In a wild and off-brand move, Chelsea have sacked a manager who’s only been at the club for 18 months or so.
We’re not sure what it will achieve. We don’t truly expect Chelsea to get better or worse for his departure, which is perhaps the most damning thought of the lot. He has been an unusual Chelsea manager – albeit for a very usual amount of time – and has delivered trophies but never any real sense of permanence.
He has never ever looked like the problem at Chelsea, but nor has he resembled a compelling solution.
And now he’s gone. So who comes next? According to the latest on oddschecker.com, one of these…
9=) Thomas Frank
There are lots of others joint ninth – Vincent Kompany, Luis Enrique, Max Allegri, and so on and so on – but this one is our favourite so we’ve put it in.
9=) Roberto De Zerbi
Getting plenty out of a talented Marseille squad, but his return to the Premier League has always felt like a question of when and where rather than if.
8) Gareth Southgate
No.
7) Xavi
Definitely going to be a Premier League manager at some point quite soon, we reckon, and interestingly the only manager in this top 10 who isn’t currently employed elsewhere. But is Chelsea in any way the right place for a man with a stated preference for a project he can really get his teeth into? When professing his love for the Premier League he talked about wanting four years at a club to really stamp his mark on them.
No Chelsea manager has lasted four years since the 1980s, long before football was invented and back when Stamford Bridge was still 27 per cent car park.
5=) Oliver Glasner
A man who may have some pretty interesting decisions to make over the coming months. There is a sense of him coming towards the end of a fine spell in charge of Crystal Palace, and a slight air of running out of steam with the team now winless in their last five.
But still. Do you swap the current job at which you are exceeding all expectations for a much bigger one at any one of what are far stupider football clubs? There’s all sorts of questions about prestige, risk-reward, potentially reputational damage to consider here. We’d say a chat with Graham Potter might be one starting point for Glasner.
5=) Francesco Farioli
A key figure in the new generation of coaches. Has been at Porto only since the summer, while last season’s title collapse at Ajax is still troublingly fresh in the memory. Seems unlikely, but this is Chelsea so who knows.
3=) Andoni Iraola
Just a terrible time for such an impressive manager to be on a 10-match run without a Premier League win. Careless of him, really.
3=) Filipe Luis
Has been hoovering up trophies as Flamengo boss and has already been linked with Chelsea in the past. Recent signing of a new contract a significant wrinkle.
2) Cesc Fabregas
Getting plenty of good notices for the work he’s doing with a very capable and enormously watchable Como team in Italy. Chelsea connections make him a very obvious contender but current reports suggest he is not the one.
1) Liam Rosenior
You, like us, may have been initially surprised to see the name of Liam Rosenior right at the very top of this list above so many seemingly far more plausible names. You, like us, may then have twigged that he is currently the manager of Strasbourg. And thus everything makes sense.
