Liam Rosenior stands on the touchline.
Liam Rosenior’s Chelsea were on the end of an 8-2 aggregate scoreline against PSG.
The mood already appears to be turning against the earnest coach with the fashionable glasses and box-fresh trainers
The temptation is always to make excuses for Chelsea. They have a young and inexperienced side. They have lots of injuries. They’ve accidentally appointed a smart young entrepreneur as head coach. They actually played pretty well for part of the first leg. And then you remember they’ve spent £1.5bn to get to this point – and that from a position of strength an inquiry has concluded they achieved by illicit means.
The Premier League may have been lenient in its judgment, but pundits should not be. Chelsea were outclassed to an embarrassing degree. It was never going to be easy to overturn a 5-2 first-leg deficit, but 8-2 on aggregate is a humiliation. It wasn’t just the margin of victory, though; it was the sense that, after going 2-0 up inside 15 minutes, Paris Saint-Germain could essentially have scored whenever they felt like it. This was a Chelsea performance devoid not only of spark but of structure.
Coming on the back of a run of one win in five Premier League games, a Champions League humbling applies an unexpected pressure. There were sporadic boos from Chelsea fans and the sense is that the mood is already turning against Liam Rosenior. His LinkedIn style, the fashionable glasses and box-fresh trainers, the earnestness, management-speak and performative scuttling around his technical area, always seemed an unlikely fit for Stamford Bridge but the more pressing issue is how poor they are at defending. This was a defeat initiated by individual errors, but also rooted in systemic failings redolent of those suffered by Rosenior’s Hull side.
And while those doubts are surfacing, Rosenior at the weekend became embroiled in the nonsense over Chelsea’s huddle around the referee Paul Tierney, giving an angry interview in which he defended his players – an issue he would surely have been better advised to avoid. Inevitably, all eyes were on the pre-match antics. First Chelsea huddled about 20 yards from the centre spot, then huddled briefly again around the centre-spot, although with no ball in sight. It smacked of embarrassment at the whole process, fulfilling an obligation with all the enthusiasm of a stroppy child kissing his great-grandmother. Chelsea’s inability to respect the sacred sphere, perhaps, explained what came next: after the double huddle came the toil and the trouble.
For all the talk of how the expansiveness of the very best continental sides seemed to bypass the crabbed pressing structures of the Premier League teams last week, the goal that put PSG ahead could not have been more straightforward, a punt from a free-kick by the goalkeeper, Matvei Safonov, a dreadful mistake by Mamadou Sarr and a straightforward finish from Khvicha Kvaratskhelia. This was a bad night for Sarr, with the Confederation of African Football announcing midway through the second half that it has awarded the final of the Cup of Nations, which his Senegal won 1-0 after storming off the pitch in protest at a penalty decision, as a 3-0 win to Morocco.
PSG’s opener was as route-one as football gets, but it wasn’t even the daftest goal Chelsea conceded in the first quarter of an hour. Glorious as Bradley Barcola’s finish for the second was, he was only presented with the opportunity because Moisés Caicedo had smacked the ball into Andrey Santos to concede possession on the edge of the centre-circle – which perhaps itself felt insufficiently respected by Chelsea’s cursory pre-match ministrations.
Chelsea’s Mamadou Sarr runs after PSG’s Khvicha Kvaratskhelia.
Chelsea’s Mamadou Sarr could not get to grips with PSG’s Khvicha Kvaratskhelia. Photograph: Allstar Picture Library Ltd/Ed Sykes/Apl/Sportsphoto
Chelsea could argue they had matched the defending European champions in the first leg until Filip Jörgensen’s error gave PSG a 3-2 lead, after which they got picked off naively chasing the game, but the difference in class was evident here. In part, of course, it’s the injuries, which have only worsened under Rosenior as he has tried to employ a more dynamic style of play. Sarr would not have been in position to make his error had Reece James not damaged a hamstring against Newcastle; although even that does not explain why Sarr was playing at right-back for the first time in his professional career.
But there’s also a broader issue of balance. With both Enzo Fernández and Cole Palmer starting, Chelsea lack physicality. Fatigue is always an issue for Premier League sides at this stage of the season, but still it was noticeable how much sharper PSG looked through midfield. That Club World Cup final feels a very long time ago now.
So too does that run of five successive wins early in Rosenior’s tenure at Chelsea. He’s a good company man and did well at Strasbourg, but he is burning rapidly through whatever credit he may have. He has a six-year contract, but Chelsea have shown themselves willing to break long-term deals before and, if Chelsea fail to qualify for next season’s Champions League, there can be no guarantees he will be in charge at the start of the 2026-27 campaign. Certainly this game was not an argument for remaining patient.