Chelsea have a manager in charge of the football team again. Mauricio Pochettino will be the fourth boss the squad have had to answer to in the space of 12 months. But after a year of chaos at Stamford Bridge, the former Tottenham Hotspur and Paris Saint-Germain coach has already drawn a line under what has gone before.
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Jose Mourinho made a bold statement when he declared himself as the “Special One” on his Chelsea unveiling in 2004. Jurgen Klopp did the same when promising to win the Premier League within four years (he took five, but won the Champions League in his fourth season) in his first news conference at Liverpool in 2015. Both men projected their strength of character at the first opportunity, and it paid off. Pochettino has done the same at Chelsea, but the hard work now begins on the pitch.
Actions will ultimately speak louder than Pochettino’s words, but the 51-year-old’s introductory news conference Friday was akin to a State of the Union address. Issues were dealt with, principles were spelled out and Pochettino projected his personality to make clear that managing a club as demanding and complex as Chelsea was a motivation, not a burden.
All of the above should be basic elements of taking charge of a top club, but none of Pochettino’s three immediate predecessors in the role last season — Thomas Tuchel, Graham Potter and Frank Lampard — were able to tick the necessary boxes.
Tuchel, a Champions League winner at the club in 2021, failed to embrace the change of ownership at Stamford Bridge last summer. He was unable to align with the vision of his new boss, Todd Boehly, and was fired a month into the season.
Potter was handed the chance to build Chelsea in Boehly’s vision, but the former Brighton & Hove Albion manager lacked the personality, experience and confidence to ride out the storm of negative results that followed. He lasted seven months in the job. Then came Lampard, a legend at Chelsea as a player but a man whose managerial record did nothing to inspire a sceptical squad in need of direction. His period as caretaker manager — just over two years after being fired from the full-time job at the same club — resulted in a run of eight defeats and just one win in 11 games in charge.
