Liam Rosenior reacts as Chelsea go behindplaceholder image
Liam Rosenior reacts as Chelsea go behind | Getty Images
Liam Rosenior's side slumped to their fifth Premier League defeat in a row after being thrashed 3-0 by Brighton
If there is one idea that has marked out a truly desperate Premier League manager this season, it has been the sudden desire to dabble with a back three. It has become the top flight’s equivalent of the struggling theatre company putting on Macbeth in the hope of putting bums on empty seats. Chelsea’s Liam Rosenior has become the latest head coach to realise how fruitless of an endeavour it can be.
The unexpected move to a 3-4-3 against Brighton & Hove Albion on Tuesday night led to one of the most lopsided dismantlings of a top-half team seen in many years. Chelsea were entirely outclassed in every department, ripped to pieces with ease and efficiency. So how did Rosenior, touted as an ascending coach but now flailing vainly for fresh ideas, get it so wrong? And why has the back three failed so badly this season?
Chelsea’s back three was the mark of a desperate manager running out of good ideas
The 3-0 defeat at the Amex Stadium marked Chelsea’s fifth consecutive Premier League match without scoring a goal – the first time, as Sky’s commentators gleefully told us, that they have gone so long without hitting the back of the net since the sinking of the Titanic back in 1912.
The club’s hopes of making the Champions League appear to be sinking in similar fashion, but it’s hard to find any metaphorical equivalent to the band resolutely playing on as the ship goes down. If any member of Chelsea’s squad is keen to do everything possible to right the recent downturn of results, they are doing a fine job of hiding it.
Perhaps Rosenior’s rather Brentish mode of communication hasn’t connected with his players, or perhaps this is just a case of a run of bad luck turning into an inescapable psychological rut. It’s worth remembering, as the predictions of Rosenior’s sacking circulate, that he was desperately unfortunate to lose 1-0 to Manchester United over the weekend. Chelsea were the better team in that match – but they certainly weren’t against Brighton.
A sudden switch of formation is seldom a sign of confidence, and the fact that it looked like Chelsea had scarcely even practiced playing with a back three suggested that panicked decision of a manager losing his usual composure.
That was born out by an atypically fiery post-match press conference, during which he accurately described his team’s performance as “indefensible” and “unacceptable in every aspect of the game, unacceptable in our attitude.”
“Something needs to change drastically,” Rosenior continued. It probably shouldn’t have been the formation, especially on the back of a relatively positive outing on Sunday. The positional demands of a back three are wildly different from those of a back four, and expecting even top-tier professionals to get it right in one go feels optimistic.
Thomas Frank gave it a go against Arsenal when Tottenham Hotspur’s form was starting to go sideways, and took a 4-1 hiding. Eddie Howe tried it twice with Newcastle this season and didn’t win on either occasion. Brentford, West Ham and Nottingham Forest have all dabbled without securing three points even once between them. Back threes have struggled all season.
As it stands, the drastic change most likely to occur seems to be in the dugout, with Rosenior’s odds of surviving the summer seemingly shifting from slim to none with Tuesday’s humiliation. Brighton looked like a team that knew what they were doing, that were sharp and fresh and ready. Chelsea quite the opposite in every regard, and the absences of Cole Palmer and João Pedro offered no excuses for a teamwide debacle.
Their defenders didn’t just look uncertain of their positioning, but as though they had never crossed paths before. This was an evening of individual errors but also of total tactical incompetence. Rosenior failed, completely, to drill his squad in the requisites of their roles in a 3-4-3 formation, and it resulted in absolute evisceration.
Why the back three has struggled so badly in the 2025/26 season
For a little while, 3-4-3 seemed to be the next big thing in football. Chelsea themselves have had success with it before, winning the 2016/17 Premier League title using the system under Antonio Conte – and there are still plenty of countries in which managers are having success with it. In England, however, it has been something of a disaster, at least over the course of the current season.
Had Rosenior looked at the statistics, he might have thought twice about implementing a system which hasn’t helped many teams in recent months. Only four teams have used it with any kind of regularity in the 2025/26 campaign: Manchester United, who moved away from a back three after sacking Ruben Amorim; Crystal Palace, arguably underperforming; Wolves, who have gone down; and Burnley, who are following them having used a three-man defence in just under half of their games.
This isn’t simply a case of a coincidence in which the teams that happen to play some variant of a 3-4-3 or 3-5-2 are also the weaker teams in the league, either: 13 teams have started a match with a back three at one point or another this year, and it has almost always been a failure. Teams have linked up in such a way 140 times this season, and won just 31 times – a dismal win rate of 22%. Only the Premier League’s current bottom three have lower win percentages as individual teams.
The only team to have tried out a back three and enjoyed any kind of sustained success are Leeds, who switched to a 3-5-2 around the turn of the year and swiftly went on a seven-match unbeaten run which started with a 3-1 win over Chelsea and included two draws with Liverpool. Their win rate of exactly one in three since the switch isn’t especially strong, but that includes a lot of creditable draws and their form improved enough to start moving them away from the relegation zone. They look unlikely to go down as it stands.
Daniel Farke’s work with a back three has been the glaring exception to the rule, however. There are several possible explanations, but the most likely is that it’s simply not a tactic which lines up well against teams who play direct and wide – and that’s an apt description for much of the top flight right now.
The natural set-up for a back three creates a narrow central defence which leaves space in behind what are typically very aggressive wing-backs for teams who are comfortable going long to their wingers to exploit. As the Premier League gets quicker, more direct and less possession-focussed in response to high lines and heavy pressing, the back three finds itself in an awkward spot.
It’s also a very difficult system for players used to a back four to adapt to, with the positional requirements and movement triggers very different to those in a 4-2-3-1 system, the Premier League’s dominant set-up. It takes training time and clear tactical instruction to switch in and out, as every team to have dabbled since the summer has found out.
Rosenior seems to have gambled on either his ability to instil the fundamentals within the space of a couple of days of training, or on his players’ capacity to work it out for themselves. It did not pay off, and one suspects that he will scramble back towards a back four with his tail between his legs in time for this weekend’s FA Cup semi-final against Leeds – ironically, the back three’s one true champion.
Perhaps an FA Cup win and a strong run of form for the end of the season will be enough to persuade Chelsea’s decision makers to give him another chance, but as it stands it’s difficult to imagine Rosenior’s stay at Stamford Bridge being a lengthy one: And with his tactics at Brighton on Tuesday evening, he has only given his board all the more reason to question his position.
Continue Reading