Seldom can a manager – or rather head coach – have arrived into the job so predigested by the wider fan-media complex. Liam Rosenior is physically slight, wears glasses, smiles a lot, talks about “being vulnerable with the players”. He seems intelligent, friendly, well-adjusted, polite. In other words, he’s the opposite of what most football fans consider leadership material.
Rosenior presents as a guy who would be more at home in the boardroom talking to his five sporting directors than in the dressing-room marshalling his 25 first-team players. He is fluent in the corporate-bureaucratic language of high performance, alignment, “the journey”, and so on, which is why some fans are already calling him LinkedIn Liam.
Maybe today’s footballer is actually more amenable to such talk than many of us believe. Over the weekend, Liverpool’s Cody Gakpo posted on LinkedIn about some of the successes he had enjoyed in 2025 in his side-career as a venture capitalist. Dressing-rooms have changed. But yes, it looks like Rosenior has been chosen more for his appeal to the Chelsea executives than for his anticipated effect on the Chelsea players and fans.
Like an increasing number of clubs, Chelsea are run by a group of executives who have embraced the concept of the head coach, who functions as one cog within a larger corporate machine, and reject the notion of the “unicorn” manager – a charismatic figure who personally incarnates the spirit of the club.
Why this word “unicorn”? In the language of finance, a unicorn is a start-up valued at more than a billion dollars. That type of unicorn at least exists. In the football context, the relevance of the term seems to be that a unicorn is (1) a wonderful magical animal, beloved by all, and (2) doesn’t actually exist. The term implies that many clubs are wasting their time in a stone-age search for some kind of magical leader, when they should be concentrating on building a rational structure that can reliably deliver success.
As the Sunday Times’s Jonathan Northcroft wrote yesterday: “Six years ago the FA’s former performance chief, Dave Reddin, talked about the death of the ‘unicorn’ manager, telling Training Ground Guru it was a ‘flawed concept’ that one person ‘has all the answers’ and is ‘untouchable’ at a club.”
Liam Rosenior trying to make his presence felt during Chelsea's FA Cup win over Charlton on Saturday. Photograph: Justin Setterfield/Getty Images
Liam Rosenior trying to make his presence felt during Chelsea's FA Cup win over Charlton on Saturday. Photograph: Justin Setterfield/Getty Images
Of course it’s a flawed concept – it’s a concept that flows from the human imagination. “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made,” as Immanuel Kant put it.
Clubs like Chelsea are trying to systematise and bureaucratise the running of football clubs, such that one head coach can be replaced by another without friction. The ideal might be a world in which the executives are hailed as the real stars, with the coaches and players mere pieces on their chessboards.
These people have forgotten that the power and magic of football flows from the imagination of the crowd.
Viewed in the abstract, the idea of “charisma” can be dismissed as a mass delusion. But football is not played in the abstract. It’s played in front of crowds of tens of thousands of people. Whether your “project” stands or falls ultimately depends on how you make these people feel. In a sense, mass delusion is the whole point of the exercise.
The classic writer on charismatic authority is Max Weber, who explained what he meant by the concept as follows: “The term ‘charisma’ will be applied to a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such, as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a ‘leader’. In primitive circumstances this peculiar kind of quality is thought of as resting on magical powers ...”
Charisma flows from many sources towards the same ultimate destination in the imagination of the believers. “What is alone important is how the [charismatic] individual is actually regarded by those subject to charismatic authority, by his ‘followers’ or ‘disciples.’” Maybe nobody really has supernatural powers, but if people believe they do ... then the effect is much the same.
Liam Rosenior, Jorrel Hato and Chelsea will soon face harder tests than the one set by Charlton in Saturday's FA Cup tie. Photograph: Justin Setterfield/Getty Images
Liam Rosenior, Jorrel Hato and Chelsea will soon face harder tests than the one set by Charlton in Saturday's FA Cup tie. Photograph: Justin Setterfield/Getty Images
Weber sees charisma not as an outdated feature of primitive systems, as today’s football executives seem to conceive of it, but as an inescapable phenomenon to which all systems of authority are recurrently subject. It’s the mode of authority to which people turn in emergencies. Non-charismatic systems of authority – whether “traditional” or “rational-legal” in Weber’s terms – are built to handle the everyday. But in times of crisis, when the system seems all out of answers, the people cry out for a messiah.
And what is football but a perpetual crisis-generator? Even the most stable and forward-thinking clubs can be plunged into emergency by a deflected shot or a badly-timed injury. At such moments the future of the “project” depends on one question: do the players and fans still believe?
The biggest reason to doubt that Rosenior can succeed at Chelsea actually has little to do with his personal qualities. It is that he is identified too closely with the corporate structure of the club, so he risks being perceived as the puppet of a system that is already unpopular.
Chelsea’s most popular and successful coaches have been charismatic outsiders such as José Mourinho, Antonio Conte and Thomas Tuchel, constantly at war with the apparatchiks of the club. Compared with these, Rosenior might as well be a sixth sporting director who happens to sit in the dugout.
The unicorn may be a fantastical beast, but imagining you can win without tapping into the emotional energy of your players and fans is more fantastical still.