A tale of two Chelseas

If ever you wanted a weekend of footballing contrasts, these last two days provided it amply, and from one single club, too. On Saturday, Emma Hayes’ relentless pursuit of success saw Chelsea secure a fourth straight Women’s Super League title. 24 hours later Chelsea’s senior men’s team brought the curtain down on a miserable season that couldn’t have ended soon enough. One Chelsea delivered a league and cup double, the other, a Premier League bottom-half finish - 12th place, their lowest position since 1994 and their worst points tally for 30 years. That’s the kind of form that would have otherwise led to relegation were it not for the even more anaemic performances of the eight teams below them. 

Now, before anyone throws the gender debate back at me, the essential comparison being made here is that one Chelsea is managed by a tactically astute head coach who, over the past 11 years, has built, maintained and enriched the team with a profound working relationship with her players, backed by investment in the best available talent. The other has, over the course of this last season, had four different managers, each charged with integrating an embarrassment of riches acquired by a £600 million supermarket trolley dash.

And there, again, is that word: “embarrassment”. It was infamously invoked by co-owner Todd Boehly after a particularly egregious home defeat to Brighton in April. While he wasn’t wrong - chewing out the team in the changing room - many Chelsea fans felt that Boehly should have undertaken some self-reflection before making such a comment, even though in a literal sense, the players he was laying into, bought for inflated fees and in some cases, paid inflated wages, have been embarrassing. All. Season. Long.

Was it their fault though? To be blunt, yes. Six-figure weekly remuneration should be enough to incentivise anyone to deliver. But that, though, takes an extremely simplistic view of the problem. The harsh reality is that there is a collective responsibility at Chelsea for the way this season has gone - from the highest echelon on down. I don’t wish to sound churlish about the Boehly-Clearlake Capital consortium who effectively saved the club, after Roman Abramovich was forced to sell up. But the way they went about running their new toy in the wake of their £2.5 billion takeover has fuelled a level of negativity towards them that took rival club owners like Manchester United’s Glazer family and Liverpool’s Fenway Sports Group years, not months, to establish.

It shouldn’t be forgotten, though, that the ensuing dysfunction only spread to the men’s half of Chelsea. After the Women’s FA Cup Final, Hayes herself reflected on how things had gone elsewhere in her organisation: “It will bug me if I don’t say this - I’m a football fan and I’ve watched how much my club has suffered this year. We’ve had ownership changes, the men’s team hasn’t been brilliant.” And she added: “Chelsea fans - this [FA Cup title] is for you. I hope we had a little bit of joy tonight. I hope we gave you something where you can smile about it this year. The whole club, owners included.”

According to media reports, Boehly is now believed to be taking a step back from day-to-day control. Since the takeover, and the splurge on players that he personally oversaw, the management structure has supposedly been strengthened, with the appointment of co-sporting directors Paul Winstanley and Laurence Stewart, amongst other senior figures. But according to some players there have been critical exits elsewhere, particularly in medical staff and members of the ‘pit crew’ that keep the highly tuned Formula 1 car that is a Premier League football team on the road. Frank Lampard (manager #4), installed as interim manager following manager #2 Graham Potter’s sacking in April has hinted at this: “Chelsea has been a big success for 20 years but at the moment we aren’t in that position,” he said early in his tenure. “In the time I’ve been here, it’s pretty evident and clear to see - behind the scenes, on the training ground - the reasons why.” Ever the PR man, his comments were far from cryptic.

It is, though, possible that problems at Chelsea have been even deeper seated. Dysfunction, in one form or another, has long been the stream flowing though the club. BT Sport took fans of a certain vintage back to the era of chairman Ken Bates earlier this year with the excellent documentary Pound Land: Battle Of The Bridge. It sourced the origin of Chelsea’s modern day state to the hubris that followed a brief flirtation with the big time in the early 1970s, which brought a couple of trophies and Raquel Welch to Stamford Bridge. The spiralling cost of building the stand I sit in to this day amid the ’70s economy almost bankrupted the club, which was then sold to Bates for a nominal pound, only for him to be forced into an existential battle with property developers threatening to flatten the ground completely and put Chelsea out of business.

With the developers soundly beaten, Bates then took on the arrival of Matthew Harding as a director and investor, creating another power struggle. Harding, though, paved the way for new investment, and with it Glenn Hoddle, followed by European elite players like Ruud Gullit, Gianluca Vialli and Gianfranco Zola (admittedly, nearing the end of their careers). A new Chelsea emerged, enjoying less profligate times in the then-new Premier League. A remarkable goal on the final day of the 2002-2003 season from Jesper Grönkjaer propelled Chelsea into the Champions League at Liverpool’s expense, and along came Abramovich with his bottomless cheque book, followed by 20 trophies in 19 years. And 13 managers.

Low levels of job security were always priced in to any managerial appointment in the Abramovich era. The Boehly-Clearlake takeover heralded talk of long-term projects and stability. Tell that to Thomas Tuchel (manager #1): having replaced Lampard in January 2021 - with the club on much the same trajectory as it has this season - Tuchel took the team to a Champions League final within four months and won it. He then masterminded a victory in the World Club Cup the following year…only to be fired just a month into the season now ending. So much for a new regime.

Before tackling the What Happened Next? chapter of this story, it is worth framing managerial turnover in the context of player arrivals and departures. Player power has led to the undermining of many of Chelsea’s managers in the modern era. They know that if their form goes or they fall out of favour, the worst that can happen is that their agent lands them a cushy berth somewhere else. Such players are hardly likely to respond to a vulnerable coach when results go against them. Which brings me to Graham Potter.

From the outset he was handed an impossible task. Despite a reputation for creating the perfect developmental culture at Brighton on a relatively modest budget, at Chelsea he was effectively the driver of a family hatchback suddenly handed the keys to a lurid, bonkers Lamborghini. Actually, 32 of them. At first, Potter’s appointment seemed like a sharp move: a young manager who’d developed an attractive manner of play on the South Coast. But, by the time of the World Cup, and the extended international break, Potter was expressing his relief at having some time to figure out what was going wrong.

Boehly’s spending, seemingly adding people the club didn’t know it needed but bought anyway without strengthening in the departments where the need was most acute, loaded the dice for Potter. As his international players returned from Qatar, and the January window opened with Chelsea doing even more business, Potter’s fate was sealed. Despite having several weeks to figure it out, results continued to be dismal, and yet Potter now had even more new players to work with. Disquiet in the Stamford Bridge stands became more audible. As January gave way to February, the #potterout movement proliferated and, by the time he was eventually fired in April, hostility had become substantial.

Following the brief one-match tenure of Potter’s assistant, Bruno Saltor (manager #3 - effectively, the Liz Truss appointment of the season), the club decided that it would take time to consider its next permanent appointment, bringing back Lampard for the final few weeks.

Let’s be very clear, this was no more than a PR sop towards fan toxicity, but as an exercise in appeasement, it didn’t work. For all. Of the eleven games Lampard was in charge of, eight were defeats.Although most Chelsea fans still revere Lampard the player, these few weeks have damaged his managerial brand, possibly irreparably. “If you ask me what I have learned in this short period,” he reflected ruefully after the abject 4-1 defeat to Manchester United at Old Trafford, “In terms of coaching, not so much. I’ve been in in this situation as a player when you have an interim after a change of manager. A lot of the plus-points you gain are about what the team is fighting for. Can you find that extra bit? And we haven’t found that as a collective. The results say so.”

With yesterday’s final whistle at Stamford Bridge, Lampard’s second spell as Chelsea manager came to a dismal end, albeit with a smidgen of pride restored by a 1-1 draw with Newcastle at Stamford Bridge. But it also heralded a new cycle of change. Financial Fair Play rules means the club will have to trim its senior squad. Step forward, then, Mauricio Pochettino, announced today as Chelsea’s new head coach, on a two-year contract.

