Liam Rosenior becomes the Diary Of A CEO final boss with the most toe-curling quote of 2026 | OneFootball

Just when we thought we’d heard the absolute worst of management buzzwords, Chelsea manager Liam Rosenior has scaled impressive new heights.

Steven Bartlett, eat your heart out.

“Am I a manager or a coach? I’m both. Coaching is educating. Coaching is wanting to improve players on a technical and tactical level,” Rosenior says.

“Management is making sure you have a strong culture.”

Whatever. We’ve heard this kind of leadership jargon a thousand times before. Educating? Tick. Strong culture? Tick. Improving players? Tick.

“In English, ‘manage’, if you split the two words is ‘man’ and ‘age’, so ‘you’re ‘ageing men’,” he continues.

Hang on. You cannot be serious.

No AI program on earth could come up with such pure, undiluted LinkedIn corporate babble if you asked it to.

The worst thing is that there’s a very large audience for this kind of thing. Do not check the latest listening figures of the Jake Humphrey’s High Performance podcast if you want faith in the future.

It’s a widely-shared argument that one of the key reasons for Jose Mourinho’s decline is his inability to relate and cut through to younger generations. It’s something that he himself has discussed in the past.

“I had to understand the difference between working with a boy like Frank Lampard, who, at the age of 23 was already a man, who thought football, work, professionalism, and the new boys who at the age of 23 are kids,” Mourinho told France Football in 2017.

“Today I call them ‘boys’ not ‘men’. Because I think that they are brats and that everything that surrounds them does not help them in their life nor in my work.

“I had to adjust to all that. Ten years ago, no player had a mobile phone in the dressing room. That is no longer the case.

“But you have to go with it, because if you fight that, you are bringing about conflict and you put yourself in the stone age.”

Mourinho gave those quotes almost 10 years ago. Paul Pogba had just turned 23 (subtle as ever, Jose) at the time. Now he’s 32 on what looks to be the downslope of his career.

Time doesn’t stop for anybody. Lampard belongs to Generation X. Pogba’s a millennial poster boy. Nowadays Chelsea’s dressing room is entirely, without exception, Generation Z.

Dozens of Mourinho’s ex-players have spoken about how they’d go to war for him. He certainly wouldn’t have considered himself above motivational speaking. It is, and always has been, part of the territory.

Mourinho could peddle b*llshit with the best of them in his time, but can you imagine him ever coming out with a line of such unmitigated guff?

Anyone older than 30 would greet all this with a healthy level of cynicism. Twenty-five years ago, Patrick Swayze’s Jim Cunningham in ‘Donnie Darko’ was a played-for-laughs caricature of the self-help grifter.

Nowadays, such characters are real, unavoidable, and somehow have millions of followers on social media, gatecrashing your feed to offer you unsolicited advice on everything from protein maxxing to crypto investments.

https://twitter.com/nocontextfm1/status/2011396480905654435?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Rosenior’s whole schtick – absolute catnip for your Humphreys and Bartletts – might actually resonate with a generation of players who have grown up in a world of #Grindset Instagram reels.

Think of Jesse Marsch at Leeds United a few years back. His chipper, earnest positivity always felt at odds with hard-edged Yorkshire scepticism.

You can just imagine the looks of bafflement and stifled titters from the grizzled veterans of the Elland Road press box when he was invoking the musings of Mother Teresa and JFK.

“[Marsch] showed a quote from Gandhi before the game about having belief and that’s the most important thing for us,” Jack Harrison told reporters at the time.

“Just having belief and everything else comes after that, staying together and the tactics and everything like that.”

Ultimately, it didn’t really matter what some middle-aged journos thought. Harrison spoke about Marsch’s team talks without a trace of irony. The message had landed.

Things soon fell apart for the American at Leeds. Almost as if there was an emptiness behind the power of positive thinking alone.

The same fate may well be awaiting Rosenior at Stamford Bridge. We’ll be amazed if that isn’t before his six-year(!) contract is up in 2032.

Until that time comes, maybe this is what Chelsea’s band of Gen Zers need to hear. Maybe, in 2026, this is the voice that’ll get them clicking. Is it all a fugazi? Of course it is. Does that matter? Maybe not.

Rosenior is the Diary Of A CEO final boss and his Chelsea tenure will be grindset culture’s ultimate footballing litmus test.