The past week has certainly added an extra frisson to next year’s Championship title race, knowing that the winning manager will not only take their club to the Premier League but also presumably replace Carlo Ancelotti at Real Madrid. Enzo Maresca to Chelsea, Vincent Kompany to Bayern Munich; we long demanded promotion of coaches within English football. We didn’t really think that it would happen like this.
On the surface – OK, several feet below the surface – Chelsea’s pursuit of Maresca is extraordinary. Maresca won four games as Parma manager in Serie B and then won the league with the Championship’s title favourites, losing five more matches than Ipswich Town. That is a negative spin on success, but the sample size bears repeating: Maresca has never managed a top-flight team.
For this, Chelsea have allowed a manager to leave who had Premier League experience, who had managed in the Champions League, who the players seemed to like, who had lost one of his previous 15 league games and who had won his last five. This is the most surprising appointment in the Premier League’s upper reaches in 20 years (or at least since they appointed Frank Lampard for the first and second times).
And yet somehow the bit that stands out most is that Maresca will reportedly be given a five-year contract by Chelsea (stop laughing at the back). This is a club that has had six permanent managers since June 2018 and whose two appointments under the current ownership have both failed to make their first anniversary. Still, it’s exactly 50 years this year since Chelsea had a manager who had reached five years, so no better time to repeat the feat.
If we already knew that high-end clubs were increasingly obsessed with process and philosophy, the last seven days have jumped the shark. There is a vague theory that these tactical dogmatists are attractive because their football is easier to replicate successfully with better players. Burnley dominated in the Championship when they had one of the strongest teams and then collapsed in the Premier League when they didn’t – perhaps the former is indeed more relevant.
And yet even this feels like a touch of over-analysis. The link between Kompany and Maresca is not just that they are wedded to a distinct way of playing, but that they were Pep Guardiola’s captain and Pep Guardiola’s assistant manager. For all that Guardiola’s trophied success stands tall, it is in your influence on others that legacies are established.
This season, Xabi Alonso (a Pep disciple, albeit one with notable other influences too) completed the most remarkable domestic season in German football history. Xavi (a Pep disciple) was Barcelona manager until recently. Mikel Arteta (a Pep disciple) came second to the master in the Premier League. The Championship titles in 2022/23 and 2023/24 were won by Pep disciples.
There is a dearth of coaches for the unprecedented number of coaching gaps this summer. Between Barcelona, AC Milan, Juventus, Liverpool, Chelsea, Porto and possibly Manchester United, the winners of 15 of the last 21 European Cups may be changing managers this summer. Alonso was the girl all the bad guys wanted and he’s staying put. Instead, clubs seek the next big thing. The Guardiola managerial family tree extends further afield.
Chelsea are an anomaly because they really didn’t need to lose Mauricio Pochettino. The breakdown of that relationship was in part due to disagreement about the future of the club, namely the strategy for squad building that so far seems to focus on paying vast sums of money on lots of young players, selling their academy players to fund the whole thing and then acting confused when things take a while to click and supporters express doubts about the erosion of any identity.
You can at least see what Behdad Eghbali and/or Todd Boehly are thinking, if you squint or were this anybody else: progressive coach with progressive squad equals project to take us through the next five years. It’s just that, well, they’re forgetting that we have seen everything else that they have done over the last two years.
Chelsea’s decision makers lurched from a Champions League-winning foreign coach to an up-and-coming British coach, then appointed a club legend as an interim manager and then went for the biggest free name on the market with Premier League experience. Now they have landed upon a man with 67 matches in his career to take charge of a squad assembled at a cost of over £900m. And by giving him a five-year contract, they are making it hideously expensive for themselves if it doesn’t work out.
There’s a tendency to seek out a 4D chess strategy in these moves, a we-are-not-worthy-to-the-ways-of-these-billionaires deference to important decisions taken by self-important people. And maybe this will all work out, Maresca and Chelsea enjoying a joint coming of age as boys become men and apprentice becomes master.
More likely is that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Chelsea are facing serious questions about their continued ability to meet profitability and sustainability rules, about their transfer market approach and their insistence on wrestling control away from the head coach. They may just have staked the house on their latest gamble.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/PkU9y63
Post a Comment