more common today, but it was about recognising habits when under pressure and changing them.
“You know, some people fight, or some people get real angry, but I was never like that. But he made me understand that some people react by trying to do too much. I watched back games and saw I was just running everywhere, and it was the worst thing I could do as you try to do 100 things and in the end you don’t do any of them well. That was a huge learning. So I recognised that, and I could feel myself in a game that when things weren’t going well, I’d slow down, breathe, all that stuff, and look to the next job and do it well.
“I had a reputation during my career of not making mistakes, and one compliment I always got was that I didn’t have a bad game. Well, I did do both, but whenever I made a mistake, I realised these things happen and instead of chasing the ball, I refocused.”
And then there’s the structural change. Along with the cultural reset, Enoka can help the team adapt to any shifting issues with a constant emphasis on players being accountable to one another.
“If things ever looked like they might go off course or whatever, he has the ability to bring it back on course,” Read said. “And the connection around what it means to be an All Black has strengthened too, as he’s emphasised that you’re not just playing for yourselves but something far bigger.”
Conrad Smith remembers Enoka’s unique team meetings. Chelsea players won’t witness a PowerPoint presentation, but instead they’ll see him use four different coloured pens on a flipchart, writing down key phrases or words for the team to remember. Both Smith and Read mention how Enoka would frequently walk barefoot around the camp.
“He’s got such a connection to who he is and to the All Blacks in New Zealand,” Read said. “He always is barefoot for meetings and it’s his way, I guess, of grounding himself.”
Enoka has also worked with the Black Caps (the New Zealand men’s cricket team), New Zealand’s volleyball sides, the Silver Ferns (the national women’s netball team), Crusaders and with individual athletes such as rally driver Hayden Paddon. He has even branched out of sport to work with a New Zealand real estate firm for over a decade.
“He understands how people are different, that we all have our own story and all have our background,” Conrad Smith said. “He has his own unique story. He’s all about bringing that all together. And that’s probably why I think he’s been so good, as he brings that all together. He understood the value in mental skills and culture before others, and spent all that time mastering it.”
Now it’s to Chelsea for a stint, where he’ll be charged with helping blend their raft of signings into a team with an individual strive for excellence all under a collective ideology.
“He makes sure there’s a real clear purpose of what you’re playing for, and there’s no individual bigger than the team — that’s the case with the All Blacks,” Read said. “I’m sure he’ll be trying to connect a lot of what we call the ‘connection purpose.’ The biggest thing is if you get a group of guys working in the same direction, all connected and wanting to play for each other, then you do well. That’s where I’m guessing he will come in.”
