The Ephemeric

It's hard to believe, but as recently as 2021, Chelsea were crowned Champions of Europe, the highest accolade in club football, for the second time in nine years. This victory capped off a glittering 18 year period of ownership under Roman Abramovich which saw the club claim five Premier League titles, two Champions Leagues, five FA Cups, three League Cups, two Europa Leagues, the Super Cup and the former Club World Cup (now Intercontinental Cup). During this time, whatever you might think of them, Chelsea were undoubtedly one of the world's biggest clubs.

During this period, Chelsea even managed to become profitable as a business for the first time in their history. By contrast, the new owners have just recorded the largest single-year loss in Premier League history, and are in very real threat of flunking the already absurdly lenient Financial Fair Play rules. The idea that anyone could take such a successful club, invest so much into that club, and turn them into mid-table club with solvency issues, in a state of constant crisis, is genuinely difficult to believe.

So what is going wrong? To answer this question, let's quickly run through the events of these past four years.

Season 1: 20 players signed, £574 million spent. Successful Champions League winning manager Thomas Tuchel is sacked 1 month into the season. Reason: disagreed with owners' transfer policy. Replaced by Graham Potter, a manager with no track record of silverware whose claim to fame is doing better than one might expect of a club like Brighton. He lasts five months. Frank Lampard comes in, but by then the bottom has already fallen out. Final position: 12th. Silverware: none.

Season 2: 13 players signed, £407 million spent. Well-regarded manager Mauricio Pochettino is brought in. Struggles initially, but by the end of the season has managed to work his available resources into a credible team. Sacked at the end of the season despite the strong finish. Reason: disagreed with the owners' transfer policy. Final position: 6th. Silverware: none.

Season 3: 11 players signed, £220 million spent. Controversially appoints Enzo Maresca, a manager with no top flight experience. Despite all odds, Maresca manages to achieve some consistency and stability, claiming the first pieces of silverware of the Clearlake era, as well as a top four Champions League qualifying finish. Final position: 4th. Silverware: Europa Conference League, Club World Cup.

Season 4: 19 players signed, £311 million spent. Decent start to the season, carrying on from Maresca's promising first season. Competing at the top of the table, with positive results including the 3-0 demolishings of PSG and Barcelina. Maresca sacked half way through the season. Reason: disagreed with the owners' transfer policy. Inexperienced Ligue 1 manager Liam Rosenier brought in. Club slumps into record-breaking loss streak. Sacked after 3 months. Final position: TBD, but currently 6th, bottom half plausible. Silverware: TBD, but none expected.

A few things stand out from these four seasons, but none more so than the managerial turnover. Clearlake's managerial appointments have tended to fall into one of two categories: hopelessly unqualified yesmen, or talented managers who end up leaving over disagreements with the owners over the state of the squad.

What disagreements might these be? Well of the roughly 60 players signed by Clearlake, only 7 have been first-team level defenders. Only 1 has been a first-team level goalkeeper (and not an especially consistent one). A full 20 have been attacking midfielders. Fewer than half have featured for the Chelsea first team more than once. The average age of these players has been just 21 years old.

The result is a Chelsea side that ranks amongst the youngest in the Premier League, blessed with an array of attacking talent, but a paucity of quality or experience in defence. This is a severely unbalanced squad. This fact is most perfectly demonstrated by this season's curtain-raiser, a season which Chelsea entered full of confidence following their Club World Cup victory, with ambitions of challenging for the title. Despite this, the club lined up against Crystal Palace with a starting centre-back pairing that consisted of an untested Academy player on one side, and a left back on the other, with no cover available on the bench. All that money spent, and not one single first team centre-back available. The fact that Chelsea failed to bring in a replacement for Levi Colwill after the star defender's season-ending injury in the summer is quite inexplicable, and reportedly an early source of major discord between the owners and then manager Maresca.

Next, consider the high turnover of playing staff. 60 players signed in 4 years is astonishing. 117 players sold or released during that same period is eye-watering. Now, in fairness, some of that high outgoing is due to the high productivity of the club's academy, but it still paitns a picture. It is no wonder the club can't achieve any level of consistency or chemistry with the constantly shifting personnel. With the vast sums of money spent, we're pretty much locked into a cycle of having to sell in order to balance the books, so don't expect this to change any time soon.

There are the injuries. Chelsea currently top the Premier League injury table with eight first team injuries. This has been pretty consistent across these four years, with double digit injury counts common. This decline in player fitness has coincided with the owners' much reported "reimagining" of the club's medical resources, which included sacking a significant chunk of the medical staff, with many functions outsourced to celebrity doctors with minimal relevant experience.

Then there are the managerial appointments themselves. None have had extensive experience, aside from Pochettino. Most have exited explicitly for not toeing the company line. There is the very real suggestion that the primary qualifying feature of these appointments has been a willingness to defer to Clearlake management and follow orders. I have nothing against Rosenier personally, but for someone so clearly ill-suited for the job to have been appointed, ostensibly just because he wouldn't question his owners' poor squad-building choices, shows an alarming lack of judgement.

I'm barely even touching on the business side of things. Even aside from the financial losses, we are now four years into Clearlake ownership and they haven't been able to sign a shirt sponsor. I can't remember an instance of a top flight club failing to do so even once, let alone four times. It is unthinkable. No wonder the club is bleeding money.

While these issues are all very real and very significant, perhaps the biggest issue has been the simple lack of self-awareness of the owners. Upon their arrival, one of the first statements that Clearlake co-founder Behdad Eghbali made was that the club had not been "terribly well managed on the football, sporting or promotional side" under the previous owners - a comment that has attracted much derision from fans in the years since with how far back the club has moved in every single one of those fronts during that time. In a recent interview, director Danny Finkelstein stated, amongst other things, that it was "pretty fucking obvious" that Clearlake were in the process of building one of the best teams in the world, and that statistics prove that there is no correlation between the manager and results. Meanwhile, in reality, I can't think of a more clear demonstration of the difference a manager can make than the switch from Maresca to Rosenier, which saw a top four-challenging club sink into a record loss-streak, despite consisting of the exact same players.

Clearlake like to frame themselves as radicals looking to upend the sport. But the truth is that nothing they are doing is new, nor has anything they are doing ever proven to produce sustained success. Other clubs have focused their transfer strategy on youth (see late '00s Arsenal) and failed to generate success. Other clubs have focused their transfer strategy on attacking players while neglecting defence (see the worst excesses of Galactico-era Real Madrid) and failed to generate success. Clearlake are proof incarnate that spending money doesn't inevitably bring success if you don't know how to spend it well.

Now, I don't actually think this club is too far off being a competitive outfit. They just need to better balance the squad with some targeted investments in weak positions, mainly defence and goalkeeper. They need a talented and proven manager to run the thing, and they need to actually listen to that manager and let them make the football decisions. Will any of these things happen? I very much doubt it.

I will make no secret of my antipathy for these owners. Despite all of the failures, all of the setbacks, all of the crises, these owners keep doing the same thing over and over, and don't seem to have any capacity to concede that they might be the problem. Every success they have achieved, seems almost to have come about by accident, and at every turn, just when things start to click, they upend everything for no reason beyond their own vanity. May both sides of their pillow be forever too warm.