Chelsea have become the football club that know the price of everything but the value of nothing, and it is why the team is drifting toward a failure to qualify for the Champions League under a head coach who is not ready for the job.
Saturday’s 3-0 defeat at Everton left Liam Rosenior’s team a point behind fifth-placed Liverpool in the race for the final Champions League qualification spot — the Premier League is virtually certain to claim that extra spot due its position at the top of UEFA’s coefficient table — but it was not an isolated setback for the FIFA Club World Cup winners.
It was Chelsea’s fourth successive defeat in all competitions and their third in a row without scoring; during that run they also suffered an 8-2 Champions League round of 16 hammering at the hands of Paris Saint-Germain.
Under Rosenior, who left Chelsea’s sister club Strasbourg in January to replace the sacked Enzo Maresca, the team have won just three of its past 12 games, but that unimpressive run of results has somewhat slipped under the radar thanks to a variety of other distractions at Stamford Bridge.
There has been a Premier League-record fine of £10.75 million and suspended transfer ban as a sanction for illicit payments made during Roman Abramovich’s ownership of the club, and there have also been Rosenior’s clumsy, sometimes bewildering, comments and actions.
His decision to hand winger Alejandro Garnacho a tactical note while Chelsea had just five minutes to overturn their six-goal deficit in the second-leg against PSG and the defense of his players’ decision to encircle the ball — as well as referee Paul Tierney — prior to kickoff in the 1-0 home defeat against Newcastle United because they wanted to “respect the ball.”
When there are so many distractions and diversions off the pitch, it can be easy to forget what is happening on it. Right now, Chelsea are performing like an imbalanced and inexperienced team, guided in the inimitable way by the overpromoted and ill-equipped Rosenior.
But while Rosenior, who was given a six-year contract when he replaced Maresca, is beginning to feel the heat from the club’s unhappy supporters, it would be wrong to pin the blame for Chelsea’s problems on him.
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Rosenior, 41, is simply a symptom of Chelsea dysfunctionality rather than a cause of it, and his presence in the dugout is rooted in the philosophy of the club’s owners, Clearlake Capital and Todd Boehly’s BlueCo, who have chosen a path of big spending on some aspects of the team and financial corner-cutting on others.
The team is overloaded with overrated forwards, often signed for bloated transfer fees, while key areas such as goalkeeper — and head coach — are neglected in favor of low-budget options.
Take last summer’s recruitment of Jamie Gittens, Borussia Dortmund’s 21-year-old winger, for a £48.5 million transfer fee. Two months later, Chelsea added Manchester United’s Alejandro Garnacho to their squad in a £40 million deal, while earlier that summer, Estêvão, 18, arrived from Palmeiras for an initial £29 million.
All three are young players with potential, and Chelsea can’t operate without wingers, but during the same summer, the club pursued AC Milan goalkeeper Mike Maignan — a proven and experienced No. 1 — yet opted against doing a deal because they regarded the £21 million transfer fee as excessive.
That decision meant that Chelsea went into this season with Robert Sánchez and Filip Jørgensen competing for the goalkeeper position, but neither are good enough and both have made high-profile mistakes in recent weeks. Rosenior dropped Sanchez in favor of Jorgensen in the first-leg against PSG, and the Denmark international made two mistakes leading to goals. Yet at Everton at the weekend, Sanchez was back in goal and he made a mistake leading to a goal, too.
So the club that has spent almost £2 billion on signing players since Clearlake-BlueCo bought Abramovich’s stake in May 2022 still don’t have a competent goalkeeper. But at least they have plenty of wingers.
As a consequence of the recruitment decisions taken before he arrived at the club, Rosenior is having to work with a weak hand, although he still has some outstanding players — Cole Palmer, Moisés Caicedo, João Pedro — at his disposal. Yet Rosenior’s appointment is another example of Chelsea not realizing the value of experience and that, sometimes, proven quality matters.
Rosenior is regarded within the game as a bright and intelligent young coach; England and United legend Wayne Rooney is on record saying how impressed he was with him when Rosenior was his assistant at Derby County. Rosenior was also harshly dismissed by Hull City in May 2024 after missing out on the EFL Championship playoffs by one position, a year after the club finished in the bottom half of the table.
But despite his reputation as a coach with promise, the leap from Strasbourg to Chelsea was far too big, and the football hierarchy at Stamford Bridge has given him a role that he is nowhere near ready to fulfil.
It is now the Chelsea way for coaches to simply be part of the football structure — a cog within a bigger wheel of upper management and multiple sporting directors — but that works only if you leave the coach to coach.
At a club with a global presence such as Chelsea, the position demands much more than ability on the training ground — the head coach/manager needs to fill the office with charisma because they must manage the expectation of the supporters and deal with an insatiable media.
Every word matters and Rosenior, just like Maresa before him, has said the wrong thing too often. But that is down to his inexperience. Managing Hull and Strasbourg does not, and cannot, prepare you for managing Chelsea.
Former owner Abramovich hired big-hitters such as Jose Mourinho, Carlo Ancelotti, Antonio Conte and Thomas Tuchel for that reason. He wanted big characters with track records to match. Right now, the new Chelsea seem to want none of that. They want shiny new forwards with potential, but are prepared to make economies on goalkeepers and coaches.
Rosenior embodies that two-tier approach, and both he and his team are suffering because of it.