The 51-year-old Argentinian’s appointment has been in the works for a long time. He was even considered by Abramovich when Lampard left in 2021, and again by the new owners when Tuchel was fired last September. So, has Chelsea finally got their man? No one knows. History has shown that it doesn’t matter whether a club makes a considered appointment or a knee-jerk, instinctive hire, nothing lasts forever, no matter how smiley the obligatory contract-signing/shirt-holding photo session.

Chelsea promised a “thorough” process to identify and appoint a permanent new manager following Potter’s sacking, but whatever technical requirements were on the shopping list in early April, the weeks since will have amped up the need to restore pride and cohesion to a team that has become a laughing stock amongst rival fans. That same tribalism informed some initial misgivings about Pochettino’s Tottenham connection (before that particular quadrant of the Twittersphere was rightly shut down by reminders of where Hoddle had played for 13 years before launching Chelsea’s supposedly continuing era of elite competition). 

The task Pochettino is facing is huge. First, he has to prune an enormous 32-player squad (so big there aren’t enough spaces in the Cobham changing room for everyone). There are plenty of candidates, and while the process won’t be pain-free, those who’ve looked increasingly ineffective, disinterested or unmotivated will be easier to live without.

Hopefully, what will be left from this exercise will be a smaller, younger and more ambitious squad, something Pochettino is historically well suited to developing. He’ll have a lot to work with. It’s been hard to gauge what Lampard’s selection strategy has been over the last few weeks and what clues that might provide as to what his successor will do, given that as Pochettino has conducted his own contract negotiations he is also believed to have informed the Chelsea hierarchy who he’d like to work with from the existing squad. 

Given his reputation for developing youth, that bodes well for young homegrown left back Lewis Hall. Still only 18, and clearly with a lot to learn, he has taken his opportunity well with Ben Chilwell and Marc Cucurella both out of action, with gutsy performances since Lampard played him in his final games in charge. Similarly Noni Madueke, the 21-year-old Englishman signed in January from PSV Eindhoven who has already shown himself to be far more interested in playing up the right wing than Hakim Zyech or Christian Pulisic have ever done. More puzzling is the development prospects for Carney Chukwuemeka, the 19-year-old midfielder signed from Aston Villa with great expectation, but whom Lampard appeared to keep at arms length. At the centre of midfield sits the Argentinian Enzo Fernández, bought in January for a staggering £106.8 million but, at 22 and a long-term contract, the kind of player Pochettino might build around.

He is also thought to be a fan of using homegrown talent, something Lampard, during his first spell in charge, made good use of, with Chelsea Academy graduates like Reece James, Tammy Abraham (now at Roma) and Fikayo Tamori (now at Milan). Unless sold in the domestic departures, Pochettino would do well to retain Conor Gallagher, another youth product. He will also want to call upon 20-year-old Levi Colwill, the central defender who joined Chelsea as a schoolboy and who has been getting regular football on loan at Brighton. Given that 39-year-old Thiago Silva can’t possibly go on forever, the thinking is that Colwill could be integrated into Chelsea’s backline (ideally, with Silva retained as a defensive coach to maximise his exhaustive experience).

Pochettino’s biggest headache, though, will be Mason Mount. At 24, and a Chelsea player since he was 8, he is the ideal figure the club needs and Pochettino wants. Personable, mature, and therefore a PR asset (making him captaincy material, with Azpiliqueta nearing the door), he is also about to enter the final year of his contract, with nothing yet agreed on a renewal despite months of speculation. For such an asset, Mount and Chelsea have been engaged in a weird, socially-distanced dance in recent weeks, with negotiations either progressing slowly or not at all. Pochettino might make a last-ditch attempt to persuade him to stay at his boyhood club, but with Manchester United and Liverpool circling, and interest from Arsenal, too, the prospect of cashing in on a player valued at around £55 million could be too tempting for the club to resist. After the Newcastle game yesterday, Mount was part of the team lap-of-honour at Stamford Bridge. To most watching on, it felt like farewell.

As it did when Ruben Loftus-Cheek, another youth product, was subsituted, giving an emotional wave to Stamford Bridge that appeared to confirm speculation that he’ll be off, possibly to AC Milan. Selling Mount, along with Loftus-Cheek, Trevoh Chalobah, Callum Hudson-Odoi and even Gallagher would not only make money, but as homegrown players balance out Financial Fair Play regulations. Other disposals will just save money, such as Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Kalidou Koulibaly, two of last summer’s inexplicable, and expensively reumunerated purchases. Whoever goes, it is understood that Chelsea will need to do their selling business before the end of June, when the transactions can be recorded in the club’s accounts for the season. That won’t rule out new players coming in (Leipzig’s Golden Boot-winning French striker Christopher Nkunku is believed to have already agreed a move to Chelsea this summer). 

Pochettino will need - and want - to work with a much smaller squad, comprising players with a shared hunger and a sense of team spirit that has, this season, been glaringly absent. If some rumours are to be believed, a lack of commitment from some players has combined to disastrous effect with a lack of confidence in other. A fundamental rebuild will, then, be essential. Not just in personnel, but in what motivates them. In that, there is a lot to learn from the season now ended. 

All seasons can seem overly long by May, but for us Chelsea fans, 2022-23 has felt endless. A touchline mini-fracas between Thomas Tuchel and Antonio Conte, when Spurs manager, now seems distant. As does the World Cup, with all of the culture war brouhaha it engendered. Another new era at Chelsea awaits, but fans used to trophies will have to wait longer before seeing another open-top bus parade on the Fulham Road. But it’s not a lost cause: Erik ten Hag effectively rebuilt Manchester United in a season, following a similar period of managerial turmoil. Mikel Arteta took Arsenal to almost the Premier League title this term, despite a particularly rocky start to his time as their manager. As long as Pochettino is allowed to get on with his work, and expectations are managed accordingly, who knows where Chelsea could end up?

While he is, though, something of a compromise, his appointment at the third time of asking is more of a marriage of convenience. “Everything at Chelsea fits,” wrote Spanish football expert Guillem Balague when Pochettino emerged as the most likely candidate for the job. “It is a young squad, a thriving academy coupled with a desire from the owners to bring youth through, a philosophy that is aggressive and dynamic with high pressure and loads of energy.”

Pochettino has also been out of a job for almost a year, since parting company with Paris Saint-Germain, evidently taking his time to find the right project. “He has taken a good look at himself and what he did wrong at the French club, what he could have done better and how he can avoid making similar mistakes at Chelsea,” Balague added. “He needs to have the energy to be able to mould players, know that the players are listening to him and have the authority to ensure that this is happening.”

He will need a degree of autonomy rarely granted Chelsea managers in the modern era. Fixing Chelsea will not be an overnight job. Patience - the sport’s most precious commodity - has never been abundant at this football club. There’s no suggestion that the cycle is about to be broken by Pochettino’s appointment, but with no European football next season and a gentler fixture list, he will have a bit more time and space to craft the squad in the way that he wants to. How long he gets to restore incoming traffic to the Stamford Bridge trophy room remains to be seen.

At the end of the day, no one knows. Day One of a new coach’s tenure always brims with hope, expectation and optimism. Until it goes wrong. That’s been the case with Chelsea forever (with, perhaps, the one exception of Rafa Benitez, who trolled everyone by winning the Europa League as interim head coach, despite being regarded as an inflammatory appointment). Pochettino does have a record of playing good football, at Espanyol, Southampton, Tottenham and PSG, and while he is certainly not held in the same regard as, say, a Guardiola, he has at least managed well with what he’s had at his disposal. Even Chelsea’s most jaded fans should remember that he came close to winning the Premier League twice - in 2016 and 2017 - with Spurs. Which makes you wonder what he would be capable of in SW6, assuming he can sort out the mess he’s inheriting. He is, to cite Balague, a “hungry manager” after a year away from day-to-day management. Let’s hope that hunger pays off.

Dreams can come true - it’s just that this one is a fever dream

I have only once seen Real Madrid play in the flesh, and that was when a business associate took me to the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium some years ago for a home fixture against Getafe. It was a new football experience for me: kick-off at 9pm on a Sunday evening followed - as is the local custom - by dinner in a highly agreeable meal nearby (which meant not getting back to my hotel until almost 1am - perfect, then, for a critical meeting at 8am later that morning...). The football was average, but the atmosphere inside that awe-inspiring colosseum was electric.

