Ranking 24 BlueCo mistakes at Chelsea as Rosenior appointment joins three sackings | OneFootball

Todd Boehly rode in as Chelsea’s white knight in May 2022 and the poor billionaire’s had a rough time of it since.

Behdad Eghbali’s emerged from the shadows on a few occasions to take some of the flack that’s been aimed chiefly at Boehly, who’s managed to shrink into those same shadows as Chelsea fans are now opposed to him more as captain of the true target of their hatred, the sinking ship BlueCo. Goddamn BlueCo.

As the powers that be consider sacking their fifth manager in under four years we bring you their many, wide-ranging mistakes, ranked from minor to major.

24) Premier League All-Stars

Starting a pitch by claiming the Premier League could “learn a lesson from American sports” was never going to go down well, and Boehly’s suggestion of a North versus South All-Star game was predictably met with xenophobically tinged responses from people who Know English Football.

It appeared to be an offhand comment made with the best intentions of giving back to the football pyramid, but the one extra game in the calendar that, let’s face it, loads of people would watch and would provide millions of pounds for smaller clubs was a terrible idea as everyone would definitely get injured during that one specific, half-arsed game.

23) The Mohamed Salah, Kevin De Bruyne academy

At that same New York conference in September 2022 Boehly claimed Chelsea have “one of the best academies in the world”, which is arguable, but using Salah and De Bruyne to evidence the worth of that academy rather sullies the argument, and by association any other point about Chelsea or football in general.

Salah broke through at Egyptian side Al Mokawloon before moving to Basel, while De Bruyne made the first team at Genk before a transfer to Chelsea. And namedropping either of those two players to attest to Chelsea’s excellence in developing stars is unwise.

Using Boehly’s earlier All-Star comments against him, Thierry Henry advised the American owner to “learn your own lessons and then come back and teach us something” in reference to his lack of knowledge on the history of his own football club.

22) Signing Joao Felix

A super talented, mercurial forward who can play on either wing or down the middle signed for £42m having cost Atletico nearly three times that much five years ago. It sounds pretty good, but it may well be the most laughable signing of all in a hugely amusing field.

He was quite clearly just a tool for Chelsea to earn pure profit through the sale of Conor Gallagher (we’ll get to that sh*tshow). They actually wanted Samu Omorodion, who may not have the quality and repute of Felix but would have at least been useful to Chelsea.

You couldn’t have picked a player Chelsea were less in need of when he arrived than Joao Felix, who had already played for the club lest we forget, in a distinctly average loan spell punctuated by missed chances and frustrating quality, in that it came to nothing nine times out of ten. They’ve already got plenty of players to deliver on those counts.

The misstep would be higher on this list had Chelsea not managed to dupe Al Nassr into paying a big chunk of what the Blues paid up front for his signing, with add-ons potentially meaning they will break even.

21) ‘Disrespecting’ Benfica over Enzo Fernandez

All’s well that ends well, right? Well, Chelsea did get Enzo Fernandez but aren’t on the best terms with Benfica as a result and haven’t signed any of their players since.

Benfica boss Roger Schmidt wasn’t at all happy with Chelsea’s approach for Fernandez. Referred to as “the club who wants Enzo”, like they’re a footballing Lord Voldermort, Chelsea were accused of making the midfielder “crazy” through suggesting they would meet his £106m release clause, then not doing so, before meeting the Portuguese club’s demands in the end.

20) Not pushing harder for Anthony Gordon

Full disclosure, when we did this ranking back in May 2023 this was titled ‘Pushing for Anthony Gordon’, but he’s made us all look a bit daft since, is now likely to start for England at the World Cup before a transfer to Liverpool or Manchester United for at least double the £40m Newcastle paid Everton for him.

19) Dressing room faux pas

Football is arguably too precious about dressing rooms. While American sports allow journalists and fans into their ‘inner sanctums’, footballers and managers appear to want some sort of DBS check for anyone thinking of setting foot in the holiest of all places.

The Chelsea players were ‘taken aback’ when Mykhaylo Mudryk and his entourage were granted entry with Booehly ahead of the Crystal Palace game in January 2023, but actually it sounds entirely reasonable to introduce a new signing to the players before a game.

However, attempting to bring a group of guests and their children, with no particular affiliation to Chelsea, into the dressing room at half-time in a Premier League game, is a bold move, not least because bringing children into a dressing room with adult men, who could be changing, could be swearing, could be doing anything, feels all wrong.

Thomas Tuchel told Boehly to do one, and was sacked four days later.

