TIME AT PSG WILL SERVE POCHETTINO WELL FOR CHELSEA JOB
▶ Argentine set for Premier League return at club who have also spent big but have familiar boardroom issues
Ahead of the 2017 FA Cup semi-final, an ambitious young manager heard a knock on the door of his Wembley dressing-room. It was his counterpart, offering condolences for a colleague who had recently passed away. The two men then got talking.
“A wide-ranging chat,” Mauricio Pochettino, then the manager of Tottenham Hotspur recalled of his conversation with Antonio Conte, then of fellow Londoners Chelsea. “Two different approaches to football were laid bare: Talking to the manager of Chelsea is a good way of confirming how different things are. Same league, same city, but our problems are totally different.”
Fast forward a mere six years and Chelsea and Spurs look like clubs with very many problems in common. They are both under interim management, having changed head coach twice this season. Both are falling far short of targets and facing up to a 2023-24 campaign without Champions League football.
Back in the spring of 2017, they were not only the top two clubs in London, but first and second in the Premier League. Conte’s Chelsea ended up winning it and defeating Pochettino’s Spurs in that Cup semi-final. In the period since, Spurs terminated Pochettino’s fiveand-a-half year tenure as their manager, and, after bringing in another ex-Chelsea manager, Jose Mourinho, have hired and said goodbye to another, Conte. Chelsea now look ready to complete the circular dance by offering Pochettino the chance to become the fifth manager to take charge of their first team in the space of a year.
The Argentinian, 51, is eager to manage again in England. He feels more worldly that he was in 2017, thanks to the uplift he gave Spurs and a testing period in charge of Paris Saint-Germain, and is understood to be giving Chelsea serious consideration.
But the Premier League landscape he knew and enjoyed at Spurs has altered significantly. Look only at London, where Arsenal are now the city’s pacesetters and will take on Chelsea today seeking to regain from Manchester City the leadership of the Premier League.
If they win, it would broaden the gap between them and Chelsea to a vast 39 points and 11 places. To look at Arsenal’s Mikel Arteta is to see a manager doing some of what Pochettino did at Spurs between 2014 and 2019. It sees a young coach guiding a fairly young team with bold instincts but also with a hint of fragility, and, in a division where managers have lately been chopped and changed with unusually high frequency, an example of the virtues of staying patient through the high-pressure moments.
That was the point made by Chelsea’s interim manager, Frank Lampard, as he prepared for the trip to Arsenal, with five successive defeats in his immediate rear-view mirror and three changes of coach – from Thomas Tuchel to Graham Potter to the previous stand-in, Bruno Saltor – in the backstory of a surreal nine months at Stamford Bridge.
“It is interesting to compare,” said Lampard of Arsenal’s faith in Arteta, who was appointed in late 2019. “There’s a long process to get where you want. You have to go back to the tough periods – I saw times when the manager was being questioned and that process can take two or three years. Another club might have changed manager two or three times.”
Chelsea did – five times. Before Tuchel came to Chelsea, in early 2021, Lampard had been Chelsea’s manager not on an interim basis, but as what they envisaged as a vote of confidence in a former playing idol’s capacity to take proven leadership credentials into a coaching role.
That formula is unreliable. Arteta, a former Arsenal midfielder, may have found, after some bumps in the road, success as their manager; Lampard was jettisoned after 18 months by Chelsea and recalled last month only as a short-term fireman.
Pochettino, who captained PSG in the early 2000s, found a very different club when, succeeding Tuchel, he became their manager almost two decades later. PSG had wealth, thanks to their Qatari owners, and although he won a Ligue 1 title, the same shortcomings in Europe – where his PSG were eliminated after holding a 2-0 aggregate lead until a disastrous half-hour of a last-16 tie against Real Madrid – that have counted against several PSG coaches contributed to his departure after just 18 months in France.
But the PSG episode carries useful lessons for any volatile workplace. Chelsea are less than a year into new ownership and, like PSG, they spend lavishly: close to €700 million on players in the last two transfer windows. Pochettino surveys all that and can see dazzling potential in the squad as well as all the missteps in the boardroom.
Lampard saw it and, being available, still accepted his short-term role. “I came in with eyes wide open,” he said.
Pochettino needs the same clarity, and so, urgently, do Chelsea.
The PSG episode carries useful lessons for any volatile workplace but Pochettino can see the squad’s dazzling potential