Life’s a lemon for Poch, but Chelsea aren’t that bitter
Club desperate for new manager’s human approach to pay dividends
THE good news for Chelsea fans is that the key executives at the club have faith in Mauricio Pochettino.
The man who has a bowl of lemons in his office to suck up negative energy might seem like an odd fit for the club who aim to be data driven, with science and supposedly rational recruitment propelling them to 100 points a season, which is apparently what new owners Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali envisage, albeit they managed 44 last term.
It appears there is still room for a Pochettino-style Latin bear hug at the club that has been in search of a new identity ever since Roman Abramovich was sanctioned in March 2022. ‘Mauricio is more into feel,’ said one club source. ‘The lemons and all that. But you can’t do everything off a spreadsheet. The human element is important.’
And right now Pochettino is the best hope Chelsea have. ‘He’s made a deep impression on the players’ psychology,’ said the source. ‘It feels like we’re all part of one organisation.’
Which will be a relief to fans if true, because it does not look like that at the moment. The only victories Chelsea accrue are ones on paper. They are seventh in the xG table, that is the expected goals a team would have normally scored given the amount of chances they have created and, analysts insist, a fairer representation of how a team is playing.
Seventh is not amazing but it is better than 15th in the actual league table. Tomorrow’s derby with Fulham is a reminder that Chelsea are now second best in their London Borough and third best in west London, which seems a steep decline since being crowned the best team in the world in February 2022.
The most positive turnaround the new owners have performed is to recalibrate the club finances in a more sustainable manner. Headlines focus on the £1billion transfer spend but they have also offloaded players for about £400m. The clever part of that from an accountant’s point of view is that the academy players they sold (Mason Mount, Ruben LoftusCheek, Lewis Hall, Billy Gilmour and Callum Hudson-Odoi) are booked as pure profit. Which will at least make the books look good.
And high earners such as Kai Havertz, Kalidou Koulibaly, Hudson-Odoi and Jorginho are off the books, while the £106m fee paid for Enzo Fernandez is spread over seven years — Chelsea’s big idea to revolutionise football is long-term contracts — which only looks like a paltry £15m on this year’s accounts. (Though any good accountant will tell you this is a ‘spend in haste, repent at leisure’ approach. And UEFA and the Premier League have now closed this loophole, so Moises Caicedo’s £110m fee will be spread on the books over five years).
But the young players they have bought in are on considerably lower salaries than the squad they displaced, as Jose Feliciano, the Californian co-owner of private equity firm Clearlake Capital, the money behind Chelsea, said recently. ‘We sold half a billion dollars of players and reduced the salaries and essentially the opex [operating expenses] of the business, by more than $100m (£81.5m) a year.’ It sounds like gibberish but represents a significant transformation. Chelsea’s wage bill was unsustainable whether Abramovich was sanctioned or not. So book the open-top bus, barricade the Fulham Road and prepare for the parade: Chelsea are champions of the spreadsheet. In Santa Monica, they’ll toast their success with kale, mango and ginger smoothies.
The bad news is that Chelsea are less good at winning football matches and scoring real goals. Since the takeover, Chelsea have won 27 per cent of their games and lost 43 per cent, which is just about better than relegation form, in that it would accumulate 42 points a season.
Which is where Pochettino now has to weave his magic. He is nothing if not a football whisperer, coaxing the maximum from young players. It is not just the rise of Harry Kane under Pochettino that suggests this. Look at Harry Winks and Dele Alli at Spurs and their careers after his departure.
Pochettino and Jesus Perez are the best men for this job right now. Feliciano maybe was not fully cogniscient of the importance of maintaining a core of experienced players when trying to bed in a new regime. But at least the club hired the right man to get the best out of their young players.
Pochettino revealed last week he was regularly playing the crossbar challenge game with one of the club’s most-expensive flops, Mykhailo Mudryk. It is not just a chance for the Argentinian to show off his skills. It is time alone to chat with a struggling player. And Pochettino is good at that.
Right now, Chelsea need his new age lemons to work their spell. Without that, their spreadsheet success has them heading for mid-table mediocrity.