Jose Mourinho gave Chelsea's players the day off on Tuesday --
24 hours help clear the mind and lower the temperature. Not just
as far as the Chelsea squad are concerned but for the Special One
too.
While that was happening, stock was being taken further up the
food chain.
The club's rationale this season, as things went from bad to
worse, had been that -- while Chelsea would revisit the situation in
December -- Mourinho was bound to turn it around.
By the end of September and the 2-2 draw away to Newcastle,
the talk inside the club was that he could still win the title (they
were eight points back at the time). By mid-November, during the
international break that followed the defeat at Stoke, the message
was that they could still get into the Champions League (at that
stage they were 13 points out of fourth place).
After the defeat to Bournemouth some 10 days ago, the message
changed. Effectively, it became a question of: How bad can things
realistically get? What's the worst case scenario? How confident
are we that replacing him in midseason would substantially improve
the situation this year?
The thinking was that the worst that could happen -- once Porto
had been dispatched and a place in the knockout phase of the
Champions League had been secured -- was a bottom-half finish.
Maybe twelfth, possibly as low as fifteenth. The season would
peter out in disappointment. Mourinho himself would resign, and, if
he didn't, nobody would fault Chelsea for making a change.
Even if those at Chelsea did bring in a new boss, how much of
an improvement could he really produce? Chelsea were on pace for
38 points. If a new manager were twice as effective as Mourinho
through the rest of the campaign -- and that's a huge ask --
they'd end up with 61 points. That's basically seventh or eighth
place, which would still equal an unmitigated flop of a season.
That rationale might have changed somewhat after Monday night's
defeat to Leicester, when Mourinho shared his postmatch thoughts.
There was another scenario, one worse than anyone had imagined:
that Mourinho would fall out with his players and start burning
bridges.
It's not something that had been contemplated, because, other than
the end of his time at Real Madrid, Mourinho had always been a
player's coach. Even the situation at the Bernabeu was quite
different. In Madrid, there was a core of high-profile, veteran
personalities who had experienced plenty of success without him and
an animosity that grew over time and went beyond mere
performance on the pitch.
This is different. The bulk of the Chelsea squad is made up of
either younger players or guys who lack the stature, inclination and
gravitas to challenge Mourinho the way he'd been challenged in
Madrid.
And yet, there was Mourinho, laying into them.
With his sarcastic comments over Eden Hazard's injury, with the
talk that the players had "betrayed his work," with the comment
that his "phenomenal" performance last year led them to overachieve
and this is what they're really like.
That postmatch routine was a game-changer.
It's one thing to lose games. It's another to question your own
players' guts, loyalty and quality. This wasn't from the Mourinho
playbook: even when things got bad, he generally always defended
the players as a group in public (though occasionally he might have
questioned individuals, and goodness knows what he did in private).
This was something else entirely.
Has Mourinho damaged relationships beyond repair? It's a
legitimate concern. If the likes of John Terry, Diego Costa,
Nemanja Matic or Hazard stop buying what Mourinho is selling, it
will damage performances.
But there's another side effect to Mourinho's postmatch interview
that is far more of concern. It's one thing for a group of
talented players to underachieve and have a bad season. It's
another for them to have an equally poor campaign but also be
singled out by their manager for their inadequacies. Especially if,
as appears inevitable, Chelsea will be rebuilding in the summer and
they'll be doing it under Financial Fair Play regulations.
Six months ago, a guy like Hazard might have easily fetched north
of $100 million and Costa maybe two-thirds of that. A poor
campaign would obviously depress those numbers. But if you throw
in the notion that they might be bad eggs as well, it hurts them
even further. That's the spanner Mourinho threw in the works
Monday night. That's what, potentially, moves the needle from
"keep" to "reconsider".
Name-brand managers -- whether they're Carlo Ancelotti or Diego
Simeone or Pep Guardiola -- demand, to varying degrees, some
level of investment when they join new clubs. Otherwise, they stay
put or, if they're unattached, they opt for the guys who are willing
to wheel and deal.
That's the new variable Chelsea are now forced to consider. That
the situation degenerates to the point that their assets -- i.e., the
playing squad -- becomes far more damaged than it otherwise would
be, because their manager shifts the blame on them.
That's what could force their hand if there aren't distinct signs of
improvement. Not just in terms of results -- there's only so much
they can improve -- but crucially in terms of relationships.
It would take a phalanx of psychoanalysts or maybe even a Vulcan
mind meld to figure out what Mourinho was thinking Monday night.
There are still those who contend that actually all of this is part
of some kind of Jose master plan, a psychological ploy aimed at
getting a reaction out of his players. One of those situations --
straight out of made-for-TV high school sports epics -- where the
coach tells the players how much they've let him down and how
they'll never amount to anything. This hurts their feelings, and then
they get angry, and then they bond, find the determination to prove
him wrong and go on to win the state title.
Yeah, maybe that's it.
But if it isn't, Chelsea have a problem that could have been
simmering under the surface until last Monday but which Mourinho
has now dragged into the open.
You can't help but think back to Inter manager Marcello Lippi and
a comparable outburst in October of 2000, following a defeat at
Reggina.
"I'm ashamed of this team," he said. "What would I do if I were
the president? I'd sack the coach, first and foremost. And then I'd
take all the players, line them up against the wall, and kick their
a---s, one by one."
Inter president Massimo Moratti only took part of his advice, but
he took it literally. Lippi was fired a few days later. The players
stuck around, because, well, they're tougher to sack. But also
because they're assets on a balance sheet, and you need to protect
your assets.
That's where Chelsea are heading unless this entire soap opera is
either a Mourinho mind trick or he manages to fix those
relationships in double-quick time.
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