Contrast that, then, with the atmosphere at Stamford Bridge around 5pm last Saturday, and what that means for mood around the ground tonight as Chelsea face Real in the second leg of their Champions League quarter final. Somehow, I don’t expect my second experience of seeing the serial European champions for a second time will match my first.

In fact, tonight promises to be a somewhat surreal episode in the fever dream that Chelsea’s season has been from the off. No one, not even the most rosy-cheeked optimist, is giving Frank Lampard’s team a hope in Hell of overturning Madrid’s 2-0 advantage from last week’s first leg. And with tickets at over £70 a pop, I’m even struggling to justify the “but it’s Real Madrid…” reasoning for seeing los blancos in the flesh against Chelsea in their current state. However, a lifelong fan does what a lifelong fan does.

Even by this season’s depths, Saturday’s defeat to an in-form Brighton at Stamford Bridge was a new low, and compounded by being Lampard’s first game in charge in front of the fans he played so brilliantly for over 13 years. The trouble is, on the evidence he’s presented over three games as interim manager, his appointment was purely a PR move by Todd Boehly and his co-owners. And even that looked like it had backfired when the American was seen remonstrating with fans in the tier above his executive box on Saturday.

Yesterday it emerged that an apparently excised Boehly followed his impromptu fan chat by marching from the West Stand across the vacated pitch to the home dressing room in the East Stand, telling the players that the club’s season has been “embarrassing”, and that the board expected better of a squad that has been added to with a £600 million spend during the two transfer windows that the Boehly-Clearlake Capital consortium has been in charge. Rumour has it that one particular player - thought to be Raheem Sterling - was made to feel particularly uncomfortable, given the princely sum that lured him from Manchester City last summer, for limited return since. However, to single out one player would be grossly unfair, given how awful almost all 16 members of the squad involved in Saturday’s game performed.

No doubt Boehly was trying his best to motivate the squad ahead of tonight’s game, with the Champions League now Chelsea’s only prospect for silverware this season, not to mention the only route back into Europe next term. It was reported that Boehly and his fellow board members, Behdad Eghbali and Hansjörg Wyss, spent about an hour in the dressing room, with one eye witness describing the scene as “weird”.

Goalkeeper Kepa Arrizabalaga, appointed Chelsea’s umpteenth captain of the season for the day on Saturday, downplayed the Boehly intervention, saying that it was “normal” for the American to visit the players after games. Lampard himself continued to apply his exemplary political skills during his pre-match press conference yesterday. “When an owner is invested in the team and wants to help and improve, it’s their prerogative to have the input they want,” adding that “past owners” - by which he clearly meant Roman Abramovich - weren’t always present in the dressing room. When the Russian did, it was either to celebrate a trophy, or to be a harbinger of doom for the current manager. “[Owners in the dressing room] is not a bad thing in terms of the identity of the club and where you want to get to,” he told journalists. “There is no problem with it. I had my things to say after the game. If the owner comes in and wants to be positive and speak to the players, then I think it is his part to do that.”

Much of the fanbase, however, pins the blame on Boehly for the mess Chelsea are in, with the £4.25 billion takeover - which did save the club after Abramovich had been forced to sell up - followed by the eye-watering outlay that brought in a phalanx of new players like Sterling, Enzo Fernandez, Mykhailo Mudryk and the loanee João Félix. In of themselves, exciting players, but injected into a squad with seemingly no plan or strategy for playing them. Thus, Graham Potter found to his cost that he was unable to get the best out of his expensive new charges, while still being saddled with wantaway deadweights like Hakim Zyech and Christian Pulisic (whom, inexplicably, he both continued to play). Lampard has now inherited the problem. Not only that but, in his own words, players he considers unfit, with some appearing unable (or unprepared) to carry out basic running at opponents.

All, then, is not happy in the Chelsea camp. Some fans will sympathise with Lampard, even if they’re not entirely convinced he's going to be able to restore any dignity to the remainder of the men’s team’s season (compare that with Emma Hayes’ Chelsea Women, who on Sunday booked themselves a place in their third consecutive FA Cup Final). However, Lampard does not have unanimous support: it is understood that in Boehly’s heated exchange on Saturday, sharp comments were made to him about Lampard’s interim appointment. You might think that to be an act of heresy, but such is the sulphurous mood at the club, that the side was booed off after the Brighton match, despite being the homecoming of “Super Frank”.

“With regard to the ownership and fans, passion goes both ways,” Lampard said yesterday. “The fans show passion and I don’t think the owners or anybody who comes to Chelsea can expect anything else. We have been fortunate enough that the club has been successful over the last 20 years or so. That means you want more of it.” Ever the diplomat, he continued: “The word passion is coming from both sides. These are passionate owners who want to bring a real vision to the club and we are probably the early stage of the process in those terms. We can all be passionate together and work in the same direction.”

The trouble is, there’s scant evidence of that on the pitch. Indeed, an impromptu team meeting led by Arrizabalaga in front of his own defensive area mid-game suggested that the players were starting to make it up for themselves. Lampard, you’d have hoped, should have been able to get this group of misfits playing for the shirt he graced as part of a team of serial winners. On Saturday, only Conor Gallagher and, to some extent, Mudryk, demonstrated any passion. Others, including the dependable wingbacks Reece James and Ben Chilwell looked off their game, possibly embarrassed by what and whom they were working amongst. 

There were too many other lows on Saturday to list here, though the ignominy of Sterling getting booed off stands out. Imagine that, happening to an English player and one of national distinction. But given that Sterling has apparently cut an isolated figure around the training ground, and is believed to have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the club (despite it paying him north of £300,000 a week), it could be said that he has become indicative of the toxicity at Chelsea, as they spiral deeper into the lower half of the Premier League.

Meanwhile, the process to appoint a permanent manager continues. Luis Enrique has already been interviewed, Mauricio Pochettino and relatively unknown Portuguese coach Ruben Amorim also remain under consideration, with Julian Nagelsmann looking increasingly the favourite (with members of the Chelsea board reportedly warming to him having initially been indifferent). However, the challenge for whoever gets the gig is that, on current evidence, Chelsea look unmanageable. To confound things further, Financial Fair Play considerations could leave the successful candidate with a squad drastically depleted by an end-of-season fire sale. Barely a day goes by without another name being added to the list of assets to be stripped. While the eBay catalogue of players many fans would readily eject writes itself (Zyech, Pulisic, Chalobah, Loftus-Cheek, Cucurella, Koulibaly and Sterling, at least), others might be more painful to part company with, most notably Academy graduates Mason Mount, Conor Gallagher and the highly rated young defender Levi Colwill, who could all leverage decent returns. Plus, to add to the new manager’s headaches, Romalu Lukaku will return to his parent club after Inter Milan signalled that they would not be renewing his loan deal, meaning a tricky ego will need reintegrating into a fractured side, despite being one criminally bereft of a nailed-on striker.

Even before the Boehly-Clearlake consortium arrived on the scene, Chelsea suffered from a bloated squad, only lightly offset by myriad loan placements. With a squad of 32 players today, including those acquired over the summer and January windows, Potter and now Lampard have had a near-impossible task keeping everyone happy. There have even been reports of not enough space in the changing room for everyone. More seriously, a working group that big presents challenges for the coaching staff at Cobham, let alone what Lampard must have to do to pick his best 11. On top of that, the new ownership brought with it a number of behind the scenes changes to technical and medical staff, which may have been reflected by some signs of player dissatisfaction spilling into matchdays.

‘Chelsea Twitter’ has been an unpleasant place for most of this season, where even the anonymous keyboard warriors - who’ve probably never set foot in SW6 - have whipped up dissent towards even favourite sons like Mount and Chilwell. The #PotterOut fraternity remained largely online until the crowd became noticeably more muted at Stamford Bridge itself, before becoming openly hostile towards the manager. By the time he was fired last month, Potter had largely lost the broad support, which forced the Chelsea board to act. But, by Saturday evening, after Chelsea’s third defeat in a row under Lampard, even the unthinkable of arguably the club’s greatest midfielder getting stick, was audible. 