18) ‘Embarrassing’ rant

We don’t know everything about what happened, but what we do know is Boehly called the players “embarrassing”, singled a senior player out for criticism leaving them ‘disillusioned’, and at least one onlooker thought it was “weird”. It doesn’t sound great.

Arsene Wenger reckons any new Chelsea manager, and there have been plenty in the last two years, should have an anti-Boehly clause inserted in their contract. It appears that clause is already in place for the sport of football as a whole.

17) Outsourcing medical work

To be fair, dismissed pair Paco Biosca and Thierry Laurent weren’t doing a great job as medical chief and head physio – Chelsea topped the injury count in the Premier League in 2021/22 with 97 according to Howden’s European Football Injury Index. But the injury problems ramped up significantly after Boehly decided to outsource some of the medical work to a private physiotherapy company.

Denis Zakaria, Reece James, Raheem Sterling, N’Golo Kante, Wesley Fofana, Ben Chilwell, Armando Broja, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Christian Pulisic, Edouard Mendy and Thiago Silva all spent significant time on the sidelines in 2022/23, and we barely saw James, Romeo Lavia or Christopher Nkunku in 2023/24, with Marc Cucurella, Ben Chilwell, Carney Chukwuemeka, Trevoh Chalobah and Benoit Badiashile also out for a big chunk of the campaign.

In a leaked private message in which he explained why his client and his teammates were struggling due to a ‘lack of pilates and terrain work’, Chalobah’s personal trainer said it best: ‘It’s an absolute mess at the moment, bro.’

16) Signing Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang

Given we were told by Boehly that the club’s decision to sack Tuchel was made over a stretch of time and not as a result of the defeat to Dinamo Zagreb in the Champions League, how the hell can he explain the signing of Aubameyang?

He was a 33-year-old striker, who was infamously kicked out of Arsenal for being a bad influence in the dressing room, signed purely because he scored a load of goals under Tuchel eight years ago.

With his transfer fee and annual salary taken into account, Aubameyang cost Chelsea roughly £20k per minute played. He then went on to score and assist a bucketload for Marseille, because of course he did.

15) Selling Conor Gallagher

People will look at the mess Gallagher’s found himself in at Tottenham and a Chelsea midfield he would now have a very tough time in getting into and see this is a good call, but we’re not having it.

Can anyone think of another example of a top football club forcing their de facto captain into a transfer? Possibly if that player’s been a bit of tit or they’re passed their best, but other than that we doubt it.

He was Chelsea’s best player other than Cole Palmer under Mauricio Pochettino, had been at the club since he was a wee boy and was sold for £20m below market value in the name of pure profit.

The two-year contract they offered – presumably just so they could say they tried – was insulting and we’re glad Gallagher told them where to go. Who would want to play for a football club like that anyway?

14) Performance-related contracts

It’s one of those things that sounds far better than it actually is. It seems reasonable to pay players in a team according to how well that team has done. A big problem is that some players are negatively affected by the team’s poor performance and others – those with their wages assured – are not. It caused significant issues in the dressing room in BlueCo’s first season.

Hard to tell if the new system has been an issue in the transfer market or not. Was it an issue for Liverpool-bound Jeremy Jacquet, for example? We don’t and probably won’t ever know because as much as we would enjoy the barefaced honesty, he’s unlikely to admit he moved to Anfield for the cash even if that was the case.

13) Re-apppointing Frank Lampard

It didn’t really matter, but let’s be clear, re-hiring Lampard was nuts. To think all that group of players needed was a pep-talk from a club legend perfectly illustrates how deluded Boehly was. 11 games, one win, eight defeats.

He’s doing swimmingly at Coventry. Third time’s a charm?

12) Raheem Sterling and the ‘bomb squad’

“I am not working with 42 players. I am working with 21 players. The other 15-20 players are training apart. I don’t see them. It’s not a mess like it looks from outside. Absolutely not. They can even have 20 years contract, it’s not my point. I don’t care.”

Enzo Maresca there, literally saying he doesn’t give two sh*ts about half of Chelsea’s senior players, including Raheem Sterling and Ben Chilwell.

We get that Maresca can’t work with 42 players – a bulging squad was one of the key contributors to Graham Potter’s downfall – but it’s an extraordinary thing to say.

And what a d*ck move to play Sterling for the whole of pre-season, telling reporters how “important” his experience and quality is to the squad, and then tell him he’s not going to play and needs to find a new club with just over a week left of the transfer window. Just a horrible thing to do to him and everyone else in the ‘bomb squad’.

