TorontoChelsea

The problem is that the club stands firm on club legends but then goes and spends like crazy on transfers and pays insane salaries to sub-par players. David Luiz had 3 years left on his contract and Chelsea still gave him an insane 120K/week on a new contract. Why? Because there were rumours that Barca wanted him for 30M? Great! We can't afford to keep Lampard or Cole, but not only have we kept Torres who makes more than anyone, we keep trying to build teams around him. It's a lack of respect towards our legends. Anyway, how much more expensive is it going to be to go out and have to buy a new LB? You can't complain about nickles and dimes when you are flushing hundred dollar bills down the toilet.

Abramovich/English dictionary. Demand: Verb: Pleading one's case while on one's knees.

It will be interesting to see what he does differently. Not really that much he can do really.

I hope so but Ancelotti, AVB, and RDM all couldn't get Luiz to behave long-term. He had brief periods of greatness followed by relapses into schoolyard football. I don't think any manager says to him "Hey David, how about you just kick the ball long to the other team 2, 3 times a game. Then, sort of wander around the midfield aimlessly for a while and then lose concentration." It's up to Luiz to straighten himself out at this point.

Managerial stability certainly still happens. Barcelona had 2 managers for about a decade. Bayern has had 4 different full-time managers in the last 15 years. Klopp has been at Dortmund for years. Arsenal, ManU, Everton, and many other English teams have had a lot of stability. It's not just about sticking with a guy forever, it's about having reasonable expectations, giving the coach some breathing room, and not going crazy after every game where we drop points. We're actually having a batter season than anyone should have hoped for. We were 6th last season and we're third now and alive in all competitions. How does that deserve a sacking? Especially when you're just hiring another temporary manager in his place. It just doesn't make sense. It's clear that Roman never wanted to hire RDM, in which case he shouldn't have. To treat anyone like that, never mind a Chelsea legend, is an absolute joke.

Yes. This exactly the problem. Chelsea almost every single year spend more than any other club and yet we still need to splash 100 million more on strikers (and an attacking midfielder. Why exactly do we need James Rodriguez?) Then, we need another midfielder and maybe a central defender so that will probably be another 50M pounds. We need a manager who has a consistent style and to bring players in who fit that style. Roman spending ridiculous amounts of money on players who may or may not fit in at Chelsea is why we're in the mess we're in. Roman thinks "hey, he's a great player, I don't care how much he costs, I'll buy him" and it produces historically horrible transfers. I don't want Chelsea always chasing big names every time something goes wrong. It makes our club a joke. Since 2003, we've spent 527M pounds more than we've sold on transfers. We've spent more per season than ManU, Liverpool, Aston Villa, Spurs, Arsenal, Newcastle, Fulham. and Everton combined. So, let's go out and spend another 200M. That will make things better. How can we have pride when we win like that? It's like a super-heavy weight beating a flyweight and bragging about it. We spend more per season than most Premier League clubs have spent in the last decade.Yes, big clubs spend more. That's the way it's always been and that's the way it will always be, but this level of spending that Chelsea, City, and a few other teams do is new and so damaging to football and I want it to stop. After the first three seasons, our spending went down to normal levels which Chelsea should be able to maintain. You buy 2-3 players every year to revitalize your squad. That's what stability gets you. You shouldn't need anything more than that but Roman prefers his massive spending/firing managers strategy.

As I mentioned earlier, I am positive the reason RDM didn't rotate that much this season is that he knew he had pressure to win every game. Last season, when RDM had no pressure, he rotated heavily. The key to proper rotations are depth and a manager who knows that his job is safe. Chelsea had neither under RDM.

I keep hoping for Roman to mellow with age. His overreactions are reminiscent of those of 19-year old supporters on the web. He's like a figure cut out Greek tragedy, a god with a hamartia (fatal flaw). If he could just back away from the game a little and hire a real football man (rather than a suite) to run the day to day operations, he'd be the best owner around. Instead, we're always chasing "names" . The most famous manager, the most famous player (we could get), etc...It's no way to manage a club. I agree, it's not the hiring of Benitez that is so upsetting, it's the treatment of Di Matteo and Wilkins without any real cause. The dismissal of Ancelotti because he had the gall to not win a trophy a year after Chelsea's greatest season ever. It's the panicked moves to buy expensive players who don't fit.

I agree with this. If you're supposed to be the Chelsea coach of the future, then you should have your say and bring in who you want but a guy who is going to coach for 6 months? Chelsea will likely just be firing all these people in half a year.

We've never replace Drogba or Lampard or Terry or Carvalho or Ballack or Essien. Our starting XI in 2005-2006 was Cech, Gallas, Carvalho, Terry, Del Horno, Makalele, Essien, Lampard, Cole, Robben, and Drogba and almost all at their peaks. That's insane. (We also had players like Gudjonsson, Crespo, Duff, and Feirera who played regularly) We had top-5, top-10 players at their position in the world all over the pitch. We had players who were elite attackers and elite defenders. We had balance, physical presence, ability on the ground, in the air, speed, leadership everything. We are light years away from that right now.