The conclusion, then, is that Season 22-23 is lost. Lampard’s totemic figure notwithstanding, Potter could have been replaced by a house brick for the remaining games this term, and the dysfunction would probably be just as bad. Whoever gets to pick up the mess for next season will have a mountain to climb. He will have to rebuild a fractured squad, ensuring that some of the pricier additions who survive the summer cull are in the right frame of mind to compete for just the Premier League, the FA Cup and the League Cup. 

As many a wag has commented, there’s not a manager in the world who can come in and rescue this season for Chelsea. It remains to be seen whether Nagelsmann, Enrique or any of the others on the shortlist can quickly restore Chelsea to the European elite that, under Abramovich, London’s serial under-achievers became a part of. 

Perhaps, though, a fallow season or two is just what the club needs. That’s unless there’s an exceedingly unlikely miracle tonight in West London. Followed by another next month. And another, in Istanbul in June.

Just when you think you've figured football out...

“Football,” Danny Baker first observed back in the 1990s, “is chaos”. It's a theme he regularly returns to in his frequent rants on Twitter, usually of an evening while a so-called ‘elite’ fixture is taking place on television. The thinking is that the vast array of punditry deployed by the media suggests that there is something ‘scientific’ about the beautiful game, other worldly and therefore self-considered to be beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. This, Baker contests, is bogus.

I raise this largely as a result of the chaos at Chelsea this season. Graham Potter, who replaced the fired Thomas Tuchel, who replaced the fired Frank Lampard, has just been replaced on an interim basis by...Frank Lampard. “It is totally in keeping with the current chaos [that word again] at Chelsea under co-controlling owners Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali and the Clearlake group,” the BBC’s chief football writer Phil McNulty wrote on the corporation’s website, highlighting how, since the takeover last summer, the new owners had pumped in £600 million to buy new players, sacked Tuchel and then Potter after just 31 games in charge. “But the return of Lampard might just be the most eyebrow-raising development of the lot,” he added.

We like to think there’s logic going on at our football clubs. We expect it to be an exact science because coaching and training is governed by xG statistics and computer modelling. Clubs employ technical directors and sporting directors (I still don’t quite know the difference) on top of ‘head coaches’ (never, these days, simply “manager”) amongst the phalanx of specialists keeping the complex Formula 1 car that is a top football team on the track. Everything is therefore planned, programmed and finely tuned to the nth degree. It’s not. Because then you send your team out, and Kai Havertz is selected to lead the line.

On Tuesday night, Chelsea’s first interim coach of the week, Bruno Saltor (who’d never before picked a team at this level) put out more or less the same side that had lost so egregiously to Aston Villa three evenings previously, leading to Potter’s dismissal. Against Liverpool, it was largely painting by numbers to the untrained eye, and probably to more informed observers, too. It was also an abject reminder of just how both Chelsea and their opponents on the night have fallen this season. “Mid-table mediocrity,” one match report concluded. “Two bald men fighting over a comb,” was my erudite contribution.

Unbeknownst to most of us at Stamford Bridge until newspapers ran the picture you see at the top of this post, Lampard was observing from an executive box, the guest of Laurence Stewart and Paul Winstanley, Chelsea’s two sporting directors. This quickly turned into the suggestion that the 44-year-old could be on his way back, though in what capacity wasn’t known. At the same time, the former Spain coach Luis Enrique was said to have flown in to London for talks with the club about the vacant manager’s position, while the newly available former Bayern Munich boss Julian Nagelsmann was also under consideration, along with a fairly predictable list of runners and riders drawn from the European leagues.

At some point on Wednesday it emerged that Lampard was being considered as an interim solution, a stopgap to the end of the season, enabling the club to take until then to consider candidates for the full-time job with, perhaps, more care than that they applied after Tuchel’s abrupt exit. With a two-leg Champions League quarter-final against Real Madrid (under Lampard’s old boss Carlo Ancelotti) to play, starting next week, and some pride to be restored in the Premier League, putting Chelsea’s record goalscorer back in charge would at least be good PR. By Wednesday evening, the Lampard banner, unfurled in the Matthew Harding Lower section before kickoffs during his previous spell, was being retrieved from the back of whichever cupboard it had been stashed away in when its subject was fired - apparently with deep regret - by Roman Abramovich in January 2021.

“It’s a pretty easy decision for me,” said Lampard 26 months later, at a press conference yesterday. “This is my club. I have a lot of emotions and feelings. I’ve come with a belief I can come and help the cause until the end of the season. I’ll give my utmost to give the fans what they want until the end of the season. There’s a lot of talent in the squad. I’m excited to work with that talent and to help them.”

We shall see. The unavoidable elephant in the room here is that Lampard was sacked by Ambramovich on the back of Chelsea taking a southerly trajectory in the Premier League, followed by his dismissal two years later from Everton, with the Merseysiders in even greater peril, recording nine defeats in 12 league games to leave them in relegation territory. In both situations, there were mitigations. But even for this lifelong Chelsea fan, all romanticism aside, you hope this latest temporary arrangement doesn’t end in tears, for a second time.

Appointing club legends as managers is fraught with peril. It’s why I hope that Gianfranco Zola never comes back to Chelsea as head coach. He is rightly held in such high regard, you’d hate that to be jeopardised. Lampard’s first spell in charge carried the same risk, which eventually came to fruition. You can only hope that, in this limited new arrangement, he knows what he’s taking on.

“Of course, it was a surprise in terms of you never know a decision the club will make,” he said yesterday when asked about coming back. “There’s been lots of change in the Premier League this year. I’ve been particularly enjoying my period at home - it’s one of those where you can really throw yourself into your family, your wife and children, things you tend to put to one side when you’re working.” He stressed that Winstanley and Stewart put forward a specific proposition: “It wasn’t simple, because you have to take a lot into account in your heart and your heart,” Lampard explained, adding, knowingly, ”but this is Chelsea”.

So what is the task at hand? After taking Chelsea to Molineux on Saturday for a Premier League fixture with Wolves, they fly to the Spanish capital for that first leg with Real Madrid, a team which ruthlessly buried Barcelona 4-1 in their Copa del Rey ‘El Clásico’ on Wednesday evening. In any other season, an encounter with Madrid would be what the modern era Chelsea does well. But in this season, Lampard’s task - getting a bloated, lop-sided squad of over-priced players to gel in a way they haven’t hitherto - seems impossible.

There is, though, some precedent. In March 2012 Roberto Di Matteo replaced the failed experiment that was André Villas-Boas, immediately improving form to deliver credible wins in the Premier League and, more significantly, progress in the Champions League, beating Barcelona in a semi-final to take on - and beat - Bayern Munich in the final. “Roberto did an incredible job to stay on,” Lampard ruminated yesterday, but in typically diffident footballer style, measured that by adding “but that’s a different time in the club’s history. What is important to me is to park it to one side and get on the job.”

Lampard has always stood out as an intelligent, personable bloke. As a player, he was always regarded as a studious one, not least because his West Ham coach father Frank Sr drilled footballing discipline into him with hothousing vigour. The same concerns Chelsea fans had when he was originally appointed as manager of the club he spent 13 years at as a player will creep back this time, but if nothing else, this unexpected coda to his two-and-a-half-spell as head coach is a masterstroke of fanbase appeasement.

Picture: Chelsea FC

“We are delighted to welcome Frank back to Stamford Bridge,” said co-controlling owners Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali in a statement. “Frank is a Premier League Hall of Famer and a legend at this club,” it continued by way of explaining the thinking behind the appointment. “As we continue our thorough and exhaustive process for a permanent head coach, we want to provide the club and our fans with a clear and stable plan for the remainder of the season. We want to give ourselves every chance of success and Frank has all of the characteristics and qualities we need to drive us to the finish line.”

