Let’s get the gags out of the way first. Mauricio Pochettino couldn’t even win at Stamford Bridge with Eden Hazard and Alessandro Del Piero running at a radio DJ and an ex-cricketer.
Despite retiring last October, Hazard still scored as many free-kicks as any Chelsea player did last season (one), while the World XI conceded more goals than any Soccer Aid side have previously (six).
And as became commonplace throughout the Pochettino era, Fear, Sadness, Anger, Envy, Embarrassment and Ennui were all on show in west London, but this time they were advertising new Disney flick Inside Out 2. Ba-dum-tss.
Maybe hard-tackling Top Boy actor Michael Ward was the answer to Pochettino’s left-back crisis all along. Maybe Frank Lampard should’ve been offered a third bite at the managerial cherry, just with his uncle and a tea-stained Robbie Williams in tow. Maybe the clowns haven’t overrun the circus and Chelsea’s biggest problem was slumped in the away dugout, outfitted by the same white-tee-loving tailor Vincent Kompany and Kendall Roy employ. If only life were that simple.
For better or worse, the whole Chelsea gang was here. Bar a Didier Drogba knee-slide, you could trace the club’s cash-sodden 21st-century history across a balding Stamford Bridge pitch littered with ghosts of their glorious past. Soccer Aid 2024 probably wasn’t designed with juicy narrative in mind, but the angles were less subtle than a Danny Dyer two-footer.
Hazard, comfortably joyful in his post-retirement glow, was effortlessly better than anyone else without breaking past a light jog. Petr Cech, now of Oxford’s ice hockey team, was nutmegged for the opener by Joe Cole, joined in the England XI by namesake Ashley.
Gary Cahill, a man born to feature in Soccer Aid, produced an archetypal solid performance. John Obi Mikel, now forging a podcasting career solely by interviewing those I’ve already mentioned, never made it off the bench, while Michael Essien strolled around midfield like he was chasing a particularly sluggish tortoise.
Between them, this septet won a collective 16 Premier League medals at Chelsea, with another three in the dugout thanks to Lampard.
Yet on the opposition bench, this must have been deathly embarrassing for Pochettino, the former President returning to the White House for a group tour, not allowed to cross the red tape or touch the silver.
The Argentine initially signed up for his second Soccer Aid while still Chelsea manager, a fun summer distraction while his charges jetted off to Germany, the US and the Maldives. Instead he was left cosplaying his former self 19 days after being told he had mutually agreed to leave the club.
He largely entered into the spirit of things, waving and walking and talking as he was supposed to, although leaving team warm-up responsibilities to his managerial shadows Jesus Perez and Toni Jimenez. That Pochettino had even brought his coaching staff to Soccer Aid was an unavoidably funny reminder of the stubbornness and dedication to his closed group which contributed to his Chelsea downfall.
Amid the post-match celebrations, the trio made pleasantries with David James and Jermain Defoe before taking one last look around the emptying Stamford Bridge and performing a flawless Irish Goodbye from their own party and into the night. Enough was understandably enough.
But of course, if this was embarrassing for Pochettino, it should have been multiple magnitudes worse for the owners and co-sporting directors. Ambling around a Stamford Bridge turf which resembled a rank sub-continental wicket were some of the Premier League and Chelsea’s greatest ever players, Champions League winners and Ballon d’Or nominees. On an unrelated note, fans look forward to the return of Mykhailo Mudryk and Nicolas Jackson come August.
This whole event was a crumbling monument to how far Chelsea have fallen, a reminder of the talent the club could once attract and what has been lost, perhaps permanently, in two years of Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital’s ownership. The 2021 Champions League winners have finished 12th and sixth having spent £1.19bn on transfers, supported by one of the finest academies in the world and the established revenue of a massive global fanbase.
This isn’t a novel point but it always bears repeating, especially when the day-to-day, small-picture chaos threatens to supersede the wider mural of decline and decay. The new ownership were not dealt a rough hand so much as they created one for themselves. The co-sporting owners they appear to trust without exception have curated a transfer policy with a success rate which still hovers somewhere around random.
Chelsea likely wouldn’t target Ashley Cole now, who was 25 going on 26 when he joined from Arsenal. Cahill and Mikel, crucial figures in the 2012 Champions League win and for many seasons around that, would be considered both too uninspiring and functional, lacking the requisite potential for sky-high return on investment. If they managed to get a shot at the likes of Hazard or Cech, both would have more stable and attractive options.
Lampard is the club legend Boehly and Behdad Eghbali were happy to temporarily exploit to put a blame sponge between themselves and the fans. Pochettino is the Chelsea head coach who never should have been, so obviously ill-suited for the hierarchical project the club are attempting to develop that he never should have been hired in the first place.
From the 2021 Champions League final team, only Reece James and Ben Chilwell remain at the club. The subsequent rebuild has not just been mismanaged, it’s barely taken place. Enzo Maresca is now the fourth permanent coach expected to lay immovable foundations in less than two years.
And so we look ahead to Soccer Aid 2025, when Graham Potter’s England XI take on Maresca’s World XI. The pair share jokes about how to spend their gargantuan redundancy packages and there’s identically over-enthusiastic hugs to the ones Lampard and Pochettino shared on Sunday.
Maybe this is Chelsea’s place now, fuel for future stocking-filler joke books, perpetually trapped in the first stage of a rebuild which will never end, a similarly Sisyphean fate to the one Manchester United continue to endure.
The old Chelsea, the club of Hazard and Cech and the Coles, made resetting and restarting an art form. The new ownership dreamed of moving away from that. Now, from inside the hole they’ve dug and fallen into, they need to learn everything they can from the past to escape.
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