Some continuity, finally, at Chelsea Football Club. Sacking their manager seven games into the season, with over £250m spent on players and a couple of whispered wobbles behind the scenes. This feels like a home, security, a club that goes back to what they know. Nature is healing itself.
At 10am on Wednesday, Chelsea are without Tommy Tuchel. Tuchel no longer, in the opinion of the board, knows exactly what they need. But it looks like Graham Potter might, if Chelsea really feel like harnessing the talent, the brains and the method rather than having spent a single minute of his professional career at the level at which the club expects to operate.
An announcement is expected, and there will be time, a long time, to chew on that succession. But for now it’s a case of Vale Thomas. Let’s let that ghost with hollow eyes and thin ankles rest. Because whatever the scales of justice here, Tuchel’s time at Chelsea has been truly extraordinary; just as his sacking tells us something quite profound about the direction of travel at the moment.
In total, Tuchel lasted 595 days, only a few more than Frank Lampard. His tenure had a great honor (the most important of all), three final defeats, two distinct property regimes: denim-clad oligarch, Russian billionaire brother versus denim-clad investor, American billionaire brother, and, of course, those three months of unprecedented geopolitical weirdness, during which the Chelsea manager had to publicly comment on issues ranging from the moral equivalence of the European and Middle Eastern conflict in the context of UK arms sales to the ability of Marcos Alonso to operate in a high-pressure 3-4-3 system.
Take into account his glassy-eyed soul disease in Zagreb, some personal problems since moving to London and a multi-million pound payment for those two unspent years on his contract that, in the words of Sam from Casablanca, should ease the sting of being fired; and it’s hard not to wonder who, at the moment, is getting the harshest end of this deal.
Tuchel will be working at another top European club in a short time. For Chelsea, well, what exactly is it? This is the obvious point of danger. Judging by purely sporting standards, this is a careless, undeserved and possibly quite flaky move on the part of an owner who has no inside knowledge of the industry (is this a problem? The exceptionalism of football is greatly exaggerated) and that he is essentially making a leap to blue.
Who is, or was, the most competent senior football figure in the Chelsea management staff? Answer: Thomas Tuchel. Who started the summer by advising the landlord, to an unusually intimate degree, about the massive spending spree? Answer: Thomas Tuchel.
In addition, of course, Tuchel is one of the most qualified candidates in the whole world, regardless of the issue of credit in the bank, to negotiate a first tickle patch of his time in charge. Only last year he was named UEFA Men’s Coach of the Year, FIFA Best Coach of the Year and IFFHS Best Men’s Club Coach in the World. He managed two different clubs to the Champions League final in the last three seasons. Chelsea are, somewhat deceptively, just four points behind Manchester City.
In the silence and confusion, for a while it seemed that Tuchel was explaining the Ukrainian war to the people of Great Britain
Really? Are you firing this? And who exactly is advising the Chelsea board at the moment, given that almost everyone has left? Maybe we should ask Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang what to do, he’s been around a bit. Pierre, speak now if you think we should keep Tuchel. Right? Nothing? Fine.
Finals aside, the strangest thing about Tuchel’s time at Chelsea remains his basic weirdness. As recently as March, when Jake Humphrey cut with great ceremonial solemnity Tuchel’s post-match interview in Lille, as if broadcasting a speech to the nation from inside the Yoda cave, Joe Cole could be heard suggesting that Tuchel should become prime minister of the United Kingdom, and it seemed fair enough.
But then, those were scary times. In the general silence and confusion, for a while it seemed that Tuchel was basically explaining the Ukrainian war to the people of Britain through a series of post-match interviews that did not occur. Here was a man in a cap and a tracksuit who could at least offer some kind of seriousness and, bluntly speaking, the feeling of being good in a crisis, like the neighbor who knocks on your door two days after the collapse of the entire human society in a hunting cap and a balaclava and offers to build a camp for you.
And this really was beyond the usual scale of turbulence. Lest we forget, Chelsea’s entire operation was frozen. The proceeds from the sale of the club are still in the bank account of a man described by the British government as “a pro-Kremlin oligarch.” Perhaps Tuchel himself will now be taken into custody and donated to the victims of the war around the world. No wonder there are some bumps, a small drop in levels.
The other half of this, Stage One of Tuchel’s Legacy, was arguably the most skillful six-month elite coaching feat in the Moderna of English football, a Champions League winning streak conjured by Tuchel at Hull, which involved beating Atletico Madrid, Porto, Real Madrid and Manchester City.
