When the Chelsea FC hierarchy made Mauricio Pocchetino walk the plank at the end of last season, I was one of those who wondered what Todd Boehly and Co were up to. The Argentine didn’t get off to the best of starts as Blues coach- a string of home defeats between September and October 2023 particularly stung. But by May 2024 things were looking up. We didn’t qualify for the UEFA Champions League, but we made it into the Conference League. We even reached the semi-finals of the FA Cup and, were it not for a Virgil Van Dijk header in the dying seconds of extra time, we could have won the Carabao Cup. Somehow, these accomplishments, following a disaster of a season where Chelsea finished outside the top 10, were not enough for Pocchetino to keep his job.
Of all the coaches in the world, him?
I can imagine old Pocch sobbing along to Lemar’s ‘If There’s Any Justice’ as he counted the millions of pounds that the premature end of his contract surely entitled him to. A month later, his replacement was announced to be Enzo Maresca, the guy who had just helped Leicester City secure promotion back to the Premier League as they won the EFL Championship. Yes, the Italian had won a trophy, but that was Leicester; a great team, but not a top-six Premier League team. The closest Maresca had come to managing one of the EPL’s big guns was coaching Manchester City’s Under-21s. Yet here was Chelsea replacing a proven EPL boss with one whose short coaching resume was made up of stints in 2nd-tier leagues in England and Italy. Given the insane amounts splashed on players the previous season, we could have tempted the great Arsène Wenger out of his FIFA job, or his arch-nemesis and one of our most successful coaches, Jose Mourinho, out of his contract with AS Roma.