Forget managers – it’s the flawed strategy of Chelsea’s owners that is the problem
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6935334/2026/01/03/forget-managers-its-the-muddled-strategy-of-chelseas-owners-that-is-the-problem/
During Chelsea’s turbulent golden era under Roman Abramovich’s ownership, those who worked at Stamford Bridge learned to recognise the tell-tale signs.
In seasons when results suffered, usually around November or December, a Siberian chill took hold of the place and the Russian billionaire’s inscrutable poker face was replaced by a frozen scowl. The death mask, some of those who worked under him used to call it.
Jose Mourinho, Luiz Felipe Scolari, Carlo Ancelotti, Andre Villas-Boas, Roberto Di Matteo, Mourinho again, Antonio Conte, Maurizio Sarri, Frank Lampard… no coach survived for long once the death mask was on show.
Well, at least one tradition of the previous regime is being maintained at Stamford Bridge. In three and a half years since Abramovich was compelled to sell Chelsea to the BlueCo consortium led by Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital’s Behdad Eghbali, the club has continued to burn through coaches: Thomas Tuchel, Graham Potter, Lampard again (a brief spell as interim), Mauricio Pochettino and now Enzo Maresca.
In some ways, Maresca’s departure carries echoes of the Abramovich era: the speed with which the whole thing unravelled from a relatively promising position a month ago, the decline of relationships behind the scenes mirrored by a sharp downturn in results on the pitch; the way that, by the end, it felt like a departure by mutual contempt.
Trophies were not enough to save Enzo Maresca at ChelseaRichard Heathcote/Getty Images
But there is a critical difference. Abramovich fixated on trophies to the exclusion of all else — which caused problems when it came to creating the conditions for sustained dominance of the type Manchester City have enjoyed. BlueCo, by sharp contrast, appear fixated on player trading to the exclusion of all else, as if their transfer strategy is not a means to an end, but an end in itself.
The Abramovich model was a long way from perfect, but it was attractive to elite-level coaches even if, ultimately, they knew they were only ever one bad month from the sack.
The BlueCo model? The last four head coaches (including Lampard) were all hired partly on the basis of their willingness to work within a structure and strategy that Chelsea recognise would not suit every candidate. So what does it say that coaches as relatively mild-mannered as Potter, Lampard and Pochettino were all left exasperated, and that, judging by the noises coming out of Chelsea over the past 24 hours, Maresca and the hierarchy ended up driving each other to distraction?
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In the rush to control the narrative surrounding Maresca’s departure, there has been the usual flurry of briefings and counter-briefings, claims and counter-claims.
Much of it has centred around the fallout from Maresca’s disclosure to the Chelsea hierarchy, as revealed by The Athletic last month, that he had spoken to people associated with Manchester City about his potential candidacy to succeed Pep Guardiola when the time comes. Sources close to Maresca have suggested he wished to extend his contract, but some of the details that have emerged might lessen the inclination among some Chelsea fans, disillusioned with the club’s ownership, to make a martyr of their departed coach.
There are two sides to the story, but it hardly reflects well on this strange Chelsea project that, in the view of the club’s hierarchy, Maresca wanted out — and not because he sensed which way the wind was blowing, but because they felt his head had been turned by potential openings elsewhere.
Your head would be turned, wouldn’t it? Because Manchester City’s ambitions are clear, just like Chelsea’s were under Abramovich (even when their vision was not). Transfer expenditure is often cited as the barometer of a club’s ambition, but Chelsea, under BlueCo, have spent enormously without giving the impression that the aim is to win the Premier League or Champions League any time soon.
To anyone who has watched them regularly over the past three years, it has been obvious what is holding Chelsea back. Lampard’s feedback to the club after his interim spell in 2023 was that while there was talent in the squad, there was also a glaring lack of experience, resilience and know-how. Potter, Pochettino and Maresca, at different times, have voiced similar concerns.
Frank Lampard had concerns over Chelsea’s squad profileWarren Little/Getty Images
Over the past two-and-a-half seasons, Chelsea have regularly fielded the youngest line-ups in the Premier League. This is continually portrayed as a good thing — almost as if it were a trophy in itself — even if, studying their results and performances over that period, you would be forgiven for concluding otherwise.
A young team ended last season on a real high, securing fourth place in the Premier League and then winning the Conference League and the Club World Cup. Inside Stamford Bridge, it was seen a spectacular endorsement of the BlueCo strategy. The club’s sporting directors, Paul Winstanley and Laurence Stewart, were rewarded with six-year contracts, as was co-director of recruitment Joe Shields and director of global recruitment Sam Jewell.
But to many of us, the BlueCo strategy is bewildering. Not because, as some at Chelsea would have it, the concept is so brilliantly innovative that it is beyond our tiny minds, but because they have spent around £1.5billion ($2bn) in the transfer market over the past three and a half years (recouping around £800m in sales) to build a squad that, despite some notable results, remains well short when it comes to competing in the Premier League. The endless hedging of bets on young talent has looked like a distraction from the serious business of building a strong team.
They can reel off some obvious successes, such as Cole Palmer, Moises Caicedo and the wonderfully gifted Brazilian teenager Estevao. They can even cite, for example, the signings of Noni Madueke, Renato Veiga, Djordje Petrovic and Omari Hutchinson, who were sold for handsome profits. But the number of signings that have elevated Chelsea on the pitch — as opposed to offering black ink on a balance sheet — is alarmingly small.