Perhaps, then, it is another experiment. Lampard won’t necessarily provide continuity, but may at least ease the sulphurous atmosphere that engulfed Stamford Bridge as Graham Potter’s hapless reign faltered ever further. In his press conference he made clear his deep and undeniable knowledge of the club, the staff at the Cobham training ground and, most importantly, many of the current players. For those acquired since his departure, they will be fully aware of Lampard’s high esteem at the club they’ve joined as well as his standing within the game at large. That alone might pay dividends, given that Chelsea’s expensively assembled squad has at times recently looked like a group of talented individuals without any semblance of unity.

Stamford Bridge, specifically, has long been trolled by visiting fans for a perceived lack of energy amongst the support. “Is this a library?” they bate us with. That has certainly been the case of late. On social media alone, Lampard’s return has certainly put smiles back on faces but if he doesn’t get a grip on team cohesion and confidence, and instil tactical thinking that seemed to desert him at Everton, those smiles might soon disappear. Chelsea’s season has already been written off, barring unlikely progression in the Champions League, but as the latest of Chelsea’s many interim managers - Di Matteo, Hiddink, Benitez et al - Lampard has history to live up to. No pressure, then.

End of the line

If ever there was an afternoon at Stamford Bridge when I needed a pick-me-up, it was Saturday. The day before I was made redundant, and with football - to evoke Karl Marx - one of my go-to opiates, I was hoping that Chelsea would deliver. I was clearly to be disappointed. 24 hours later, Chelsea head coach Graham Potter joined me amongst the unemployed (although, it should be noted, with considerably better compensation).

Credit where it’s due, Aston Villa were just more organised, more committed and better drilled. Not for the first time this season with visitors to the Bridge, they were an opponent who didn’t create many chances, but when they did, took them well, with excellent goals from Ollie Watkins and John McGinn. Potter, in his post-match comments, would bemoan Chelsea’s better possession stats, but stats don’t win games. Goals do. 

On Saturday, as it has been for countless Saturdays this season, not to mention some Sundays, the occasional Wednesday and one obscure Friday, it was hard to see where Chelsea’s goals would come from. With Reece James, arguably Europe’s best right wingback, consigned to central defence, and Ruben Loftus-Cheek - a pedestrian midfielder at best - unable to create any width, Chelsea’s notoriously anaemic attack had little supply. On the left, Ben Chilwell, James’ opposite number and just as impactful, was forced into spending more time defending that attacking. It all pointed to the same thing: Chelsea hadn’t been set up right.

Graham Potter never felt right as a Chelsea manager, but fans were prepared to give him a chance, stoically supporting the rare opportunity of an Englishman in the dugout. But before our eyes, the fanbase began to erode, and the #potterout tweets proliferated. On Saturday, the 50% of supporters yet to turn on him, did. The atmosphere at full time, with large swathes of empty seats visible, was notably sulphurous. Last night’s club statement was inevitable. 

Unlike many, however, I held back from the Graham Potter pile-on that built up in the wake of his appointment after Thomas Tuchel was abruptly dismissed in September. Todd Boehly and his co-owners had signalled that their £4.25 billion takeover would herald a period of stability, a commodity missing during the turbulent Roman Abramovich era, when managers came and went like trains at Clapham Junction. Potter had never achieved anything at a so-called ‘elite’ club, but he’d built Brighton & Hove Albion into a decent side and on relatively meagre means, too. From one angle, however, he looked like the good soldier, a nice bloke who would drive the new owners’ long-term “project”, whatever that was. 

The conclusion now is that long-term thinking is fairly pointless in the Premier League, when judgement is meted out on day-to-day results. Even if Boehly and co-controlling owner Behdad Eghbali were prepared to stick with the Englishman, the noise around him wouldn’t go away.  In the end, sporting directors Paul Winstanley and Lawrence Stewart pushed for an immediate change and got it.

In fairness, the decision put Potter out of his misery. In February he spoke about the unforgivable abuse his family had received in the wake of Chelsea’s poor performances - many of which weren’t his fault as injuries began to rack up just as a new squad, which hadn’t had the benefit of a proper pre-season, toiled. In further mitigation, the spending spree of close to £600 million that the Boehly-Clearlake Capital went on in two transfer windows, bloated the squad with more expensive players than even José Mourinho would have known what to do with, adding unbelievable pressure to Potter who found himself charting new and decidedly richer professional waters.

“You have to accept that when the results are what they are, you accept criticism and it should come,” Potter reflected in February. “But that isn’t to say it’s easy at all. Your family life suffers, your mental heath suffers, and your personality suffers. It’s hard.” That may have won him some deserved sympathy, but the results continued to be poor. “Clearly it is a process of how to get our message across better. How can we structure things in a way to help the players? Because that is what we are here for. When results aren’t good, you have to accept that we haven’t done it well enough.”

In every post-match interview and pre-match press conference, Potter would pursue the same passive defence: “I feel the support of the players, I feel the support of everyone here,” he said after being beaten 2-0 by a managerless Tottenham (Antonio Conte being absent due to gallbladder surgery). “I understand the frustrations externally but among the players it is a desire for us all to do better and that is the pleasing thing. The results haven’t been good but we are still there fighting for each other.”

If I was writing his lines, as a PR pro, I’d probably be having him say the same thing. The reality, however, on the pitch was a whole lot different. Even if the intent was there, the execution wasn’t. Potter’s 31 games in charge - which included 11 defeats, 12 wins and eight draws - resulted in Chelsea’s worst managerial record in the Premier League era, which began with a nominal revival in the early 1990s as the late Matthew Harding’s investments brought a touch of glamour to the club, including a new stand, and players like Ruud Gullit, Gianluca Vialli and Gianfranco Zola.

But nothing is ever simple at Chelsea. BT Sport’s brilliant recent documentary Pound Land - The Battle Of The Bridge recounted the fractious rivalry between Harding and chairman Ken Bates who, himself, had led a valiant effort to save Stamford Bridge from being turned into flats. Bates had bought the club at the end of an equally turbulent period, when the club faced bankruptcy as a result of over-extending itself by building the Bridge’s East Stand (where I’ve sat for the last 20-plus years) on the back of the club’s successes in the early 1970s. The late ’70s and much of the ’80s were marked by relegations, financial ruin and the scourge of hooliganism. 

The arrival of ‘name’ players in the 1990s commenced a period of increasing success that ultimately led to Roman Abramovich buying the club in 2003, and leading to 20 titles over the course of his 19 years’ ownership. We had literally never had it so good. But if the near-bankruptcy of the ’70s, and the fight to keep Chelsea at Stamford Bridge were existential threats, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year genuinely took the club to the abyss. The Government’s sanctioning of Abramovich forced the sale that brought the Boehly-Clearlake consortium to the rescue. 

The last ten months since the takeover must be put into some context. That Potter leaves Chelsea with such a disappointing record is unfortunate, but let’s face it - at least he had a Chelsea to be fired from. 

That notwithstanding, however, questions should quite rightly be asked about the club strategy since the takeover, particularly of the £600 million in player acquisitions that seemed more scattergun than purposeful, and whether Potter was ever the right manager to take charge of them. 

“We have the highest degree of respect for Graham as a coach and as a person,” Boehly and Eghbali said in a statement last night. ”He has always conducted himself with professionalism and integrity and we are all disappointed in this outcome.“ As they should be.

Of course, no one will ever know whether Thomas Tuchel, whose firing remains shrouded in suggestions of backroom disagreements (he wasn’t exactly a compliant employee at Paris Saint-Germain…) would have fared better, but given what he delivered since replacing Frank Lampard in January 2021, taking the team on to win the Champions League itself, makes one wonder whether his departure was really for the best. And if it was, why was Potter, a manager seen as the driver of a decent Ford Focus, given the keys to a Bugatti Veyron Super Sport like Chelsea? Potter will have his reasons for his team selections, but for the paying fans, they’ve often been hard to fathom. And if they’re hard for the crowd to comprehend, it’s likely that they’d be difficult for the players too. 

