There’s a long way and a short way to answer the question we’ve posed in the headline of this piece. The short answer is, “Chelsea better hope so.” The long answer is a little more involved and complicated, but we’re going to try to answer it anyway. Let’s begin with the facts: The latest in a long-running series of managers to come through the revolving door at Stamford Bridge in recent years is Mauricio Pochettino. He wasn’t universally wanted by the fans, and he may have alienated his former supporters at Tottenham by accepting the job, but the Argentine has decided to go to Chelsea anyway.
Pochettino, it should be remembered, took Spurs to the final of the Champions League – but he didn’t win it. He was hired by Paris Saint Germain specifically to win the Champions League there but wasn’t able to do it. He never cut a happy figure in Paris, and while he managed to add the Ligue 1 title to his resume as his first major honour, it’s a lightly-regarded championship compared to the likes of the English Premier League or La Liga.
To put the above another way, Pochettino isn’t a proven winner, and Chelsea have a habit of jettisoning coaches who turn out not to be winners very quickly. That doesn’t bode well for either the club or its new coach – but there are reasons to believe things might be different this time.
Things can only get better
Pochettino has the advantage of walking into Chelsea at a time when the club is at its lowest point in thirty years. Yes, chairman Todd Boehly has money, but there’s a limit to how much more he can spend without breaking FFP rules. Most of the hundreds of millions he’s spent since taking control of the club have been squandered on players the incumbent manager neither wanted nor needed. That money can’t be spent again, and vast proportions of it probably can’t be recouped by selling the unwanted players. There isn’t a single player at Chelsea whose value hasn’t dropped during the past season.
Chelsea’s likely lack of spending this money will lead to reduced expectations, and expectations were already low. Sacking Thomas Tuchel at the beginning of the season was quickly exposed as the wrong move. Replacing him with Graham Potter – a coach who the players, by all accounts, never respected – was another bad move. Bringing in Frank Lampard as interim coach until the end of the season after sacking Potter was an outright disaster. Chelsea finished with the club’s lowest points tally and league position in the Premier League era, stuck in the bottom half of the table. Pochettino almost can’t fail to do better – the only way to perform worse would be to get the Blues relegated.
Changes behind the scenes
As one door opens, another one closes. Mauricio Pochettino is a new arrival at Stamford Bridge, but there’s also been a significant departure. Tom Glick has “mutually agreed” to leave his role as Chelsea’s “President of Business” after just a single year in the position. He’s been replaced by Chris Jurasek, who comes in with the more traditional title of Chief Executive Officer. From the outside, it looks as if Glick has taken the blame for Chelsea’s disastrous year of transfer dealings, both in terms of the dugout and the playing squad. It shouldn’t be forgotten that it cost Chelsea £20m to acquire Graham Potter from Chelsea, and around that amount again when they fired him less than twelve months into a multi-year contract. It was an expensive mistake in every sense of the word.
There’s also a sense that there’s going to be a change of ownership structure and transfer policy. Todd Boehly is understood to have been surprised and hurt by how much negative press coverage he’s received and how poorly he’s been received by the club’s fans. The rumours say that he wants to take a step back from the club and reduce his shareholding by around twenty per cent. There are also suggestions that players won’t be accumulated at the rate they were this last season, even if all the failed arrivals from the past twelve months can somehow be moved on to other paying customers. Joao Felix has been told that his loan move from Atletico Madrid won’t be made permanent, so he’s already returned to Spain. There will be other departures but few arrivals. Those who do arrive will likely be cheaper and lower profile.
Rolling and rolling again
The biggest blessing for Pochettino – and the biggest problem for Chelsea – is that the club can’t really “roll again” with their manager even if things go wrong next season. By “roll again,” what we’re talking about is the mechanism by which people play slots games at online casinos. If you’re not happy with the payout or result you got from one spin at the Monopoly Casino sister sites, that’s fine, so long as you’ve got the money to spin again and see if the next one has a better outcome. Still not happy? Roll again. That’s how casino games work, but they’re an expensive habit when luck isn’t with you. Sacking Tuchel was a roll or a spin of the reels. Sacking Potter was another one. Bringing back Lampard was three rolls in a single season. There’s likely neither the budget on the boardroom nor the patience in the stands for Pochettino to be “just another roll.”
For the reasons outlined above, Pochettino is probably unsackable for at least one season and possibly even two. That means he’ll remain in the Stamford Bridge hot seat for a full campaign, which begs the question of what success might look like for the Argentine. The fans would love the club to qualify for the Champions League, but that might be a bridge too far from where they are now. Qualification for the Europa League might be more likely. Picking up a minor trophy like the EFL League Cup isn’t impossible. All of this is a far cry from where Chelsea were as little as two years ago, but it would be a start – and that’s probably good enough for now as far as the club’s new manager is concerned.
