Capricious Chelsea cruel to leave Sarri dangling with his future undecided
Even the Europa League triumph may not be enough to keep Italian in Stamford Bridge job
As clouds of glitter billowed across Baku’s Olympic Stadium, there was no more touching sight than that of 60-year-old Maurizio Sarri cradling his Europa League winner’s medal as if it was the first prize he had ever won.
It had, truth be told, been a while: 16 years, to be precise, since he claimed the Coppa Italia Serie D with Sansovino, the little Tuscan club not far from his home town. For his current club, the experience was a little more familiar, with Roman Abramovich’s billions ensuring a 16th major trophy over the same timespan.
Sarri understood, from the moment he first set foot inside Stamford Bridge, that any successes he achieved would be fleeting and precious. History taught him that there were ski-jacket salesmen in Fiji with more stable career prospects than the average Chelsea manager in the Abramovich era.
Carlo Ancelotti masterminded the double in 2010 and was gone within a year. Antonio Conte led his team to the Premier League title by seven points in 2017 and was deemed surplus to requirements the next season.
For Sarri, as for his predecessors, it is a Faustian pact: sign the fattest cheque of your life, but accept that with this owner, the end can come abruptly and with minimal justification. Even so, there is a sense that he deserves better than this latest predicament, where any exultance at hard-earned silverware lasts only until the next bombardment of questions about his future.
Abramovich’s philosophy on managers is utterly ruthless, based on a conviction that buying the best entitles him to treat them solely as guns for hire. After the 4-1 demolition of Arsenal, Sarri shrugged that his debrief with the Russian and transfer chief Marina Granovskaia would be “normal”. In reality, it will be anything but, with
Abramovich’s inscrutability and refusal to offer any public assurances breeding a mood of perpetual unease.
Chelsea fully merited their European triumph, with 12 wins and three draws across eight months, but rarely can the reward for such a marathon effort have felt so fragile and, dare one say it, hollow. For all that the club won in Azerbaijan, just consider what they stood to lose. They were facing up not just to Sarri’s potential departure, but to the certain exit of their finest player, Eden Hazard, who acknowledged within seconds of the final whistle that he was seeking a fresh challenge.
It is not as if Chelsea even have many options on how to spend the €120 million (£106 million) that Real Madrid are paying them for
Abramovich could, of course, make a case that this addiction to chaos brings results
the Belgian’s services. This summer they are deciding whether to appeal against a two-window transfer ban, having broken the rules on the signing of under-18 overseas players.
The greatest imponderable concerns the role of Abramovich himself. This Europa League final was the first competitive match he had attended for more than a year, after he was denied a UK visa extension last summer. He subsequently took up Israeli citizenship, but where once he would entertain hundreds of guests in his Stamford Bridge hospitality suites, he has not been seen at a game within 2,500 miles of the stadium since. Even his attempt in Baku at a rousing dressing-room speech reportedly did not go quite to plan, with David Luiz disclosing that players had jokingly thrown various objects at him.
Bruce Buck, the Chelsea chairman, denies that there is any uncertainty over Abramovich’s future, saying that he receives calls from him several times a day. The insistence on normality was a touch difficult to credit, however, when the same Buck was this week pictured deep in conversation at a Baku hotel with Andrea Agnelli, his counterpart at Juventus, one of Sarri’s mooted destinations. Contrary to any idea that the club would try to build on what they already have, Chelsea look poised to roll the dice once more.
It is, frankly, perverse. They have swept aside their London rivals in a European final, finished third in the league and runners-up in the Carabao Cup, but still they would rather engage in another game of snakes and ladders.
Abramovich could, of course, make a case that this addiction to chaos brings results. He has gone through 13 different managers since 2003 but tasted glory in both the Champions League and Europa League. Arsenal, by contrast, have had only two men in charge during that period, and have not won a European final since the 1994 Cup-winners’ Cup.
But it is Chelsea’s sheer capriciousness that continues to make them mightily hard to love. They are willing to leave Sarri, ostensibly a decent man if not always a purveyor of the prettiest football, twisting in the wind. And for all that Chelsea fans might believe that the ends tend to justify the means, why does Hazard, their talisman and their brightest light, now feel he would be better off elsewhere? The road to popularity and prestige in football can be a tortuous one. Manchester City are discovering as much, taking 198 points from two seasons but still finding themselves lampooned as the playthings of Abu Dhabi plutocrats.
Chelsea’s place in wider public affection is arguably even more vexed, courtesy of Abramovich’s machinations. Sarri declared in Baku that he loved his players. Then again, he also threw a fit of pique in training and kicked his club cap. Such is the frustration, perhaps, of working for employers so impervious to sentiment, and whose modus operandi is still to be as contrary as possible.