Andoni Iraola at Stamford Bridge in December 2025.placeholder image
Andoni Iraola at Stamford Bridge in December 2025. | AFP via Getty Images
Andoni Iraola is the early favourite to replace Liam Rosenior at Chelsea - but is he the right man for the job?
With the news that Liam Rosenior had been sacked in the wake of Chelsea’s dismal 3-0 defeat to Brighton & Hove Albion on Tuesday evening, BlueCo find themselves searching for a sixth permanent head coach in just four years of ownership. The club has become a byword for managerial churn, and the owners are earning a reputation for making the wrong appointments. That may not change just yet.
In their statement announcing the 41-year-old’s departure, Chelsea said that they would “undertake a process of self-reflection to make the right long-term appointment,” but reports already suggest that a shortlist has been cobbled together with one name alleged to be at the top of the list: Bournemouth’s Andoni Iraola.
Iraola has the shortest odds with the bookmakers at the time of writing. He’s already announced that he will leave Bournemouth when his contract expires this summer, and is the kind of young, dynamic and ascending manager that BlueCo appear to prize. But would he be the right man for the job?
Andoni Iraola is a superb manager – but could be a bad fit for Chelsea
Iraola arrived at Bournemouth in 2023 with a reputation as a tactically astute manager who had overachieved in Spain with Rayo Vallecano and who was deeply popular with his players – and swiftly proved that assessment of his talents to be correct. In the context of his club’s relatively limited resources, he has worked some small wonders at Dean Court.
The 43-year-old instituted an aggressive style of play which prized width and looked to create overloads in wide areas, exploiting gaps in opposing defences as quickly as possible – not long-ball football, but exceptionally direct nonetheless.
The quality of his man management and individual coaching has shone through as well. He made stars out of talents like Dean Huijsen and Milos Kerkez in short time, got the best out of Antoine Semenyo and Dominic Solanke, and managed to maintain momentum despite their inevitable sales. The rapidity with which new arrivals, often very green, have established themselves in his first-team has been remarkable.
All of that makes him very appealing to Chelsea. The football his teams play is exciting and he has done exceptionally well at developing youth - a necessity for any coach at Stamford Bridge given the enormous amount of money spent on dozens of young players during the current regime’s tenure. To an extent, he’s precisely what Chelsea want – and he’s available for free, which is handy when you’ve just paid a hefty amount of compensation, yet again, to move on from the last manager.
The question mark is whether Chelsea’s squad is particularly well suited to Iraola’s tactical methods. This is a side which has been built to very different specifications – to play narrower, for starters, especially down the left flank. Iraola wants wingers who can stretch play and wing-backs who will attack the byline. As good as Marc Cucurella and Reece James may be, that’s not really their way.
Chelsea have wingers who are typically looking to check inside, wing-backs who prefer to play supporting roles and focus on their passing games rather than attacking wide areas in the final third, and arguably lack the kind of off-the-shoulder striker that Iraola needs to push defences back – Liam Delap could fit the bill, but has struggled desperately in his debut season at Stamford Birdge, while the board doesn’t appear interested in giving Nicolas Jackson a second chance.
And how would Cole Palmer fit into what remains, fundamentally, a base 4-4-2 system even if Bournemouth’s team sheets are often published as a 4-2-3-1? Would he be willing to stay wider on the right, or could he operate as a true second striker – as rising star Eli Junior Kroupi does – rather than as a number 10?
Clearly, Iraola could change his tactics. Just because he has played one way at Rayo and Bournemouth doesn’t mean he doesn’t have range. But the further you ask managers to stray from their tactical template – and the more you ask players to adapt their playing style – the more risk becomes attached to the project.
Chelsea, of course, are not generally shy of spending money and would surely have little compunction about switching their forwards around again, for instance, but have struggled for some time to keep up with UEFA’s financial regulation (the sale of the women’s team to their owners’ holding company didn’t help them there). They have already received a £27m fine for breaches in 2025 and could be banned from European competition if they fall afoul of the fiscal rules again. The owners may be staggeringly wealthy, but throwing cash at a new head coach’s needs may not be feasible.
Iraola would be unlikely to prove as awkward a strategic fit for Chelsea as, say, Ruben Amorim was at Manchester United – that was a tactical disaster that looked likely from the start – but he isn’t necessarily the neatest fit for Chelsea’s players. But would any of the alternatives be much better?
Would an Edin Terzić type of coach suit Chelsea better?
When the story of Rosenior’s sacking first broke, former Borussia Dortmund manager Edin Terzić appeared to be the primary alternative to Iraola. There would certainly have been some logic behind it. For all that he has obtained a reputation as both a nearly man and as a coach who doesn’t find it easy to get along with his players, Terzić’s pragmatic style of play and adherence to approximations of the 4-3-3 would have suited Chelsea quite nicely. Sadly, he appears to have agreed to take over at Athletic Club in Spain - that’s one way to get off the shortlist.
At Dortmund, he usually played with either a traditional 4-3-3 with two eights and a single holding midfielder, or a 4-2-3-1 with a single number 10, with inverted wide forwards – a system which, on paper, would be a tidier fit for Chelsea’s current squad.
The debate with Terzić, who has been out of work since leaving Dortmund in the wake of their Champions League final defeat to Real Madrid in 2024, was whether he can take teams over the line when silverware is on the line (having failed not only at Wembley in 2024 but also on the final day of the prior Bundesliga season when they drew to Mainz and let the title slip away) and whether the public disagreements he had with his squad towards the end of his tenure – most notably with Mats Hummels – would become a recurring theme of his career or not.
Chelsea have enjoyed plenty of success under pragmatic coaches like Antonio Conte and José Mourinho, and Terzić seems to be cut from relatively similar cloth. His style of play – relatively conservative but also adaptable, used to playing out of a 4-2-3-1/4-3-3 base – should at least offer a good template for BlueCo to follow. Terzić may no longer be an option, but the thought process behind putting him on their initial shortlist may well prove to be sound.
If Behdad Eghbali, Todd Boehly and their fellow board members do indeed take their time over a decision and undergo a process of sincere self-reflection, we may not discover their decision very quickly. Maybe they will take a chance on Iraola’s obvious managerial talent, or perhaps they will go in a different direction entirely. For once, however, they have to learn to look at a new head coach from all angles before they make their choice. There may be a better fit out there than Iraola, even if they aren’t as good of a manager in a void.
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