The move from Mauricio Pochettino to the club's long admired Chelsea makes sense. Photo: Adrian Dennis/Getty Images
The wait has paid off. for Mauricio Pochettino, Chelsea's first choice at a club where other managers paid the price for the rookie's early misadventures, now contemplating some moments of punishment.
Surely, some soul-searching may be the only reaction of the restless VCs who are now running the show at Stamford Bridge. Fire one manager who won the Champions League and you can benefit from doubt. Fire his successor six months later and it looks like you're the problem. Unfortunately for Todd Boeli and Behdad Egbali, you can't amortize a bad decision over eight years — the reputation deduction is immediate and paid in full.
Enter Poch? Friendly, nimble and at the same time with a not entirely hidden element of ruthlessness. One can already imagine Pochettino in the Cobham office, frowning at his laptop screen as he reads an email from Jesús Pérez listing Chelsea's five worst high-intensity runs. Subject: Those who lack commitment to our ideas.
Good time for a new Chelsea manager. The new ownership regime is already falling behind, whether they admit it or not. A key driver of their brand of leadership momentum is a cascade of big, bold decisions that pay off and give the impression of competence. However, the opposite may also be true.
At the time of this writing, no one has embraced Boely's idea of a North vs. South Premier League All-Star Game. His dressing room speech after the loss to Brighton did nothing but demonstrate the futility of trying to do the coaching job for him. Also, the mystery of those three missing members of Graham Potter's original behind-the-scenes staff that no one, not even Frank Lampard, is allowed to talk about.
Perhaps, in accordance with the HR protocol, they were simply assigned new roles in the organization. This could mean that they are currently working on the design of a new 60,000 capacity Stamford Bridge. Or solve another big question facing English football in 2023: will Leicester City players be eligible for Team North or Team South?
In short, owners “ Chelsea need a working idea. . Pochettino would be the obvious choice. It's hard to believe that a good coach like him has been out of work since the summer. He turned down an offer to change Aston Villa's relegation battle in October. In the meantime, he has seen what the new Chelsea owners are capable of and may demand that they not repeat the same thing if he agrees to be the next manager.
With much of Chelsea's squad building already done, with £600m spent on fees, they need a manager who can work with the players at his disposal. There is no better man than the man who hasn't signed a single player for Tottenham Hotspur in two consecutive transfer windows. Pochettino's great strength at Spurs was to inspire, persuade, drive a team of young, not very young and unrealized into some great collective goal. He was good at it.
Such is the storyline that awaited him at Chelsea: a young idealistic teacher takes on a difficult, underachieving class suffering from low self-esteem. With potentially heartbreaking results. Players like Mihail Mudrik, Noni Maduque and Benoît Badiashile are linked to Chelsea for a long time — or, as football clubs like to predict, for at least two more cycles of TV coverage. To have any hope, these signings must be profitable.
This is the scenario to which Pochettino belongs. The period of Paris Saint-Germain was a strange divergence. He was trying to keep 10 months when Manchester United asked. During the Roman Abramovich years, Pochettino greatly admired the club, and yet he never seemed to him as suitable as he is now: a little besieged and less sure of his place.
Huge problems are brewing. Raheem Sterling failed to convince Lampard to start the match against Real Madrid, and it is for this game that he became one of the most profitable clubs of the summer. This is a subtle management calculation. Sterling has four years left before the completion of a deal that has changed the dynamics of all contract negotiations for senior players.
The question of Pochettino's years at Spurs seems less important in an era when the biggest clubs are more likely than ever to appoint managers who take charge of their rivals. Daniel Levy, Tottenham's chairman, has not spoken to Pochettino since Antonio Conte left over a month ago. Pochettino was interested in Arsenal, who sacked Unai Emery 10 days after the Spurs sacked Pochettino in November 2019, but the latter considered it too big a step.
Pochettino is a different manager than a man, who left the Spurs three and a half years ago. There were always clear ideas about what he wanted from the club, but the relationship with Levy seemed to be unstable at times, going from romance to resentment in a short period. Like any manager, he will have to make compromises at Chelsea, but he can also make some demands.
He has shown that he is willing to wait for the right job. Another question is whether the Chelsea owners can afford to miss out on Pochettino. One of the few benefits of putting a club into temporary limbo is the ability to hire a new manager ahead of the summer showdown. If it's Pochettino, they should trust him. Their brilliant idea may be his appointment, and they should leave everything else to the discretion of the man himself.
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