Chelsea’s next manager will have his work cut out. He’ll be inheriting a lop-sided squad that should be challenging for titles but, barring an incomprehensible miracle in Europe, will next season be focused solely on domestic silverware. A much-needed clear-out this summer, partly to balance the books for Financial Fair Play, might allow that new head coach to start from scratch, with a proper pre-season and a blueprint of how to go about things. In some respects, that clear-out began last night, with Graham Potter’s departure. The onus is on Boehly and Eghbali to choose his successor with a little more understanding of the task he’ll have to deliver on.

Forget Blue Monday, it’s Blue Sunday I’m worrying about

© Simon Poulter 2023

The ascent to the seat I’ve occupied at Stamford Bridge for 26 years is an arduous one, but the view is worth it once you get up there. The decision I made in 1997 with a mate of mine to take out season tickets in the East Stand Upper section, just below the main commentary box, was a sound one. Like the media who sit a few rows behind us, we have the perfect vantage point, sitting just to one side of the centre line. 

The one downside - well, increasing downside - is that it requires a lung-busting hike up several knee replacement-inducing sets of stairs dating back to the late 1970s when the East Stand was built. It is now the oldest stand in the stadium, and constructed at tremendous cost to the pre-Abramovich (and pre-Ken Bates) Chelsea Football Club, which was almost bankrupted by the venture. However, I’m not as young as I was in 1997. But there is, still, a latent desire to make that climb “every other Saturday” (or whenever the Premier League and its television partners deem games should be played). Right now, though, it feels like some form of ritualised torture.

Chelsea are in crisis. There is no other way of looking at it. Perhaps the mist of optimism veiled the view in my last post on the club’s fortunes, but since then, I’ve witnessed back-to-back defeats to Manchester City and the God-awful nightmare that was last Thursday’s away fixture to Fulham (in which loanee João Félix made a genuinely refreshing debut, only to then get red carded, and fellow loan player Denis Zaharia - one of the other rare bright spots in the squad - withdrew through injury. Chelsea lost 2-1 to the noisy neighbours).

Picture: Chelsea FC

I’ve never been one to join sack-the-manager pile-ons, especially as high head coach turnover at this football club has only ever been an irritating carrot-and-stick incentive to successors, but you have to question whether Graham Potter is, now, the man to dig Chelsea out of the hole they’re in. It’s not, though, his fault. The trouble is, it rarely is the manager’s. 

For too long, Chelsea bosses have borne the brunt for players with too much power, too much money and too little incentive to produce their best for the team. Potter, though, is yet to display the ability, charisma and sheer strength of personality to turn this predicament around. Something needs to happen to move Chelsea out of the mid-table moribundity they’re settling into, despite the vast outlay by the club’s new owners since taking over last summer.

On that front, clearly, Potter cannot be blamed for players like Kalidou Koulibaly and Marc Cucurella being hopelessly at the wrong club (even if the latter played for Potter at Brighton). Nor can he be blamed for the serial underperformer that is Hakim Zyech, or the enigma that is Kai Havertz, who has now laboured for too long leading the line. It wasn’t Potter, either, who bought Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, when anyone else would have steered well clear of the Gabonese skipper, ingloriously ejected by an Arsenal at a time when they could least afford to lose him, but clearly had to. 

Picture: Chelsea FC

What, too, has Jorginho really contributed to the midfield, in seasons-numerous? Nowhere near his reputation, that’s for sure. And Kepa, bought for a £72 million record goalkeeping transfer fee, then usurped by Edouard Mendy because of poor performance, to be restored to the team only to regress back into the indifferent form. And, lastly, there is dear old César Azpilicueta, the club captain. He tries his best, but at 33, has legs that just can’t keep up. Yes, it’s the manager’s job to get the best out of these players, but you’d have to argue that even a coach as sainted as Pep Guardiola can’t work miracles.

The Fulham game highlighted a malaise that has beset Chelsea, in one form or another, for some time: spirit. On paper, the club isn’t bereft of talent but it does lack leadership. That’s not just down to Azpiliqueta or the bench, but highly rewarded players who, when their backs are up against the wall, apply some gumption. Easy to say, I know, but it seems equally easy to just not put in a shift, drive home to that mansion in Oxshott in the custom-fit 150-grand G-Wagon, and fire up a cigar with that week’s wad of notes.

According to the Daily Telegraph, however, change is coming. It may not be immediate, but the Todd Boehly-Clearlake Capital consortium that owns Chelsea is planning to drain the swamp, and clear out players who’ve been allowed to build up in the squad over successive transfer windows, but not perform. Hopefully, even, one or two known to have undermined management authority. 

Against the prevailing mood from the terraces, Potter’s job is safe for now (and it was noted that some fans outside Craven Cottage on Thursday night were making it plain that the squad is the problem, not the head coach). I’m still not 100% convinced that Potter is the man for the job, but in fairness, he may not have been given a chance - even this far into the season. Injuries, too, have been punishing - something no manager can mitigate, whatever his strategic and tactical tools. 

A squad refresh could certainly help, with the Telegraph suggesting that a new wage structure might be introduced to reset an inconsistent spend during the Abramovich era. The thinking might be to put players on more or less the same wages for their age and experience, and build new and lucrative causes into their bonus agreements for meeting individual and team objectives. An interesting development if so.

That, though, is for the future. Potter’s problem, however, is here and now. The mood tomorrow afternoon at Stamford Bridge for the fixture against Crystal Palace is likely to be sulphurous. And if it isn’t, it will still be a struggle to get a raise out of even the most boisterous mobs of the Matthew Harding end. 

Potter needs results to change the mood, which makes the Palace game a must-win. The numbers don’t lie - Chelsea are currently in their worst run of form since 1996 and lie 10th in the Premier League, well off the pace for Champions League requalification. Exits in both the FA and League cups to Manchester City means that their only hope of silverware this season is the Champions League itself, which seems only a distant prospect to the most optimistic of supporters.

With the transfer window still open, there is talk of yet more signings to address the injury crisis, with PSV Eindhoven’s Noni Madueke along with Borussia Monchengladbach’s Marcus Thuram being considered to inject some urgency into an otherwise anaemic Chelsea attack, one in which even the lively Mason Mount has looked lethargic. But with each new name linked to the club, the belief is that it is committing the same mistakes they’ve made in successive seasons - buying more players without a plan of what they can do and where they will fit. 

As I wrote in my last post on this subject, last summer’s splurge on £170 million-worth of defenders has so far looked downright foolish, when considering the performances of Cucurella and Koulibaly, and the long-term injury of Wes Fofana, who barely played for the club before heading to the treatment centre.

Picture: Chelsea FC

For Potter, even the most tribal, antagonistic observer of football must show some sympathy. It’s not, though, what he wants: “I can’t sit here and say that things are improving when the results are like they are,” he said during his press conference yesterday. “We do know more about the club, more about the players, a lot more about what we need to get the club back to where it could be, where it should be. But at the moment, it’s not there. Lots of things have happened over a period of time that manifests itself into the situation. We have to make sure we act well going forward, but at the moment it’s tough to see any light, it’s tough to see any green shoots because we’re still suffering from defeats.”

The injuries - both existing and new - have felt like the feet being dragged from beneath him, especially the loss of Reece James on his return to the first team against Nottingham Forest. “It’s almost like, ‘Back to the drawing board’,” Potter said of all the injuries that continue to rack up. “It felt like taking one step, like you’re making progress watching João Félix, then all of a sudden, whoosh, he’s not here for three matches. That’s where we’ve been.”

The pressure on Potter for tomorrow’s Palace game is palpable, but then his opposite number, Patrick Viera, is looking at a run of four defeats out of five. A win over could move them level with Chelsea on points. Even if Potter’s job is not immediately at stake, psychologically, a lot is. One win from eight for a club with Chelsea’s most recent history is not only bad, it’s hard to actually remember when it was last quite so bad.

