When it comes to the Premier League heavyweights, no team has been quite so brutal or chaotic when it comes to the hiring and firing of managers as Chelsea.
Across the 19-year reign of Roman Abramovich between 2003 and 2022, the Russian churned through 13 managers (some twice!) but racked up 21 trophies in a remarkably successful era.
But when the Russian oligarch sold the club last year to an American consortium led by billionaire Todd Boehly, the new ownership group promised an end to the relentless churn of head coaches.
Stability and continuity, they claimed, would be prioritised over short-term results.
Just 100 days after their takeover, Chelsea’s manager Thomas Tuchel was sacked in September.
Then his replacement Graham Potter was sacked overnight after just seven months and 31 games in charge.
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He leaves the Blues in 11th place in the Premier League, having already been dumped out of both domestic cups in the early rounds – and with the club having spent over $1 billion in transfers this season.
When Potter’s future first came under a cloud earlier this season, he boldly declared: “There’s a completely different ownership.
“This is hard for people to get their head around as Chelsea for 20 years has been one thing and now all of a sudden it’s different.”
His exit proves that things aren’t all that different under Boehly and Clearlake Capital.
But there’s one big difference: even amid the dysfunction that was Abramovich’s tenure, Chelsea won.
Under Boehly, they look further away from success than ever.
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The decision to sack German mastermind Tuchel in September was controversial to say the least. Here was an elite manager, greatly experienced at the top level, who had delivered the club a Champions League, Super Cup and Club World Cup. Because of that success – the Champions League in particular – he remained a popular figure among fans.
Chelsea had also spent a whopping £270m or so ($A500m) on transfers in the off-season, bringing in a whopping 13 players including the likes of Wesley Fofana (£69.5m), Marc Cucurella (£56m), and Raheem Sterling (£47.5m).
Tuchel hardly had the time to gel with his new-look squad before being shown the door just six league games into a new campaign.
Boehly’s next move, less than two days later, was even more surprising. Under Abramovich, Chelsea had typically employed managers with strong records at the elite level – think Jose Mourinho, Carlo Ancelotti, Guus Hiddink, Antonio Conte, and Luis Filipe Scolari.
The new Chelsea hierarchy took a radically different approach by signing Potter, a manager who had never taken charge of a heavyweight side.
The now-47-year-old had been at Brighton & Hove Albion for three and a half years, a club where he had been afforded plenty of time and patience. His mandate at the south coast club had been to implement a clear style of play and to develop young talent and sell them on to bigger clubs, thereby taking a long-term sustainable approach.
The results were extraordinary. He forged a tight-knit squad, brought through young players and turned them into top-line stars, and created a positive environment at the club. The results spoke for themselves: Brighton enjoyed their best-ever top flight finish and smashed a host of other club records to boot.
But the Seagulls’ patient, long-term approach was a world away from the manic and success-driven world he stepped into at Stamford Bridge.
As Barney Ronay wrote in The Guardian: “It was painfully obvious from the start that Potter was not the right fit. In fact, he was so obviously the wrong fit it was tempting to squint in search of some brilliant masterplan just out of sight, because this couldn’t be serous, could it?
“Here we had the ultimate slow-burn process manager, thrown into a chaos of panic-capitalism, shifting sands, eight mid-season signings, an acquisitions department touring the world like Father Christmas on crack.”
It never seemed a natural fit. But Chelsea’s new owners were determined to focus on the long-term future, recognising the upheaval that had already taken place in their first 100 days would likely result in short-term pain.
To build a winning culture, as he had done at Brighton, Boehly needed time – and plenty of it. To that end, Chelsea handed Boehly a five-year contract worth around £10 million per season.
But the chaos and instability off the field meant the Chelsea job – easily the biggest of Potter’s career – was a poisoned chalice from the start.
And even if the board was willing to give Boehly time, as they showed when they resisted sacking him in February after a dismal run of results, the fans would be less forgiving.
The massive transfer spend in the off-season, followed by the sacking of a popular manager in Tuchel, meant the expectations among the Blues faithful were sky-high.
They wanted an A-list manager to bring them titles, and were instead given someone whose best Premier League finish was ninth place.
