Lay off Thomas Tuchel – there isn’t a manager alive who could have dealt with chaos at Chelsea

The narrative of the sacked manager - lost the players, clashed with the owners, had to go - is a familiar one, and Chelsea have told it more often than most leading clubs in the Premier League.

You may also feel that sympathy can find many more deserving cases right now than an unemployed football manager about to be paid so much money that he can probably afford to heat his own home until March, at the very least.

Tuchel, 49, does not need defending given that he will be back in a job, a big one, soon enough but I glanced at those headlines and sensed real misgivings that a man’s abilities and achievements are so easily and quickly chewed up in the churn of managerial upheaval.

You can argue that managers do a decent job of surrendering their own dignity when squaring up like Tuchel and Antonio Conte on the Stamford Bridge pitch recently, and we should all be inured by now to the perils of the sack race, but there is something about the ready disposability, the easy discarding of an elite coach that leaves us in danger of undermining all that it takes to succeed in this job.

We hear about the lack of emotional intelligence that meant that Tuchel struggled to adapt to a new American regimen under Todd Boehly’s consortium but I was left wondering if there is a manager or head coach alive who would have the breadth of skills to deal with everything that Chelsea has demanded over the past six months. Tuchel does not have it all? Who does?

He certainly must have quite a few exceptional skills to have navigated the daunting task at Borussia Dortmund of following a character as huge as Jurgen Klopp. Big shoes to fill but Tuchel guided the German club to a first trophy in five years, created an attractive system and developed outstanding individuals, most notably Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, who recently moved to Chelsea to play under the German.

Tuchel also had to cope with the trauma of the team bus being nail-bombed on the way to a game in 2018. No one learns through the Uefa ProLicence how to cope with an attempt to blow his team to smithereens.

In France with Paris Saint-Germain, Tuchel has a claim to be the most successful manager in the club’s history as he went one goal from a historic quadruple. He lost the club’s only Champions League final and there were tensions with the owners but, then, Carlo Ancelotti is the nicest guy in football and he ended up desperate to get away from them too.

And so Tuchel came to Chelsea in January 2021 and took a team that was ninth in the Premier League, with no discernible strategy, and proved not only an instant hit but also a spectacularly successful one. He rearranged a mess into a side which could overcome Atletico Madrid, Porto, Real Madrid and, ultimately, Manchester City in one of the great managerial acts of alchemy.

He helped Chelsea to finish third and reach a second FA Cup final even as he had to answer countless questions about working for a Russian oligarch and the invasion of Ukraine, about whether the club might be sold or shut down and whether a footballer’s salary could be morally justified if the owner was also paying for tanks. They do not cover that in the coaching manual, either.

After all that, in came new American owners who decided that they could dispense with all the familiar staff, double the head coach’s tasks overnight and conclude that they, and their own analysts, knew more about Anthony Gordon than the recent Uefa and Fifa manager of the year. Tuchel was struggling with relationships? No shit.

Of course it is the privilege of new owners that they want their own man. In Graham Potter, Boehly and Behdad Eghbali have made an intriguing choice: a coach who will bring an innovative and, if allowed, perhaps even long-term plan to Chelsea. Potter is smart, adaptable and almost certainly more patient with owners than his predecessor.

But he is also fortunate that he is not having to carry the baggage that weighed down Tuchel. Potter can negotiate his own role and terms; Tuchel was expected to indulge owners who decided that, whatever the coach wanted, they would sit down with Jorge Mendes to discuss possibly signing Cristiano Ronaldo.

Tuchel did not hide how his role had changed in ways that made him uncomfortable, especially with the loss of Petr Cech as a senior advisor with an understanding of football. One report suggests that, overwhelmed by the workload, he sent his agent to meetings on recruitment so he could focus on coaching. It is not clear if this is meant to have been a failing.

Only Tuchel can answer how much his energy and mood was also sapped by the collapse of his marriage but work was the last place he was going to find peace or stability.

He lacked emotional intelligence? Isolated and inflexible? Some context - months of chaos and dysfunction - is also required.

-The Times

Originally published as Lay off Thomas Tuchel – there isn’t a manager alive who could have dealt with chaos at Chelsea