Run Liam, run. Don’t look back. Wrench off the hazmat suit. Scoot past the security gates where the guards are already writhing and frothing at the mouth. And exit the compound for good, ice-white trainers pounding the dirt track, designer hoodie flapping.
For Liam Rosenior the urge now must be to put as much distance as possible between himself and what is, if not the strangest and most illiterate footballing project of all time, then surely the strangest and most illiterate yet. Welcome to BlueCo Chelsea, a place where blaming the manager for the on-field spectacle feels a bit like complaining that the scientists inside the Chernobyl nuclear plant still haven’t washed up the canteen coffee cups.
The moment it first became clear on Wednesday morning that Rosenior really was going to be sacked was when news emerged that Chelsea’s executive were having a meeting. Business theory generally suggests the opposite. Having a meeting is the best way to ensure nothing actually gets done. But this is to forget the true nature of what you’re dealing with here. Which is: rainmakers, alpha-dogs, finance super-bros. In a roomful of swinging dicks, a dick will ultimately have to be swung.
And in a sense Chelsea’s board has finally arrived at a robust, knowledge-based football decision. Sacking the manager of a team whose last league goal was scored by Kerry Dixon in front of a row of parked Ford Capris seems like a sound choice. But it is also a choice that flows directly from the many very bad choices already made. Not least creating an environment so skewed that giving a novice manager a six-year contract in January, then terminating it in April, can still seem like a breath of common sense.
So let us be clear first of all. Rosenior emerges unstained from this. His future is still wide open. He may or may not be a good manager. Nobody knows, because the wrongness of the basic structure absolves anyone caught up in it, even if they happen to be wrong anyway.
The biggest criticism of Rosenior has been that he’s Not Up To The Job. But of course he isn’t. Nobody is up to this job. Rosenior is young and smart. He can go off and start a billion-dollar corporate wellbeing company called L.I.am Ro-senior-management if he wants to. He can go and learn more about elite coaching in a more functional environment.
He has the brains and the will and, for all the awkward press conference chat, the basic honesty. Perhaps the most instructive moment of Chelsea’s season to date is Rosenior’s brutally candid final post-match interview after the zombified defeat at Brighton on Tuesday night, the tangible sense of hurt and shame at being engaged in something so brittle and empty, like watching a man trapped inside General Zod’s flying screen of death screaming at the cold, dead space around him.
It had long since become clear Rosenior was destined to become just another note in the BlueCo era. This is a regime so fundamentally strange it would come as no surprise to discover it is in fact a public art happening, the work of brilliant pranksters designed to demonstrate the emptiness of corporate life, the vapidity of commodified sport, the comic potential of what happens when the self-appointed cleverest guys in the room turn out to be the stupidest.
Above all the current Chelsea are a warning about the future. This isn’t just about mistakes made. It’s a way of operating that is deliberately destructive. We have known the basic game here for some time. Hedge-fund ball. A clearing house for talent. A portable leisure brand. A short while back the club announced it would be building a luxury Chelsea tower block in Dubai featuring lion statues, starlit spa, and best of all, “a lifestyle that rivals match-day energy”, copy presumably written by someone who doesn’t go to a lot of matches, unless the new lifestyle must-have is angry men in Peaky Blinder caps repeatedly calling you a wanker.
But this is not just the standard brand over substance blah. The Chelsea project is about tearing down, deconstructing, reimagining in the name of super profits. Last year Todd Boehly gave a remarkably candid speech at the Financial Times leaders in sport conference where he talked about the grail of using the Premier League to create some kind of global tech platform, with football as the chief cut-through, not just a SoccerFlix, but a world-shaping omni-app. Burn a billion on talent? So what, we’re unlocking Bezos money here.
Which probably sounds like a good idea in a room with other finance bros. But at this point the basic incompetence of its operation must also be factored in. Graham Potter had it right in one of his press conferences when he said, well, they must know what they’re doing, they’re billionaires. But it turns out the first lesson of BlueCo Chelsea is quite the opposite.
Chelsea’s owners have applied their distressed asset template from the start. Most obviously they have created a very silly team, world champions of a sort, but also lacking any kind of gristle, spleen, sense of itself.
The initial, enduringly disastrous move was to allow Boehly to act as a sporting director, buying players, as he has since admitted, based on whether other teams wanted them too, because this is just like trading stock, right?
What Boehly and his successors have created is a ChatGPT version of sport, a team with no balance, no intelligence, no human qualities. In recent conversations with fans one Chelsea director claimed it was “obvious” Chelsea are building one of the best teams in world football. What is obvious is that the club’s key decision makers have no idea what talent looks like. And that aggressively monetising a complex centuries-old industry with your super-slick finance dude skills might actually be harder than it looks.
It also emerged the club has decided, based on commissioned data, that managers are essentially interchangeable, that here is another way of gaming the game. It is hard to think of a more self-evidently incorrect conclusion, a theory that can be disproved by reading Jürgen Klopp’s Wikipedia page, by watching Pep Guardiola and Mikel Arteta face off in the last few weeks.
At the end of which we have not just a castle built on sand, but a castle that thinks sand is the number one castle-building location of all time, and also doesn’t actually know what sand is, or what a castle is. But which feels pretty sure it’s definitely right about all this, because it has a helicopter. Do you have a helicopter?
It’s not just the stupidity though. The really chilling part of BlueCo Chelsea is its emptiness, the sense of something you love and cherish and feel connected to being hollowed out and petrified. This is the wider horror of Chelsea 3.0, reflected in those Sky Sports pictures at the final whistle at the Amex as the players communed with the fans, the look of men who have stared into the abyss and found the abyss staring right back into them.
Many things have been billed as the death of football, from hooliganism to the scrapping of the wage cap. Maybe this is what will kill it in the end. Drift, commodification, pricing out, the death of its status, even now, as a source of cultural connection. Let us leverage you, reconfigure you, and in the process entirely alienate you.
In the short term there is no way to fix Chelsea, other than for its ownership to leave or accept its ignorance, to reinsert footballing knowledge into the machine. For now BlueCo Chelsea feels like football’s own state of the art expression of late-American capitalism, an empire that’s still out there driving the world, but also clogged by its own arrogance and isolation.
There they go, up to their elbows on some foreign field, no clear endgame, entirely ignorant of the true nature of their opponents, money, energy and will being expended. But with the sense that someone at the top of this is still going to walk off with a trolley load of gold, whatever mess they happen to leave behind.
