BlueCo have turned Chelsea into the most unattractive big job in Europe | OneFootball

When a job becomes available at one of Europe’s supposed ‘big’ clubs, managers are usually queuing up to put their name in the hat rather than rule themselves out of it.

Chelsea’s sacking of Liam Rosenior has prompted Germany coach Julian Nagelsmann to confirm – via journalists – that he has absolutely zero interest in taking over at Stamford Bridge after the World Cup.

Nagelsmann is not alone. Cesc Fabregas, someone who presumably holds Chelsea adjacent if not close to his heart, has also reportedly said ‘no thanks’. Andoni Iraola, Marco Silva and any other promising young manager would be wise to do similar.

Usually when it comes to ‘big’ clubs, managers or head coaches do not need much convincing. It is a chance to win trophies, to work with the best players and to be able to say you are one of the best coaches on the planet. Oh and a chance to earn some serious money. Looking at the current iteration of Chelsea, is it realistic to say any of that is achievable barring the wage packet?

Chelsea may have won the Club World Cup last summer but even that success was enabled by the achievements of the previous ownership. When Chelsea won the Champions League in 2021 and the UK government ordered Roman Abramovich to sell, a prospective owner should have looked at the club as a business that simply needed maintenance rather than knocking down and rebuilding.

Abramovich’s model was heavily criticised but it undeniably got results. Managers were ruthlessly fired for a trophyless season but Abramovich was sacking Carlo Ancelotti, Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte; BlueCo are sacking Enzo Maresca and Liam Rosenior.

Since their arrival, BlueCo have introduced a strategy of buy, buy, buy and sell, sell, sell like a parent who has just discovered Vinted. Last summer, only Brighton saw more players come and go…and at least the Seagulls made a profit.

Chelsea have concentrated on player trading rather than development

The turnover in personnel both in and out has been enormous. From the starting XI of the Champions League final, just one player – Reece James – remains at Chelsea. That day’s opponents, Manchester City, have four. Captain James is the only player in the current squad with over 150 Premier League appearances for the club. Arsenal have four over that tally; City and Liverpool both have five.

BlueCo’s focus has been on buying young talents with the idea that they can either let them mature at the club or sell them for profit down the line. But realistically, how is that plan supposed to come to fruition if they are playing in a dysfunctional team without leaders? Is Enzo Fernandez worth more than the £105m Chelsea paid for him? Is Joao Pedro worth more than £60m? You dread to think what £89m Mykhailo Mudryk is now worth.

Mudryk also highlights a flaw in one of BlueCo’s key strategies. To get around financial regulations, Chelsea offered ridiculously long contracts to their players so they could amortise the transfer fee, which is smart when that asset is, say, a car or a house. When it’s a human who could break his leg, be banned for doping or even suffer a horrendous loss of form, you are stuck paying £100k a week for the next five years.

The result of this Moneyball experiment is that Chelsea have the youngest squad in the league but one where hardly any could walk into another top team. A fit James and Moises Caicedo are perhaps the only pair that have a claim while Cole Palmer looks a long way off his first season in London, and Joao Pedro, Pedro Neto and Jamie Gittens could be described as streaky players if you were being generous.

Chelsea new approach clearly took inspiration from Brighton – they took a lot of their players and staff after all – but the expectations for the two clubs are so massively different that this recruitment approach was never going to work. And that’s before you even get to BlueCo’s management styles.

The problems with the squad and recruitment are one thing but perhaps most off-putting to a potential manager is how hands-on the owners are.

Enzo Maresca, who is not in the top tier of managers by any means but a better fit than Rosenior, walked because he believed he could not work within the parameters offered by BlueCo.

BlueCo gave the medical department as much say as Maresca when it came to player minutes, meaning the former Leicester boss felt like just a cog in the wheel and told the press he had endured his “worst 48 hours” at the club and said “many people didn’t support us”.

Any prospective manager will surely look at the experience of their colleague and wonder why they should bother. Success in football is hard enough without an intra-club conflict to navigate. Oliver Glasner and Iraola are being heavily linked and even if football managers’ egos often mean they believe they can be the one to change a failing club, surely the only reason they would join Chelsea right now is for the severance package that is never too far away.

Behdad Eghbali is clearly a numbers guy. Him and his Clearlake Capital investment fund partners looked at football and believed they knew better. It’s coming up to four years now and they should have learned by now that they really did not.

BlueCo’s problem is that they have zero experience of winning throughout the organisation. When the club was sold, sweeping changes were made to the point that nobody from owner to sporting director to manager can tell you what a team needs to win a Premier League title.

The perks of being an owner and not a manager means you never actually have to explain your decisions so BlueCo may well see the Rosenior experiment failure as a wake-up call, or they may just as likely believe the problem solely lay with the manager.

An answer to that may be given with the next manager appointment but if you are one of the best coaches in the world, you would be mad to pick up the phone when this version of Chelsea come calling.