Chelsea’s manager cycle will continues until new model is put in place | OneFootball

This is a syndicated version of this story, originally featured on the BBC Sport website.

Chelsea have announced that Enzo Maresca is no longer the club’s manager, ending a fevered morning of speculation.

While in hindsight the clues were all there that the Italian was on his way out – from the cryptic comments about a lack of support to the failure to attend the post-match press conference after a draw on Tuesday – it still has all come crashing down very quickly for a coach who was the Premier League’s manager of the month for November.

Maresca’s unhappiness with things behind the scenes was palpable, and clearly it was felt internally that the cloud around him was affecting results. The Blues made it one win in seven Premier League games by drawing with Bournemouth on Tuesday night.

Sporting directors continue to fail without consequence

Laurence Stewart and Paul Winstanley in a montage.

Chelsea are now looking for their 5th permanent manager since being bought by their current ownership in May 2022. The higher that number gets, the more embarrassing the situation becomes for those owners and the people they have appointed to run the club.

While Chelsea fans were hardly universally positive in their views on Maresca, they are far more united in their dislike of the cabal of sporting directors at the club. These are the people who are appointing the managers who keep getting fired, and they must be the next to go after failing with yet another appointment.

Those failures, combined with their largely dire record in the transfer market since taking control in 2023, is more than enough evidence that they are a bigger problem than any individual coach. The ownership continue to take a lot of flak too, in part for keeping their faith in the likes of current sporting directors Paul Winstanley and Laurence Stewart.

An appointment will be made in days – but until things higher up the chain change, it seems inevitably that we’re back in this same place in a year or two.