Mourinho set the bar high because we had ridiculously talented teams then. Out talent level is nowhere near that right now. If you gave this Chelsea a CB combo of peak-level Carvalho and Terry (Never mind Makalele, peak-Lampard and Drogba, Ballack, etc...) do you think we'd have near the same defensive problems? Mourinho was the right manager for the team, but I think too many fans give him way too much credit. We won because Roman spent a ton of money buying a lot of world-class players. We had as much talent as any team in the world and a lot of managers would have had success with those squads. We simply have not replaced those players. Ancelotti's second season was a disappointment, but a lot of that was due to not replacing the Ranieri-era Chelsea that still made up our core and it wasn't that bad a season. We did finish second in the league. The inability to replace the core of the team is down to the board and they've now fired a bunch of managers for their own mistakes.

I don't care at all about Rafa. I'll support him and hope he does well. What makes me sick is the management carousel, the absurd expectations on managers where a few bad games gets you sacked, and the inability of the board to learn its lessons. We need a long-term manager. It should have been Ancelotti but we fired him. It needs to be someone though. This can't continue.

On the face of it, it seems like cynical attempt to win Chelsea fans over to him . using a former Chelsea player. Zenden has no managerial experience. However, since Benitze will only be at Chelsea for a few months, it doesn't really matter. The new manager will bring in new assistants as well.

One the worst aspects of managers being under too much pressure is that it effects the way they manage. If you know you have to win every game, you don't rotate your team properly, you can't possibly bring along young talent, you take minor tournaments too too seriously, you are late in substitutions, and you never risk trying anything very different, and so on. For those people who were angry at RDM's unwillingness to rotate, can you blame him? Draws against Swansea, Liverpool, and and a loss to WBA did RDM in. That's all it took. Three poor results and he's gone. (Losses to Shakhtar and Juventus away are no embarrassment and the loss to ManU was ref-assisted), Fans have the right to voice their displeasure. Everyone should back Chelsea no matter what, but you can be pissed off at the club and still support them.

We play West Brom March 2nd after a tough five games where we play Arsenal, Newcastle, and City. Wonder who the next manager is going to be. It's been over a year since we've payed Porto millions for their manager. Maybe we should try that again.

I personally don't see a system that we could possibly play that would suite Falcao period. Not with the players we currently have. He needs a team built around getting him the ball in dangerous areas. Trying to turn Hazard, Mata, and Oscar into guys who mostly just try to feed Falcao doesn't make sense in any way. Solid, world-class defenders like JT and Cole will succeed in any system and if we bought some solid central defender, they would do (whereas someone like Luiz I think would be brilliant at a team like Barca but not in the Premier League). Lampard was a world-class box to box midfielder so it was very easy to fit him into any system. Mata is different. He is a fantastic offensive playmaker but he has real limitations. We have played a few styles with him and he was basically useless when we tried to play the defensive counter-attack in the CL last season. He was probably our worst player in the CL after the group stage whereas Ramires played the best football of his career in that system. Most players are not as well rounded as players like Terry or Cole or Lampard were and do fit into specific systems better than others. It works much better when a manager has a vision and can acquire players that fit into his vision.

Of course, compared to the the Dalgliesh trifecta of Downing, Henderson, and Carroll, Benitze looks like a genius in the transfer market. Maybe it's just a Liverpool thing. ( and yes, I know, they are much better than us because they won the first division a lot in the 70's and 80's and that's clearly much more important than current success.)

Add to that-buying players in January is more expensive and more difficult anyway.

We can because we don't know if they'll fit the system that the next manager will want to play. We already have too many players who are ideal in different systems.

Looks like we'll be buying players with no long-term vision once again because we don't have a long-term manager.

This is a move that made absolutely no sense. If Roman really wanted Guardiola or someone and he had become available, I still wouldn't have agreed, but it would have made sense. But firing a manager who was doing OK really to bring in another temporary manager is ridiculous. It's obvious that Roman never liked Di Mattero and was looking for any excuse to see him gone. We're in third place in the league and still alive in every other competition. Even had RDM not won the CL and the FA Cup a few months ago, he didn't deserve to be fired.One of the most undeserved sackings I can ever remember. We'll do better with Benitez for the first couple of months because the schedule is really easy.

We'll almost certainly get off to a good start with the new manager. After the tough City game, we have our easiest stretch of the season with 8 straight very winnable games. (Fulham, Nordjsalaend, Southampton, and Villa at home and West Ham, Sunderland, Leeds, and Norwich away.)

Even more than that, who would listen to him? If you're a player and you know you'll be there next year, and your manager is upset at you, who cares?

Exactly...and people need to stop pining after some other managers immediately too. If Guardiola doesn't get hired, it's because he doesn't want to be here. That's fine. We've won without him and will win without him again. Just, for the love of science, let the manager breathe before jumping all over him.

Managerial consistency doesn't make you win, it just gets you better results than you can be expected to have. Arsenal are constantly better than they should be. That's where managerial stability gets them. They don't win titles because they don't spend money. In the last 3 seasons, we've spent over 200M pounds more than we've made from buying and selling players. In that same time period, Arsenal have made millions on their transfers. We should be miles better than Arsenal, but we're not. We're pretty much on the same plateau-we'll likely be fighting for third at the end of the season.