Liam Rosenior’s press conference before Chelsea’s FA Cup tie against Port Vale was more dramatic than most people had expected. The Chelsea head coach revealed that Enzo Fernandez would not feature in the club’s next two games – one of which is an important Premier League match against Manchester City.
The problem was Fernandez had done an interview while on international duty with Argentina in which he’d remarked that Madrid was a beautiful city that reminded him of Buenos Aires and that it would be a dream to live there and so on.
This came just a couple of weeks after another interview he’d given in the aftermath of Chelsea’s 8-2 aggregate defeat to PSG in the Champions League. Asked about his future, he had responded: “There are eight [Premier League] games left and the FA Cup and then there’s the World Cup and then we’ll see, we’ll see . . .”
Such talk is familiar to anyone who has followed the game longer than about five minutes. For example, at around the same time Fernandez was praising the loveliness of the city of Madrid, the Manchester City maestro Rodri was telling Spanish radio that nobody could turn down a move to Real Madrid and “I’d like to return [to La Liga], obviously”.
For Pep Guardiola, Rodri’s comments were “normal”. The surprise was that at Chelsea, Enzo’s have been deemed unacceptable.
“A line was crossed in terms of our culture and what we want to build,” Rosenior explained. “As a football club, with me as part of that process, we’ve made a decision.”
In other words, the sanction had come from the Chelsea hierarchy, not (just) the coach. To react with such force demonstrates that Fernandez’s comments had jabbed at the anxieties that haunt the BlueCo Chelsea model. Items on balance sheets are not supposed to publicly toy with alternative futures.
Chelsea manager Liam Rosenior gestures towards Joao Pedro after the team's elimination from the Carabao Cup against Arsenal in February's semi-final second leg. Photograph: Clive Mason/Getty Images
Chelsea manager Liam Rosenior gestures towards Joao Pedro after the team's elimination from the Carabao Cup against Arsenal in February's semi-final second leg. Photograph: Clive Mason/Getty Images
There was a revealing episode last month when a Chelsea fan-protest group, NotAProjectCFC, posted an account of a meeting they’d held with a Chelsea director, later revealed by the Daily Telegraph to be (Lord) Danny Finkelstein (who seemingly believed the meeting would be off the record).
The fans argued that Chelsea’s approach to squad-building – summed up by not signing any player aged 27 or older in the last three years – was not going to get the club seriously competing for the Premier League or Champions League. The fans told the director it was reminiscent of “Arsenal’s earlier years of playing at the Emirates Stadium post-2006, where a focus on developing youth rather than mixing youth with experience never developed into a team that was capable of winning leagues”.
The director disagreed. “The discussion became heated when the director responded by telling us players will mature as they get older and that, to them, it is ‘f***ing obvious we are building one of the best teams in the world’.”
It would indeed be obvious – if you could rely on footballers to “mature” as reliably as some other asset classes.
When Chelsea co-owner Todd Boehly’s firm Eldridge Industries bought a stake in Bruce Springsteen’s music catalogue in 2021, Boehly could be confident that the songs would keep doing the job he’d bought them to do for as long as he wanted them to do it.
Eldridge’s president, Tony Minella explained at a conference in Singapore last October that music rights are an investor’s dream compared to, for instance, real estate. “You don’t need to do tenant improvements, you don’t need to maintain a building. You have a catalogue that you can rerecord, you can go out and do endorsements and they’ve performed extremely well for us.”
It turns out, as an asset class, footballers compare poorly to music rights or even real estate.
The BlueCo philosophy is to spot players young, buy them cheap (although in practice, they have often been expensive) and sign them to long-term contracts. In the process, they are locking in the players’ potential for years to come.
Of course, no investment is risk-free and everyone knows things can go wrong. Some BlueCo signings have torn ACLs or ended up serving lengthy doping bans.
But let’s ignore the downside risk and think only about the best-case outcome: you sign the player and he does really well. What happens now?
Can you sit back and reap the benefit of your foresight, enjoying exorbitant margins for the rest of the player’s multi-year deal, as Eldridge Industries does with the ever-more-lucrative Bruce Springsteen catalogue?
No. Now the player wants much more money, or sometimes a change to a better club. Dancing In The Dark doesn’t have an agent whispering in its ear saying Real Madrid might be interested. Born To Run will never do an interview talking about how it loves the Buenos Aires-like vibes of the Madrid lifestyle. I’m On Fire isn’t going to throw a strop and start playing out of tune on everyone’s Spotify.
Paris Saint-Germain head coach Luis Enrique (right) has brought European success to the French club but is, apparently, not the kind of coach Chelsea would want. Photograph: Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP via Getty Images
Paris Saint-Germain head coach Luis Enrique (right) has brought European success to the French club but is, apparently, not the kind of coach Chelsea would want. Photograph: Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP via Getty Images
Looked at this way, Enzo’s dreamy talk of Madrid begins to sound less like the entitlement of a spoiled and disloyal footballer, and more like a rebellion of the human spirit against the cynicism that sees individuals as means rather than ends.
You feel BlueCo’s football model would work much better if it wasn’t for all the humans that unfortunately have to be involved. NotAProjectCFC complained to Lord Finkelstein that BlueCo Chelsea had been unable to sustain a relationship with any coach for longer than 18 months, with Enzo Maresca leaving the club after falling out with the hierarchy just when he appeared to have won the confidence of the fans.
“Once again, there was a lack of self-reflection from the director, who even said there is no statistical relationship between managers and results, and that their overall impact is overestimated,” they reported. The director apparently added that a coach like Luis Enrique would not have been suitable for Chelsea.
Since Luis Enrique is universally regarded as one of the very best coaches in the game right now, succeeding where many illustrious predecessors had failed in turning PSG into a football juggernaut, you have to wonder why the Chelsea board might feel he would not be the right coach for them.
The thing you can’t help noticing about Luis Enrique is he says what he thinks and he is ready to embrace conflict in pursuit of his objectives – in fact, he actually seems to enjoy it. A 2024 documentary following him as he worked at PSG was called “You Have No F***ing Idea”. The title was his own suggestion.
Chelsea have created a multi-departmental management structure encompassing five “sporting directors” all reporting to the senior co-owner Behdad Eghbali. The organisational concept might be described generously as “collaborative” and less generously as “a puppet show”.
In this context, the Luis Enrique type of personality is going to cause problems. BlueCo preferred to hire Rosenior, a young coach who is grateful for the opportunity, ready to accept any amount of “feedback” from the leadership and still declare himself “aligned”.
Whether the best Chelsea players would consider Rosenior to be a worthy replacement for Maresca – whether he was the kind of figure these players would want to stick around and play for – was a secondary consideration. Good relations with the hierarchy come before good relations with the players. Every club wants a coach who can “manage up”, but some seem to have forgotten the importance of managing down.