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If sacking Thomas Tuchel at the first sign of trouble was one last hurrah for the ancien r?gime, everything Chelsea’s owners have done since has been designed to display daylight between them and Roman Abramovich. From the briefings that this was not down to performances, but instead the wrong vibes between coach and ownership, to the hiring not of Europe’s next big thing in management but a prospect from the Premier League’s mid tier, this is supposed to be a new era at Stamford Bridge.
If one wants evidence that Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali are indeed different, they need look no further than the continuing employment of Graham Potter, whose side have won two of 12 games since the World Cup, losing six. Such was Abramovich’s capriciousness it is easy to imagine the current Chelsea head coach might not even have made it as far as Qatar, presiding as he did over a run of defeats to Arsenal, Manchester City and Newcastle. The mitigating factors are many: injuries, a lopsided squad, the burgeoning quality of the Premier League’s mid tier. The old boss could not have cared less.
Boehly, Eghbali and the rest of the ownership consortium have determined themselves to change that. The hiring of a string of individuals whose role vaguely approximates that of a sporting director was to bring with it a collegiate approach to club management, the half billion pounds of player recruitment about building a pre-peak squad that can grow together. They look up the Premier League table and see the value of the patience displayed at Arsenal, where Mikel Arteta has gone from public enemy No.1 to the prince that was promised. They want to give Potter similar leeway.
But the culture of a club is not defined solely within its corridors of power. Two decades with Abramovich in charge have taught supporters what it is that they should value. The turbulence that was the sine qua non of life at Stamford Bridge was accepted because it was garlanded with more trophies than supporters who grew up before the takeover could ever have imagined. Expensive rebuilds were no less familiar under the Russian as they have been under Boehly and Eghbali, who spent January unknitting the mess they had sewn in signing the likes of Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Kalidou Koulibaly.
The difference is that when Abramovich’s Chelsea dropped nine figures over a summer there was an implicit contract with fans that this was being done in the expectation of immediate returns. This was a club that subscribed to a Keynesian view of the long run, namely that in it we’re all dead. It is not easy for supporters who have come to understand their club in that way to adapt to a worldview whereby ?88.5 million Mykhalio Mudryk is a project signing showing little indication he can make an immediate impact. This is Stamford Bridge’s own Shock Doctrine.
None of which is to absolve the lunatic fringe of supporters from an iota of responsibility for the death threats sent to Potter and his children. As has been the case since he took the reins in September, the Silhillian dealt with gracefully with these trying circumstances, acknowledging the hurt that had been caused to his family but refusing to be blown off course. For neutrals it seems impossible to not root for Potter to make a success of his time in west London.
He has not so far, and it will not have helped his standing among more sensible supporters that the three points that Chelsea have come to view as a given whenever they face Tottenham were instead taken by Spurs. The 2-0 defeat was Potter’s tenure so far in microcosm, pretty patterns and intricate play but once the first goal went against them they could not fall back on the preprogrammed patterns that would have allowed them to charm a way through their hosts’ back five.
“We played well in the first half I thought,” said Potter, “and in a game that isn’t easy to create chance after chance because Tottenham defend well in a back five. The feeling among the players is one of support. They are fighting for each other and fighting for the team. They want to do better and are hurting. I feel for them.
“I can’t necessarily think too much 40,000 or 50,000 people. I need to focus on what I can control, which is the next day and the next training session. Our supporters have been very fair and I have supported the team. I’ve no complaints with the supporters. They are entitled to be frustrated, upset and angry with the results we’ve got and that is my responsibility. So I have no complaints with the supporters.”
Yet again when the Blues came up against a side that they would consider their contemporaries they were woefully short on attacking punch. In five Premier League games against ‘Big Seven’ opponents since changing manager, Chelsea have averaged 0.6 expected goals (xG).
Ownership might have seen this coming when they appointed Potter and, even after all their January expenditure, left him a squad with one senior striker who, in the form of Aubameyang, looks to be an ill fit for what the modern game requires. Such has been the unbearable weight Kai Havertz seems to feel in the final third that Potter opted to end Aubameyang’s exile as his side attempted a doomed comeback. In eight minutes Chelsea’s No.9 registered one touch.
The summer will bring another new recruit in attack. Christopher Nkunku has been one of the Bundesliga’s deadliest scoring forces (just like Timo Werner was) but like Joao Felix, Havertz and Romelu Lukaku, he tends to work best in a tandem. Should Potter make it that far, incorporating the RB Leipzig forward into his attack will bring with it a fair few headaches. If there was a question that hovered over his tenure at Brighton it was his side’s lack of killer instinct in front of goal. In each of his three full seasons in charge the Seagulls scored fewer than their xG, across the three Premier League seasons they had 121 goals from 142.5 xG. This might be little more than a statistical quirk but it has carried over to Chelsea, where the Blues are the league’s lowest scorers since the World Cup with its 10th highest xG per game in that period.
Boehly and Eghbali could see that as an argument for patience; it is not conceivable that everyone in their squad bar Koulibaly and Mason Mount are going to keep underperforming their xG, not least when there have been flashes of something promising on a near game by game basis. As Potter noted, the rewards of sticking it out with a coach can be great. “We were talking before the game about watching the Arsenal All or Nothing and two years into Mikel [Arteta’s] reign he is close to getting the sack and people want him out. It was seen as a disaster but things have now changed a bit,” he said after the Tottenham defeat.
And yet there is one crucial difference between Arteta and Potter: most of the former’s great struggles took place behind closed doors in the Premier League’s lockdown season. There were complaints aplenty on social media but when are there not? The Kroenkes were never exposed to the tangible anger of a ground that has lost faith in its coach, as Stamford Bridge seemed to in the humbling 1-0 defeat to bottom of the table Southampton earlier this month.
In that regard Potter may be more like Unai Emery than the man who followed him at Arsenal. As the Spaniard faltered early in his second season those above him were insistent that they were not a sacking club. Once the Emirates Stadium started to grumbly, however, it was merely a matter of when.
That was at a club where fourth place would have marked progress. Since Ken Bates cashed in in 2003, Chelsea have been a club where even silverware does not protect managers for long. Ownership cannot have dispensed with the beloved Tuchel off the back of a few defeats and expect supporters to show greater patience with his successor.
Boehly and Eghbali might see things differently. But they will not be able to shield their eyes from a fanbase who have been taught to view Chelsea through a specific prism.