I’m not really clinging to it. It’s fact? Tuchel was sacked and then within 24 hours Potter was appointed and made one of the highest paid managers in the world.
The total package or removing Tuchel and bringing in Potter at £95m.
Look I’ve said it may end to working out but what I take issue with is this notion from some fans, not necessarily you, that this was all a long term plan and there hasn’t been any chaos at the club. It’s blindingly obvious everything is all over the shop. From the odd window, the arguments with Marina, Cech and Tuchel to the lack of DoF and whirlwind hire of Potter.
It’s naive to think otherwise.
It's also naive to think that everything from Tuchel being sacked to Potter being hired happened all inside 24 hours without any sort of prior planning or talks with potential replacements. The top media sources like David Ornstein have written that cracks started to appear in the relationship between Tuchel and the new regime since about the Orlando leg of pre-season and the decision to sack him was well on it's way to being made already a few weeks before the fact so it's only natural that the process to hire his successor was going on for roughly the same amount of time also.
When the season is already underway and the football is being played with a very tight schedule, clubs generally don't tend to take too long with managerial replacements and a lot of the work is quietly being done behind the scenes even when the previous manager is still at work. For example, Thomas Tuchel himself was hired within 24 hours of Frank Lampard getting the boot and I'm betting if I bothered to go looking I could easily name at least a dozen others at other top clubs where mid-season managerial hires have seemed swift and decisive at least on paper with a replacement hired before the previous guy has hardly had enough time to clear out his office.
As for the 'cost' of sacking Tuchel and bringing in Potter I'm not even going to get into it with you too much. All I'll say about that is you willingly choose the absolute maximum amounts for everything, despite some mixed reporting, and automatically assume that Potter will get his full £12M/y for five years even in the event of him being sacked. That's not usually how manager contracts work, there are very often clauses that only guarantee payments till the end of the ongoing season or the end of the next season at most in case of the manager's contract being terminated. For example I don't think you lot ended up paying Moyes and his staff for the full six years, did you? On the other hand, if Potter actually does stay for five years and gets all that money, he'll very likely have been a big success at the club so it will matter exactly feck all how much he has cost.
I firmly believe that Boehly-Clearlake's initial plan after their takeover was to keep Marina and Cech in place till the end of the summer window (thus no plans to appoint a DoF before) and also keep Tuchel for at least the current season, possibly further if successful, before even thinking of starting to make moves of their own but for various reasons, not all disclosed to the public, they've either chosen or been forced to accelerate these plans. Marina/Cech were the first to go, which resulted in Tuchel having to take on a much bigger responsibility with recruitment that he didn't enjoy and he was in a bit of a meltdown mode since around the Arsenal game in pre-season. Feel free to go look at some of his explosive comments after the match to see what I'm talking about. If he acted that way publicly in the media, how do you think he was behind closed doors both towards his players as well as the new bosses? He also has prior history of falling out with club leaders at both Dortmund and PSG so clearly not the easiest guy to work with when things start to go wrong. Tuchel had a great working relationship with Marina and Cech but in addition to things not exactly working out great on the football pitch early this season, the departure of the previous sporting structure was one of the catalysts that ended up in this total clear-out.
Sure, but it's not a binary choice between everything being perfect and everything being in chaos. I'd imagine Chelsea supporters naturally want to locate the positive elements and give the new regime a chance rather than focus on negativity, especially when we don't know all the details as to what has gone on, and I can't say I'd be any different if it was my club to be fair!
Thank you, that's exactly what I've been trying to say but
@TheReligion only sees things as black or white when Chelsea are concerned. A lot of the things we've seen so far under the new ownership group have been far from perfect but I would also say there have been some mitigating circumstances for some of these struggles, some of which I tried to point out above.
The timing for the takeover process being fully completed was also not great, with the new transfer window opening very soon after and our squad needing lots of transfer business done. In an ideal scenario a club takeover would go through sometime mid-season so a lot of these quirks with recruitment personnel etc. would already be settled by the time the summer window comes but in our case that simply wasn't possible due to the sanctions placed on Roman Abramovich and the club's special license to operate scheduled to end as soon as the 21/22 season was over.
Because of some of these difficult circumstances I'm willing to look past a little bit of 'chaos' in the beginning of this new Boehly-Clearlake regime but at the same time I'll say that things have to calm down very soon and having a clear sporting structure in place would be a good start to doing that.
If by this time next year things still seem 'all over the place' it's the right time to panic and start blaming the new owners for having no idea what they're doing but for now me and most other Chelsea fans rather choose to look at the positives and at the very least Boehly-Clearlake have been showing a lot of ambition to running the club, mainly from a financial perspective but also from wanting to be heavily involved in things instead of just being absentees like Glazers, Kroenke etc. Time will tell whether their hands-on involvement and their new policies with longer contracts etc. will be a positive or a negative influence in the long run but at least it shows they're trying to make big changes in the club's culture.