11) Mykhaylo Mudryk

When this list was first published in January 2023 this section was titled ‘failed hijacks’ as we questioned why the result of cherry-picking people that we assumed were among the best in the business from Brighton, RB Leipzig and elsewhere to oversee all things transfers, those individuals appeared to be engaging with the market in the same way anyone with an interest in football with access to the interweb might – gossip columns.

And although we very quickly had egg thrown in our face as Mykhaylo Mudryk did in fact end up hog-tied and brought to Chelsea over Arsenal, it remains a ‘failed hijack’ by virtue of the quite astonishingly negative impact of said individual.

Arsenal got Leandro Trossard, who’s been largely excellent, while Mudryk – save for brief snippets of Shakhtar-like quality – resembled a lost puppy, shooting as though his right foot is made of sweaty salami before being banned for failing a drugs test.

Good thing Boehly’s tied him down for eight years, and then took up the option of a further year in the midst of his terribleness. He’s on £100,000 per week.

10) Skimping on goalkeepers

Even when you take into account the increased cost of outfield players in comparison, spending just £70m out of £1.6bn on goalkeepers is odd. Add to that the fact that that £70m has been spent on four goalkeepers, all of whom are varying shades of sh*t, and it’s utterly absurd.

Kepa Arrizabalaga continues to exemplify why spending all of that cash on one stopper is a big risk, but the points dropped and games lost as a result of poor goalkeeping from purveyor of false calm Robert Sanchez and his poise-feigning understudy Filip Jorgensen makes the decision to walk away from a deal for Mike Maignan over what would account for little more than a rounding error in the summer is one of the more infuriating calls.

9) Hiring Graham Potter

Let’s not claim now that is wasn’t an exciting appointment. Potter could have been the man to usher in a new dawn at Chelsea. And yet, in his bid to be nothing like Roman Abramovich, Todd Boehly has been more Roman Abramovich than the Russian oligarch himself, sacking managers with greater regularity than the man whose absolute favourite thing was to swing the axe.

Boehly was said to be surprised by the strength of the fans’ anger at Chelsea’s performances under Potter, and realised that he had no choice but to show him the door as his own relationship with the fanbase was at risk. He has of course f***ed that relationship up now anyway.

Hired after pre-season, Potter was handed a poorly balanced and swollen squad featuring a combination of very young players and those that were entirely disillusioned with the club. It was never going to work.

8) Captain Enzo Fernandez

We were told everything’s fine after the Argentinian’s racist chant and we don’t know whether we’re more disgusted by what Fernandez did or the fact that Chelsea have so successfully brushed it under the carpet after telling the offended parties to lump it or leave it. Why? Because Enzo Fernandez cost £107m.

Not only did Wesley Fofana and his teammates have to put a brave face on things and accept Fernandez’s return, they’ve also had to be fine with him being their captain for much of the time since in the absence of Reece James.

Enzo Maresca thinking that his namesake acts as an example for others to follow weeks after he filmed himself smiling and singing racist slurs is wholly deplorable.

7) Hiring Liam Rosenior

He talks a good game if you like that sort of thing. We don’t and after an initial High Performance honeymoon period, the players also now appear to have seen through Rosenior’s seize the day ‘friend first, boss second’ schtick for the middle-management, big city recruitment firm tosh it is.

Rosenior looks, acts and sounds like a guy who’s read a couple of books on football management and is putting his own spin on things, or someone who’s been created in a manager breeding trial before being disregarded as an outlier way too outlandish for public consumption.

We get that world class football managers have to start somewhere and genuinely hope Rosenior succeeds, mainly because he provides excellent content. But Chelsea, particularly this version of Chelsea, where expectation remains entirely at odds with the reality of what they can achieve thanks to a young squad with absurd and glaringly obvious quality gaps, was way too big a step up from Strasbourg after Hull City.

No football club of equivalent size and repute is hiring a Rosenior. As is the case with the players the club targets, his appointment stinks of a hierarchy desperate for their counterparts to at some point hail them as all-seeing geniuses, who did things their own way and ended up ruling football.

We’re nearly four years into the project and those counterparts have barely stopped laughing.

6) Sacking Mauricio Pochettino

Reports suggested Boehly was actually happy to keep Pochettino and it was co-owner Eghbali who was ‘lukewarm’ and pushed for his exit.

Apparently he was ‘concerned by Pochettino’s tactics’ and his ‘antiquated’ training methods, which given as of three-and-a-bit years ago these owners had rarely seen a ball kicked in anger they must have swatted up impressively in the meantime.

