The long-term plan that didn't work

Amid plenty of concerns about Chelsea’s somewhat unusual recruitment under Behdad Eghbali and Todd Boehly’s ownership, it was fair to give them credit for two things. First, there was an obvious plan. Second, it appeared cohesive.

Chelsea were signing younger players than any other club. They were signing them to longer contracts than any other club. And in Mauricio Pochettino, they appointed a manager whose managerial record suggested he was more effective at working with emerging youngsters, at Tottenham Hotspur, than he was working with established superstars, at Paris Saint Germain. It was joined-up thinking.

This was, then, unashamedly a long-term project — not necessarily the type of approach you associate with foreign owners who immediately sink huge sums into a club they’ve just bought. That means, in the short term, things can be difficult, for two reasons.

First, most obviously, you have to wait for youngsters to reach their peak age. Second, it’s about cohesion and teamwork. Familiarity between players is as important as their individual ability, and in deliberately ripping up the remains of a side who were European champions just two years beforehand, Chelsea were eschewing that collective experience.

In terms of expected goal difference, usually a good measure of a side’s performance, Chelsea are fourth for the entire campaign. Results themselves were worse than that, of course, and Chelsea finished sixth. That was down to wasteful finishing and the fact that Chelsea made the highest number of defensive mistakes that led to opposition shots in the division. Pochettino can’t be entirely separated from that, but it’s also a natural consequence of buying inexperienced defenders.

Pparting company with Pochettino — supposedly a mutual decision, although you suspect if Chelsea had desperately wanted him to stay on, they could have found an agreement — isn’t simply a harsh reflection of the manager’s performance. It also throws into doubt Chelsea’s entire direction. Eghbali and Boehly seemed committed to long-termism, but have reacted unreasonably after a single season that doesn’t even constitute a failure.

It’s difficult to see that Pochettino’s successor will be any better qualified for the job than Pochettino himself. There’s been a huge demand for elite-level coaches this summer — Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Liverpool, Juventus and perhaps Milan and Manchester United are all on the prowl. Barca and Bayern, tellingly, subsequently attempted to persuade the incumbent to stay on, such was the paucity of options.