And yet the club appear resolutely committed to continuing on that path, convinced that their recruitment strategy is wonderful and that the only thing holding them back is the ingratitude of coaches who get ideas above their station.
There have been times this season when it has been possible to imagine that a young Chelsea team might be about to come of age. The 3-0 win over Barcelona in the Champions League in late November was every bit as emphatic as the scoreline suggested. The 1-0 victory at Tottenham Hotspur a few weeks earlier was one of the best all-round team performances of this Premier League campaign.
The spirit and intelligence they showed in drawing 1-1 with leaders Arsenal, having had Caicedo sent off in the first half, was highly impressive. So, too, was the way they rallied with a makeshift defence to beat Liverpool 2-1 and came from 2-0 down to force a 2-2 draw at Newcastle just a fortnight ago.
But these high points have been interspersed by frequent and entirely predictable reminders of the concerns successive coaches have raised about a squad built with so little regard for the value of experience.
Clubs whose entire business model is based around developing players for resale can afford to commit as much money and playing time as Chelsea did, for example, to Madueke and Nicolas Jackson after signing them in 2023.
But when, having persisted with those raw young recruits through two years of growing pains, the strategy involves offloading them at the first opportunity — Madueke sold to Arsenal, Jackson loaned to Bayern Munich — and replacing them with another cluster of ‘project’ players, such as Alejandro Garnacho, Jamie Gittens and Liam Delap, it invites questions about a) the purpose of this whole exercise and b) what, beyond continuing inconsistency, Chelsea expected of Maresca and his team this season.
One of the criticisms levelled at the Italian over the past 24 hours concerned the number of Premier League points dropped from winning positions this season, particularly the defeats at home to Brighton, Sunderland and Aston Villa. Another is the number of silly yellow and red cards. But is this not par for the course for a young, inexperienced team, led by an inexperienced coach? Are certain deficiencies not to be expected in both penalty areas when Chelsea, despite spending more money than any club in world football over the past three and a half years, have appeared unconvinced by the need to sign a top-class goalkeeper, central defender, or centre-forward?
Moises Caicedo earns another yellow cardGlyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images
This is not a lament for Maresca. At times, his own lack of experience — appointed after 67 games as a head coach, 53 of them with Leicester City in England’s second-tier Championship — was as evident as that of his team. He was a ‘project’ appointment who was required to learn on the job if he was to fulfil the potential that Winstanley and Stewart identified in him. He came up trumps last season in the end, but there was a prolonged period in the first few months of 2025 when he was really struggling to find a way forward.
When The Athletic revealed Manchester City’s interest in Maresca last month, as a contingency plan for when Guardiola steps down, the immediate reaction among many was surprise. He is a talented coach, certainly, but one who seemed as likely to be beaten by the Chelsea conundrum as to take the club to the next level. And so it has proved. It had always felt rather two steps forward, one step back. Or, given the streaky nature of their results, five steps forward, four steps back.
He did seem to be learning, though. His authority had never been higher than it was five weeks ago, when the excellent win over Barcelona was followed by that spirited and tactically accomplished performance against Arsenal. And if his response was to start making power-plays behind the scenes, then, yes, that was always going to backfire unless it was accompanied by an improvement in results — rather than, as it transpired, the exact opposite.
What next? It has been intriguing to learn of the possibility that Chelsea might turn to Liam Rosenior, the 41-year-old coach of Strasbourg, also owned by BlueCo.
Rosenior is intelligent and innovative, among the brightest of a new wave of British coaches. But, as with Maresca in the summer of 2024, it would be hard to escape the feeling that this would be another of those “long-term” investments unlikely to be given the time to mature at a club where coaches are always on borrowed time. (As an aside, what kind of message would hiring Rosenior send out to Strasbourg, whose supporters are already highly sceptical of BlueCo?)
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Maresca’s tenure lasted longer than many expected — longer than Pochettino, longer than Potter, certainly longer than Tuchel lasted under BlueCo’s ownership — but it was still another appointment that fizzled out inside 18 months at a club where players and indeed sporting directors are secured to staggeringly long deals but coaches are regarded as expendable.
BlueCo would describe themselves as strategic, working to a long-term vision that would have been alien to the club’s previous regime. But it has been three and a half years, with an extraordinary amount of money lavished on an extraordinary number of players, and Chelsea are 15 points off the top of the Premier League at the halfway stage. Fifth place in the table looks reasonable at first glance, but points-wise, they are as close to 16th-place Leeds United as to third-placed Aston Villa.
There will be a temptation, internally, to pin that on the man who has just left the building. But when it comes down to it, it isn’t about Maresca. It isn’t about a run of one win in the last seven Premier League games. It isn’t really about heads being turned or relationships unravelling or the various micro-issues that underlined a growing state of dysfunction in recent weeks. It’s about a project that requires a level of faith that the decision-makers’ record over the past three and a half years cannot be said to warrant.
And at Chelsea of all clubs, that is a problem. Abramovich always saw managerial changes as a form of shock therapy, a desperate attempt to shake up a complacent dressing room and ensure the season would end with Champions League qualification and another trophy or two in the cabinet (and, in the short term, it often worked). In that context, the sense of drift under BlueCo’s ownership feels so much more acute.
By Oliver Kay
Football Writer