Perhaps they didn’t see the relationship Pochettino has built with the players, his work on the training pitch and in one-on-one chats coming to fruition. Literally everyone else did. There wouldn’t have been a single rival fan, who would have had growing concerns that the Chelsea sh*tstorm might be about to abate to make way for a sensible and dangerous football team, that didn’t punch the air with glee at the club heading right back to square one under a manager that the majority of the players clearly didn’t want because they wanted Pochettino

The owners also ‘expected quicker progress given the significant investment on players’, which is unreasonable as they bought children even before you pair that grievance with another reason for Pochettino leaving being because the owners denied his request to be more involved in signing players. Essentially they spent loads of money on players Pochettino didn’t want, and that’s his fault.

5) Boehly as sporting director

Absolutely ridiculous. A guy who had pretty clearly barely watched a game of football in his life became the authority on all things football for one of the biggest clubs in the Premier League. It would be like someone with no experience in education buying a school and making themselves headteacher, hiring and firing teachers, conducting lesson observations and giving feedback.

It’s been a bizarre and scattergun approach to recruitment in general in their time as owners, but that first window when Boehly was heading up transfers was particularly woeful and not in keeping with what we’ve seen since.

Wesley Fofana, Marc Cucurella, Raheem Sterling, Kalidou Koulibaly, Carney Chukwuemeka, Cesare Casadei, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Gabriel Slonina arrived and all but Fofana and Cucurella have either already been sold or are currently being pushed from the club.

Boehly sacked himself midway through the January transfer window having added Andrey Santos and David Datro Fofana to his roster and recently admitted that he signed Cucurella “because Manchester City wanted him”.

4) Sacking Enzo Maresca

Defeat to Atalanta in the Champions League preceded Maresca’s “worst 48 hours” at Chelsea as “people didn’t support me and the team”.

Those “people” didn’t need to be named as various members of the hierarchy, who baulked at the Italian cutting one or two of the puppet strings as he railed against their failure to sign him a centre-back to replace the injured Levi Colwill at the start of the season and then sent Maresca packing when it became clear he had become far too big for his boots.

He led them back into the Champions League and won two major-ish trophies, putting European Champions Paris Saint-Germain to the sword in the second, but he also spoke out of turn, so…

What they want is a yes man, and no half-decent coach is going to be that at Chelsea because they can’t trust the people above them to make the right decisions. They had an experienced coach in Tuchel, who pushed back and got sacked, hired a young gun in Graham Potter, who couldn’t hack it and got sacked, hired an experienced coach in Pochettino, who pushed back and got sacked, and after another up-and-comer like Potter looked as though he was on the path to become a Tuchel they sensed the power shift and got rid.

Supposed talks with Manchester City just before he left the club should have confirmed Chelsea were on to a winner rather than acting as proof of Maresca’s lack of commitment to the cause.

3) The FFP mess

Nothing sums up BlueCo’s time at Chelsea quite like them not being able to afford to play in the Europa Conference League. Reports in February 2024 suggested they would rather be banned from European competition than enter its third tier as they’ve spent so much money that they couldn’t afford the financial hit of playing under UEFA’s stricter financial rules.

But the lads had an ingenious plan to avoid those particular sanctions. They sold all of their delicious ‘pure profit’ players, otherwise known as the academy graduates, who grew up in and love the football club, but have big fat Euro symbols floating over their heads.

They got rid of Mason Mount, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Ethan Ampadu, Callum Hudson-Odoi, Lewis Hall, Billy Gilmour, Ian Maatsen, Conor Gallagher, Omari Hutchinson, Bashir Humphreys, Alfie Gilchrist, Armando Broja and would definitely be without Trevoh Chalobah – probably their best centre-back this season – had injuries not forced their hand into recalling him from Crystal Palace.

So much for soul and identity.

1) Sacking Thomas Tuchel

“It wasn’t a decision that was made about a single win or loss, it was made about what we thought was the right vision for the club.” It’s a shame Boehly’s vision couldn’t include the manager who had won the Champions League a year previously and had taken Chelsea to six finals. It’s also a shame Boehly’s vision wasn’t apparent before he spent £270m on players for the manager he would then sack five days after the summer transfer window closed.

Simon Jordan reckons the secret reasons behind Tuchel’s Chelsea sacking would “make people’s eyes water” but on the face of it the decision looked incredibly rash and the timing downright ridiculous.

Things didn’t go all that well for him at Bayern and the England proof will be in the World Cup pudding this summer, but it’s hard to imagine a Tuchel-BlueCo relationship strained enough to make his sacking the right call given the pain of the succeeding three-and-a-half years.

BlueCo want a world class puppet to coach their football team and are yet to source one amid increasing evidence that that individual does not actually exist. They should have stuck with the in situ world class manager and accepted that brilliance and autonomy go hand in hand.