It is starting to feel as if Chelsea’s hot-shot new owners are addicted to chaos. They must like it. They must feel comfortable with it. Maybe they have some sort of predilection for looking stupid. Maybe they take a perverse pride in taking the opposite view to everyone else.
That, after all, has been their schtick since Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali took over the club two years ago. They know better than the fuddy-duddy traditional owners of English football who have not leveraged nearly enough profit out of the bloated cash-cow that is the Premier League and they are going to show us how it’s all done.
So we should not be surprised that just as Mauricio Pochettino was finally beginning to make sense of the anarchy of the billion pound supermarket sweep of player purchases Boehly and Eghbali had inflicted on the club, it should be decided that now was the right time to let him walk away.
Congratulations, guys. You just lost a manager who had the guts and the stature and the strength of character to make it through the hard part. You just lost the manager who had turn what no one thought was possible and had begun to tame the chaos. You just lost progress. You just went back to square one.
The decision to allow Pochettino to leave beggars belief, even if many had expected it. Chelsea won their last five games in succession to end the season with a real feeling that they were making progress and that the troubles that had dogged them for the earlier parts of the season were behind them.
Mauricio Pochettino has left Chelsea by mutual consent following an internal review
Chelsea’s co-owner’s Behdad Eghbali (left) and Todd Boehly (right) seem like they are addicted to chaos
Pochettino (centre) had led a resurgence at Chelsea towards the end of the season, following a turbulent start to the campaign
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Now they have sacrificed all that because of some amorphous drivel about how Pochettino does not fit in with the structure of the club. Loosely translated, that seems to mean that the owners want to have more power for themselves and strategist yes-men who keep telling them that their modelling suggests Chelsea should have won the league by 25 points.
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BREAKING NEWS
Mauricio Pochettino LEAVES Chelsea by ‘mutual consent’ after just one season at Stamford Bridge… despite brilliant end to the season which saw Blues finish in sixth place
The corollary of that is that they want less power in the hands of the manager. Even if the manager has started to prove, as Pochettino has done, that he can mould the hotch-potch of signings bequeathed him by people who have proven themselves ignorant of the game, into an effective unit.
It was Pochettino who built the platform for Cole Palmer to thrive and become one of the players of the season. It was Pochettino who finally began to make sense of the army of players at his disposal; so many players that they had to expand the dressing room to accommodate them all.
After all that chaos, Pochettino managed to conjure a sixth-placed finish for Chelsea that was a minor miracle in the circumstances. That was one place above state-owned Newcastle United and two places above Manchester United. It qualified Chelsea for European football next season.
It appears their owners Boehly (left) and Egbhali (right) have sacrificed all the progress they have made by parting ways with Pochettino
Pochettion is the third permanent manager to leave the club under the new Chelsea ownership
It may not be what Chelsea are used to but it is the absolute maximum they could have expected after such a shambolic recruitment splurge. It is said that the owners were disappointed they did not qualify for the Champions League. If they want to know who is really to blame for that, they need only look in the mirror.
It is said that Pochettino left after being subjected to an internal review, led by sporting directors Paul Winstanley and Laurence Stewart as well as Eghbali. That is bitterly amusing, too. The last time I read anything about Winstanley and Stewart, they were in joyously self-congratulatory mode about their perspicacity. It is vanishingly rare that sporting directors pay the price for their ineptitude. They often make the manager pay it for them.
And so Pochettino has gone, sacrificed on a bonfire of the vanities of the people who run the club. Pochettino is the third permanent manager to leave the club under the new ownership.
To lose one manager may be regarded as misfortune. To lose two looks like carelessness. To lose three bears all the hallmarks of a regime in a blindfold, trying to pin a tail on a donkey.