A postscript to this is that the day after tomorrow is ‘Blue Monday’, so named as it sits furthest between paydays, post-Christmas credit card statements are arriving and (of particular pain for me), HMRC self-assessment tax bills are due. On top of that, Britain seems to be stuck in a permanent weather pattern of wind and rain. T-Bone Walker might have sung “They call it Stormy Monday, but Tuesday is just as bad“, but potentially, Sunday could be much, much worse.

A gentleman to the end

I can’t remember the exact date, but it was in the early summer of 1996 that I was passing through the 8th floor of the Philips offices in Croydon when I heard, from within a desk cubicle, “Fuck me! They’ve signed Vialli!”. A marketing manager and fellow Chelsea fan had just received a text message telling him that Gianluca Vialli - who had, just days before, been the Champions League-winning captain of Juventus - had signed for Chelsea on a free transfer. 

It’s hard to describe, even now, how Earth shattering this news was. Even in 1996, with Manchester United in the middle of their imperious domination of English football, it was unusual for a proper European superstar to join a Premier League club, let alone a player who had just won the European Cup as captain of ‘The Old Lady’ of Turin. And now he was joining an apparently underwhelming club that hadn’t won a major trophy in 26 years. 

Vialli’s arrival at Chelsea can be seen as significant in the transformation of English football. It is inseparable from the rise of the Premier League as the world’s most lucrative football competition, attracting stellar talent and broadcasters willing to pay top dollar to watch them. A month or so before Vialli joined the club it had appointed Ruud Gullit as, initially, player-manager. The Dutchman was, himself, a glamorous, ‘sexy’ European idol whose own move to Chelsea - even long after his playing usefulness had evaporated - brought stardust to West London.

Vialli was Gullit’s first, and unlikely, signing. But even with the striker being presented to the press holding a Chelsea shirt, it was hard at first for fans to grasp the concept of such a European football giant in their midst. Gullit, who’d won three Serie A titles and two European Cups with AC Milan, had been brought to Chelsea by Glenn Hoddle the year before, at the start of the club’s change in fortunes. It still took some getting used to the idea of a Ballon d’Or and a two-time World Soccer Player Of The Year winner on the club’s books. The acquisition of ‘name’ players like Mark Hughes suggested that Chelsea were emerging from near calamitous times in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the club yo-yo’d between the old First and Second Divisions, and even flirted with financial collapse. Its relative resurgence was being part-propelled by millionaire Matthew Harding who became a director in 1993. With Gullit replacing Hoddle, his Filofax of international connections soon brought in Vialli, followed by fellow Italians Gianfranco Zola and Roberto Di Matteo. Suddenly, Chelsea Football Club looked glamorous again, even if they hadn’t actually won anything.

Italian football was very much in vogue in 1996. Italia 90 had made us all fall in love with the country and its footballing culture, aided also by Channel 4’s Football Italia in 1992, presented by James Richardson. By 1996, those who knew their football, knew Gianluca Vialli. Those who knew their Serie A, knew what Vialli’s arrival at Chelsea meant. My Philips colleague’s expletive exclamation was entirely justified. This was on a par with, say George Clooney joining the cast of EastEnders.

Having just turned 32 when he signed for Chelsea, there were the inevitable sniffy comments from rival supporters that the apparently nouveau riche Chelsea had acquired Vialli on a free because he’d exceeded his usefulness in Italy. Not so. In his time as a player at the club, he went on to score 40 goals in 88 appearances. Two of those goals came in his first season: in January 1997 Chelsea faced Liverpool at home in the FA Cup fourth round. 2-0 down at half time, Hughes and Zola clawed back a goal each early in the second half, even with Chelsea having lost defender Scott Minto to a red card. Chelsea’s comeback was completed by goals from Vialli in the 63rd and 76th minutes. His legendary status at the club was secured within his first few months as a player. Chelsea would go on to win the FA Cup that season, with Di Matteo scoring his famous goal against Middleborough after just 42 seconds of play at Wembley. I was there, and just as Vialli’s arrival had been somewhat other-worldly, to see the club I’d supported since childhood winning one of the greatest trophies in sport, for the only time in my conscious lifetime, was another moment to bewilder. 

When Gullit was sacked in February 1998, Vialli followed the Dutchman’s earlier transition from player to player-manager and took over. His first game in charge was a League Cup semi-final against Arsenal, before which he gave each of his players a glass of champagne in the changing room. Chelsea went on to win 3-1, reversing Arsenal’s lead from the first leg. It’s a small piece of the Vialli legend, but a compelling snapshot of just why his death, announced yesterday, has brought a palpable pall over football, and the Chelsea community.

People talk lovingly about footballing greats when they die, but I’ve never heard of a player as loved or as revered as Vialli. I once let him pass me on the stairs leading down from the East Stand commentary box at Stamford Bridge and felt a genuine presence, even if he was wrapped up in an ostentatiously Italian scarf, coat and hat combination. I’m not easily starstruck (I’ve met plenty of musicians and actors in my career), but to even stand in the same space as Vialli was a ‘moment’, simply because of what he represented in his relatively brief time at Chelsea. 

While the sort of success that came in the Abramovich era was still somewhat beyond the club’s reach when Vialli was in charge, he still took them to the quarter-finals of their first ever Champions League run (which included a 3-1 victory over Barcelona) and another FA Cup trophy in 2000, beating Aston Villa. In total, he won five trophies with the club in less than three years, including the European Cup Winners’ Cup, making Vialli - at 33 - the youngest manager to win a major European trophy. The silverware alone, in my mind, qualifies  him still as one of the greatest figures to have ever played or worked for Chelsea.

In its obituary the club itself wrote: “As soon as he walked through the door at Stamford Bridge, when already a global football star, Luca declared his wish to become a Chelsea legend. It is a target he undoubtedly reached, revered for his work on the pitch and in the dugout during some of the most successful years in our history. Loved by fans, players and staff at Stamford Bridge, Luca will be sorely missed not just by the Chelsea community, but the entire footballing world, including in his native Italy, where he was such an iconic figure.”

These are the words you invariably read when a much loved figure in football passes on. But for me, at least, laden with poignancy. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine someone in the game to endear himself so profoundly to fans and those he worked with. Everyone seems to note how charming he was, funny and, despite his prodigious achievements in the game, even long before he came to SW6, lacking the rampaging ego so many big names in the sport seem to possess today. His likeability, amongst the Chelsea fanbase, was enhanced by his wholesale embrace of London and the sense of Italian style he brought to it. For years I’ve worn black V-neck sweaters purely because Vialli did.

Nothing at Chelsea lasts forever, and after indifferent performances early in the 2000-2001 season, leading to a strained relationship between Vialli and his players, the club sacked him. The consensus was that Chelsea had, with Gullit and then Vialli, tried and failed with two legends of the game as young player-managers. That said, the approach had still managed to net silverware that had proven elusive since the 1970s. Perhaps, too, in appointing Claudio Ranieri, the club had learned that a foreign perspective and a little Italian charm went a long way.

News that Vialli had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer first emerged in November 2018, but after 18 months of chemotherapy - and out of the spotlight - he was given the all-clear. Still, though, the Italian remained typically modest, telling a TV interviewer in his home country, with remarkable honesty: “I cannot fight with cancer because I would not be able to win this battle, it is a much stronger opponent than me. Cancer is an unwanted travel companion, but I can't help it.” Defiantly, though, he kept going. “I have to go ahead and travel with my head down, never giving up, hoping that one day this unwanted guest will get tired and leave peacefully for many years because there are still so many things I want to do in this life.” 

In 2019 Vialli joined his former Sampdoria strike partner Roberto Mancini in the Italian national set up. But at the end of last year the cancer returned, and he stepped down from his role with the Azzurri. Presciently, in March last year, he’d told a Netflix documentary: “I know that I probably will not die of old age, I hope to live as long as possible, but I feel much more fragile than before.”

Picture: Getty Images

Vialli handled his cancer journey with humility, even devoting a book to it - Goals: Inspirational Stories To Help Tackle Life’s Challenges, a compendium of stories examining the human spirit. Reading it again now, it reflects both his courage and his sense of humour. “Illness can teach a lot about who you are, and can push you to go beyond the superficial way in which we live,” he said at one point.