They were vocal in their criticism of the English manager from the start – and by the end, their cries become nothing short of brutal.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” the Chelsea faithful jeered at their own coach during the weekend’s defeat to Aston Villa that sounded his death-knell.
The truth was that he was always caught between the short-term demands of success and his long-term process.
Where he had forged a clear playing style and a culture of togetherness at Brighton, he failed to deliver either at Chelsea.
Both were due to a complex confluence of factors. But nothing was as damaging as Boehly’s scattergun approach to the transfer market – like ‘Father Christmas on crack’ as Ronay put it.
Having blown their rivals out of the water with their off-season spending spree, Chelsea broke the all-time January transfer window record to deliver a full EIGHT more players to Boehly.
That included a British record of £107m on Argentina midfielder Enzo Fernandez, plus Ukraine forward Mykhailo Mudryk for £89m. It took the total outlay under the new owners to around £600m.
Boehly flew across Europe, personally involving himself in a hunter-gatherer mission to amass as many players as Chelsea possibly could – but seemingly without any thought for whether they would help the manager or fit into his plans, much less whether the price was right.
The result was a bloated Chelsea made up of a veritable a hodgepodge of players – a (rather expensive) rabble rather than a team. The squad was simply too big for Potter to juggle the pieces effectively, the very opposite of his tight Seagulls unit.
Boehly’s transfer cash splash had backfired hopelessly.
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Trying to get the fresh faces adapt to life in the Premier League meant Potter playing out-of-form big-money signings instead of homegrown talents.
He was unable to spend the time doing exactly what made him so successful at Brighton – working with young players to develop them into hardened pros.
It also led to a tactical muddle. At Brighton, Potter had shown a confident and adept handling of tactics, getting the best out of the players at his disposal and tinkering with systems as required. But trying to figure out the best way to use the horde of players at his disposal left the mastermind in a muddle.
And the huge playing group at his disposal came with another major problem.
As reported in The Standard: “Some players made Harry Potter references and lacked respect for a manager who had never before managed at elite level.
“Analysis meetings at Cobham were said to be very quiet, with leaders in the squad not naturally being vocal or rallying the group.
“One senior source described how often “everything felt wrong” and that they could not pin down one specific tactical issue to resolve.”
No manager could be expected to succeed with such a fundamental squad upheaval – but the fact that some players had to Google Potter’s managerial resume was proof enough that he should never have been hired in the first place.
Potter was fighting a losing battle from the start. A battle for respect, from fans as much as the players. A battle for time.
In the end, he lost the most important battle – for results. 11 defeats in 31 games was simply never going to be good enough, no matter how much Boehly and the board wanted to be different, wanted to back Potter through the bad times.
As Liverpool great turned pundit Jamie Carragher tweeted: “Todd said he would be different to Roman (laughing emoji) (laughing emoji)
“I feel for Graham Potter, but it was inevitable.
“You don’t change Tuchel for Potter. Ridiculous decision to start with.”
The pressure is now on Boehly and the new hierarchy at Stamford Bridge to prove the dysfunctional disaster of the last 12 months is just growing pains.
So far, their biggest decisions have backfired – from sacking Tuchel, to appointing Potter, to the ridiculous approach to the transfer market.
Having paid out a reported £13m to Tuchel after his sacking, Chelsea then paid off Brighton to the tune of £21m to poach Potter and his staff. They won’t have to pay out all of Potter’s £50m contract – but when combined with the £600m transfer outlay, this season looks more and more like an expensive mistake every day.
The cost of failure will also likely include the hefty financial hit from missing out on a top-four Premier League finish and Champions League qualification. At this point, sitting in 11th with 10 league games to go, Chelsea seem more likely to miss out on European football entirely.
Potter’s reputation has taken a hit, but there will surely be another mid-level club willing to take a chance on the manager and his long-term rebuilding ability.
It is Chelsea that has taken the biggest hit. They now have 10 games to save their Premier League season, while they face Real Madrid in the quarterfinals of the Champions League next week.
Twice under Abramovich, sacking a manager almost immediately delivered Champions League glory.
For all of the talk that they would be different to Abramovich, the Blues’ new owners will be wishing and hoping the past will repeat itself.
