The serious sadness behind the demise of LinkedIn spoofer Liam Rosenior | OneFootball

So farewell, then, Liam Rosenior. You have aged your last man.

At Chelsea, at least. And quite possibly in England. Where Rosenior rocks up next after serving just 106 days – a tick under 4.5% – of his six-year Chelsea contract is anyone’s guess.

It’s easier to say where it won’t be. It won’t be another top club. It almost certainly won’t be an English one of any flavour. It might be somewhere in France, where his reputation from the work he did at Strasbourg remains strong and the whole LinkedIn Liam thing may not easily translate into open ridicule and mockery.

We’ve certainly had our fun mocking what have frequently been very easily mocked pronouncements from a man promoted way above anything his experience or ability could merit.

But there is a serious and more dispiriting side, and not just that it’s rarely nice to see anyone lose their job – unless they are a proper outright villain, rather than a cartoon character like Rosenior.

But also because despite how much we took the p*ss, his was an appointment we would really like to have seen somehow, against all odds, succeed. We never thought it would, obviously. We never thought Chelsea should have done it. We always suspected it would be some flavour of absolute disaster, albeit perhaps not a ‘lose five games in a row without scoring a goal and somehow ending up worse even than Spurs’ disaster, but a disaster nevertheless.

But we hoped. We really did. A young, black English manager getting that kind of opportunity was something we should all want to see work out. And the complete collapse of that opportunity is a reason for sorrow.

It’s a simple truth that black coaches and managers simply do not get the same opportunities in the game. The meritocracy that exists on the field is simply not replicated in the dug-out and is a source of lasting shame for the sport.

Which all adds to the frustration with Rosenior. In an industry where young coaches like him don’t get the chances and breaks they deserve, here was one getting an opportunity he didn’t.

The hope must be that the sheer absurdity of Rosenior’s persona means he hasn’t set back the wider cause too greatly. But he sure as sh*t hasn’t moved it forward, either.

We should be grateful that he became so ridiculous in post so soon after ridiculously getting the position at all. Our hunch is that, luckily, the learnings from this will be the correct ones.

That overpromoting a company yes man who has swallowed LinkedIn whole to one of the biggest managerial jobs in England is a bad idea and you probably shouldn’t do it.

Quite why and how Rosenior disappeared so very far down the guffspeak middle-management pipeline is unclear.

A genuine tragedy appears to be the fact that he wasn’t always like this. That he, more than other similarly guff-afflicted managers, was playing a role. With your Mikel Artetas or Brendan Rodgerses or even the Eddie Howes of this world, you get the impression that time has merely exaggerated and sharpened the odder parts of who they already were.

They have become extreme versions of themselves, but still recognisably themselves.

We’re not so sure that’s true with Rosenior. His former team-mate Kevin Kilbane spoke well on this, saying he simply didn’t recognise the intelligent, funny, yarn-spinning man he used to play with in the LinkedIn-spouting bespectacled caricature who was in charge at Chelsea.

Maybe it was simple insecurity. Maybe it was a shred of self-awareness buried deep, deep down that he knew he shouldn’t be there. We don’t know, and it’s not our place to speculate.

But it’s to be hoped Rosenior can recover from what has become a ritual humiliation. Behind all the nonsense, there are some interesting tactical ideas and an interesting brain.

It’s not really his fault he got a job he wasn’t (yet) remotely ready for. What’s he supposed to do? Say no? Easy to say, far easier to actually do. Especially when the promotion you’re being offered is one within the company he was already working for. Not like “no thanks, I’ll just stay where I am, ta” was as straightforward an option as it would be for most managers being headhunted from outside the tentacles of multi-club ownership models.

And it is worth remembering that Chelsea is surely the hardest of all the big Premier League jobs. Hard to the point of impossible. Even at the very stupidest of the other big clubs – and you know who we’re talking about – there is a clear sense that footballing success is the driving goal.

They might not have the first clue how to actually go about it. They might sometimes be distracted by concerts or NFL or other shiny things. But there is still no doubt what the primary purpose of the football side of things is: be successful.

That’s simply not true at all anymore at Chelsea, where the main goal of the football operation increasingly appears to be delivering profit from wholesale player-trading, with on-field success a potential but far from inevitable or even necessary side-effect.

This group of players had no respect for Rosenior and made that clear. But they are also an absolute rabble. A chaotic mishmash of talented players assembled for their paper worth rather than their ability to knit together and form a coherent team on grass.

It’s a nightmarishly difficult job for an experienced, capable manager.

It was an impossible one for a novice who quickly ended up a spoofer who convinced nobody, above all himself.