“I can‘t tell you how good a guy he was,” a visibly moved Graeme Souness told Sky Sports yesterday morning, minutes after the news of Vialli’s death had been announced. Like Mancini, the Scot had played with Vialli at Sampdoria. “Forget football for a minute, he was just a gorgeous soul. He was a truly nice human being,” Souness added. “I went to Italy when I was 31-years-old. He was 20 and he was just fabulous to be around. Such a fun loving guy, he was full of mischief. He was such a warm individual and a fabulous player.“

“I think it’s so typical of him that he kept [his cancer] very private, very personal and he took it on as I’d expect him to take it on,” Souness said. “It was his fight, wanted to deal with it himself, didn't want to burden other people with it.”

Like so many successful sportsmen and women, Luca Vialli was a serial winner. The sight of him celebrating Italy’s success over England in the Euro 2020 final at Wembley brought no pleasure to me as an English supporter, but still brought a smile to my face - a footballing hero revelling in victory. Of course, it’s a sight you see with any sporting endeavour reaching a conclusive outcome, but somehow, the fact that it was Vialli made it more enjoyable. Satisfying, even.

Apart from that fleeting encounter on the staircase at Stamford Bridge, I never met Gianluca Vialli. Why would I have done? When he came to Chelsea he was a near-mythical football God. In real terms he may not have spent all that long at the club, but his death has affected me more than I expected. He didn’t know me, and I didn’t know him, but I feel compelled to make the same statement as did Carlo Ancelotti, Vialli’s former Sampdoria teammate and another effortlessly cool Italian who held the title ‘Chelsea manager’: “Ciao amico mio”.

Gianluca Vialli - 1964-2023

Window of opportunity: time for Chelsea to put a turbulent August behind them

Picture: Chelsea FC

“It’s soft, soft, soft defending. What stops that? Pure mentality. You stop it with pure mentality, defending mentality so there is no superiority for the opponent. Just toughen up as a team.” So said Thomas Tuchel in the aftermath of Chelsea’s defeat on Tuesday night at Southampton, their second loss of this already five games-old Premier League season, which has left the club languishing mid-table. And, to be honest, he was right.

On Match Of The Day, Tuchel was equally forthright: “We lose concentration, we lose our plan and lose consistency, it is too easy to beat us. We need to have answers, we need to step up and play a level higher if needed. We struggled to do this.” Crucially, he added: “It is too easy to put us off balance, to beat us, to confuse us. It is too easy. It happened against Leeds. We need to understand why and find solutions.”

Well, solutions may have arrived. Last night’s closure of the summer transfer window ended a £255 million spree, the second highest spend ever by a European football club. Into the ranks have come Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Raheem Sterling, Kalidou Koulibaly, Marc Cucurella and Wesley Fofana, along with teenagers Carney Chukwuemeka and Cesare Casadei being added to academy director Neil Bath's next-generation vision.

When the Todd Boehly/Clearlake consortium took over Chelsea it promised a sizeable fund to plug gaps, especially in defensive capabilities following the departures of Antonio Rüdiger and Andreas Christensen. It would, of course, be ridiculously naive to expect the new blood to already be producing the goods, but - the Southampton performance notwithstanding - Koulibaly and Cucurella have looked lively (but clearly still gelling with their teammates) and Sterling's brace against Leicester and Chelsea’s only goal against Southampton hinted at the goal scoring prowess of which the 27-year-old is reknown. 

However, one swallow doesn't make a summer. Until yesterday’s signing of Aubameyang, the lack of a qualified No.9 finisher and indifferent performances from Chelsea's massed ranks of attacking midfielders meant that goals were in short supply from others, including the toiling Kai Havertz - played as a sort of 9 - or the patently frustrated Christian Pulisic. The 33-year-old Aubameyang will still have to demonstrate his worth in a position that has been checkered for Chelsea over the years (and is unlikely to play straight away for his new club after he was attacked with a hammer by a burglar at his Barcelona home earlier this week).

Critics will always round on the sums of money paid by a supposed championship contender to bolster their ranks, and in Chelsea’s case, it has always been so. Ever since Roman Abramovich commenced his extravagant outlay to turn the perennial under-achievers into London’s own Galacticos, the wisdom of football’s tribality has had it that the club has simply bought the five Premier League titles, five FA Cups, the Champions League (twice) and several more trophies, at a cost of 15 different managers in the 19-year Abramovich era. But at what cost? As a season ticket holder of many years standing, I’ve benefitted from all the glory, but can’t help feeling that Chelsea have also fuelled the inflationary player market. As we’ve seen again this summer, when Chelsea come knocking, a player’s value seems to go up by at least another £10 million. How else does the relatively untried 21-year-old Fofana move to Chelsea from Leicester for an eye-watering £70 million-plus add-ons?

Todd Boehly and Wes Fofana
Picture: Chelsea FC

Time will tell as to whether this summer’s intake will make a difference. The brief, at the end of last season, was that Chelsea need to close the 20-point gap on Liverpool and Manchester City. Five games in, that looks extremely unlikely. In mitigation, this has been a somewhat fraught summer for the club. 2021-22 ended with the existential threat of the club disappearing altogether, following the UK government sanctions on Abramovich forcing him to sell up. The Boehly-Clearlake takeover took an uneasily long time to close, which meant a frantic few weeks to reorganise everything from the club website to Stamford Bridge stadium staff, as well as start their summer transfer business. A short summer, with the new season starting even earlier due to UEFA’s ludicrous World Cup in Qatar, has added to the pressures on Tuchel to hit the ground running, with both new players and a squad featuring several players looking for a move away.

There is certainly substance to Tuchel’s comments about mentality. But while there have been myriad conditions mitigating the club this summer, none of the players at the club already or newly joined are under-rewarded. That, of course, is assuming that a modern Premier League player’s psychology is purely underpinned by their wage packets and what colour Lamborghini they want to buy next. Clearly, though, there have been some fragile egos at play. For example, it will be interesting to see how Hakim Zyech performs, now that he hasn’t returned to Ajax, or that Pulisic hasn’t found somewhere else to ply his alleged wingcraft. Marcus Alonso has, thankfully, finally been off-loaded to Barcelona as a makeweight in the Aubameyang deal, which will hopefully be one less disinterested influence in the dressing room.

Picturre: Chelsea FC

Hopefully, then, the “distractions” (Tuchel’s word) of the transfer window are now behind Chelsea and they can knuckle down to the business of closing that gap with City and Liverpool. Much expectation will fall on the shoulders of Aubameyang, but given that he’s following in the footsteps of Romelu Lukaku, Fernando Torres, Gonzalo Higuain, Alvaro Morata, Radamel Falcao and even Andrei Schevchenko - with the exception of Didier Drogba, the centre forward role at Chelsea may well be cursed. In truth, though, while that position might attract all the attention, it’s elswhere that Tuchel must apply himself. 

When he took over from Frank Lampard, Tuchel rebuilt from the back, addressing defensive frailty. The job now is to find the right formation, figuring out how best to use a good pool of defenders, including newcomers Koulibaly, Cucurella, the established old heads of Thiago Silva and Cesar Azpiliqueta, and wingbacks Reece James and Ben Chillwell. Midfield still presents a challenge. On paper, N’Golo Kante, Jorginho and Mateo Kovacic should be ipregnable holding players, but injuries have blighted the position. The arrival of Juve’s Denis Zakaria on loan might make the role more dynamic. Moving upfield, Chelsea’s attack has looked anaemic in the opening games of the season. Sterling aside, others, like Havertz, Zyech, Pulisic and even the saintly Mason Mount have simply not been delivering.

Tuchel is right in saying that Chelsea’s problems have been mental rather than physical, but in itself, the mental challenge now is for the head coach himself to impose his will on team psychology. They need to play less predictably and with greater resilience. And that starts tomorrow with the visit to Stamford Bridge from West Ham.