Ten reasons why Chelsea have sacked Liam Rosenior: ‘Aura’, Lampard, rebellion…

Chelsea have sacked Liam Rosenior after just 106 days at the helm on the back of their worst league run for well over a century.

Here are ten reasons why he became the latest BlueCo victim.

He talks a good game if you like that sort of thing, and we can absolutely see why some players were taken with his charm and personality, but when results don’t follow, the seize the day ‘friend first, boss second’ schtick is in danger of becoming very irritating very quickly and exposed for the High Performance, middle-management, big city recruitment firm tosh it appeared to be from the outset to more cynical minds.

A recent report from The Athletic claimed senior players damned Rosenior with faint praise by declaring him ‘a nice guy’ who’s ‘created a nice environment’ .

And while we don’t want to get too ‘this is Chelsea Football Club we’re talking about here’ and descend into Roy Keane-isms about the problems of being best mates with everyone, it sounds more like Rosenior is the proprietor of a Marbella beach bar than the manager of an elite football club.

Rosenior looks, acts and sounds like a guy who’s read a couple of books on football management and is putting his own spin on things, or someone who’s been created in a manager breeding trial before being disregarded as an outlier way too outlandish for public consumption.

The players saw through him after claiming he ‘lacks the aura’ of Enzo Maresca or Mauricio Pochettino.

Just as pretty much every Chelsea player improved to varying degrees under Maresca, almost all suffered a downturn under Rosenior.

Maresca saw to it that the price tags of Moises Caicedo and Enzo Fernandez were no longer worthy of mention; the former was touted as the best midfielder of his type in world football under his stewardship. Marc Cucurella was similarly heralded having been a figure of fun.

Levi Colwill came on hugely last season. Trevoh Chalobah was brought seamlessly back into the fold. He was getting a tune out of Pedro Neto. He proved doubters wrong by turning Reece James into an excellent central midfielder.

None of those players looked as good under Rosenior. The one outlier was Joao Pedro, who excelled, though his form has also dipped significantly in recent weeks.

We accept the difficulty in arriving mid-season with games coming thick and fast, and like with many of these reasons to send Rosenior packing, at the very least this wasn’t all on him.

The buck stops with BlueCo, but Chelsea have also been staggeringly successful through sacking managers in the middle of a campaign in the past, notably in 2012 and 2021, their two Champions League-winning seasons under Roberto Di Matteo and Thomas Tuchel.

The truly terrible display against Brighton on Tuesday made it five consecutive league defeats without scoring a goal for the first time since 1912.

He sectioned Enzo Fernandez for “crossing the line” by declaring his love for the city of Madrid and giving the middle finger to Chelsea in the form of a “we’ll see” when asked about his future at the club.

The attitude of the players since suggests they weren’t all that keen on him putting his foot down. It was certainly odd that Marc Cucurella didn’t join Fernandez on the naughty step for far more critical comments about the club that pay his wages and the wider issue was the evident lack of respect they felt in order to break ranks in such a way.

Again, he’s too ‘nice’. They wouldn’t even have thought of such dissent under Maresca and risk one of his withering looks. Tuchel would have ripped them to shreds. Even the prospect of disappointing club legend Frank Lampard would have been too much to bear.

Chelsea’s inability or lack of will to make the most of their outstanding academy remains one of the biggest bugbears of a fanbase treated to wonderful potential which, more often than not, sees other teams reap the rewards.

Their academy transfer failings have been brought into stark focus while Marc Guehi stars for Manchester City en route to a domestic treble as Rosenior tries and spectacularly fails to find a centre-back pairing worthy of playing for Chelsea. And what did the club do with that £18m of pure Guehi profit? Whatever it was, it definitely wasn’t put to good enough use to make it worth denying the club 10-plus years of a world-class defender.

Maresca struggled with his defence too after making plain the need for a new centre-back following the injury to Levi Colwill on the eve of the season, but at least the Italian recognised the opportunity that dearth granted to nurture and develop Acheampong’s talent.

The 19-year-old started six games under Maresca this season and just one under Rosenior, who inexplicably stuck with Jorrel Hato and Wesley Fofana as his preferred duo against Manchester United after consecutive 3-0 defeats to Everton and Manchester City.

Amid reports suggesting Acheampong is growing frustrated at his lack of game time you can bet your life BlueCo will bite hands off for £25m+ offers in the summer.

Here’s hoping Calum McFarlane, who handed him a start against Manchester City, gives him plenty of opportunity to shine in what remains of the campaign.

Something that BlueCo clearly should have considered before making his laughable appointment, but presumably a factor in sending him packing.

Of course everyone has to start somewhere and obviously every manager hadn’t won anything at some stage in their careers. But Chelsea were hanging their hat on a guy who has no previous association with the football club whose achievements to date are missing out on the Championship play-offs as Hull City boss and taking Strasbourg into the Conference League.

If Chelsea had been enduring this shocking run under a manager with titles (or a title) under their belt then there would have been hope to cling on to. But getting a team in Ligue 1 to play some quite good football with the aid of some hugely talented Chelsea cast-offs simply isn’t enough of a carrot.

Cole Palmer says his mind had been put at ease after “speaking to the owners” and through Reece James signing a new long-term contract, but he made no fewer than four references to “signing players we need in the summer” in his 304-word vow to stick it out at Chelsea and even a guy with the ‘brains of a suet pudding’ can’t hold out any hope of that.

The next load of promising, inexperienced players will arrive, maybe thrive but probably flop and they’ll be back to square one again.

Rosenior had nothing to do with the child rearing policy of course, but if Palmer, Joao Pedro, Moises Caicedo and the other top Chelsea players don’t believe in their teammates’ ability to drag them up to the next level they need optimism for the future, some evidence of Chelsea remaining a serious football club from a tangible source, and the look on their faces after the defeat to Brighton suggests they didn’t see Rosenior as the man to offer that reassurance.

We don’t mean to be disparaging of Lampard and we’re delighted he’s back in the game and proving many doubters wrong at Coventry , but the revisionism we’ve heard with regard to his first Chelsea spell in recent weeks is a damning indictment of what’s currently going on at Stamford Bridge.

Yes, he led Chelsea back into the Champions League and to an FA Cup final by bringing through academy players after being denied new additions through a transfer ban. But that first season was seen as a par score at best from almost everyone at the time and an alarming lack of direction and no tactics to speak of in his second campaign saw him booted out with the Blues 10th in the Premier League.

Tuchel came in, won the Champions League and led Chelsea to fourth with the same group of players. Lampard wasn’t a good Chelsea manager, he was just a better Chelsea manager than Rosenior, as almost all Chelsea managers have been.

The grass isn’t always greener but yer da is caring for the turf on the other side of Rosenior like a favourite child, spreading fertiliser, raking away the moss, donning those spiky shoes to aerate the soil, banning his actual children from going on it and watching it grow from the back door with a piping hot mug of tea. It looks glorious.

Chelsea would be far better off with at least the top five available managers , including the man they sacked three months ago, and there are any number of in-work alternatives BlueCo should be chasing while they still retain a modicum of respect as a football club. It won’t be long before the likes of Cesc Fabregas are turning their noses up at a doomed project.

Chelsea at their best were a bunch of pr*cks, and who better to nurture and develop burgeoning young talent into talented middle-aged pr*cks than an unapologetic pr*ck adored by his players and deified by his fanbase. If only it were true that