Chelsea managed to cycle through it all in nine hours, give or take. First, bright and early on Wednesday, came the announcement that the club’s owners had decided to dispense with the services of manager Thomas Tuchel, after a reign encompassing a mere 19 months and one measly Champions League title.
The window for shock was a relatively brief one. Chelsea had only just concluded a summer of spending unlike anything the Premier League had ever seen — two months of shock and awe and photos of Todd Boehly, the club’s co-controlling chairman and interim sporting director — most of it seemingly conducted in accordance with Tuchel’s wishes.
But no matter. An explanation emerged swiftly, centred on the desire of Boehly and the rest of his consortium to change the culture at Chelsea and their belief that Tuchel was not the right figurehead for that shift. Quite what form that new culture will take, and quite why the 49-year-old Tuchel could not be part of it, has not been adequately explained, at least not yet.
Still, there was no time for questions. Graham Potter, the impressive coach of Brighton, had been installed as favourite to succeed Tuchel by lunchtime on Wednesday. Chelsea had been in touch with his current employer by dinner. He had “verbally agreed” to take the job — as opposed to agreeing by interpretive dance, presumably — by the time darkness fell.
And just like that, Chelsea’s crisis — one that had been difficult to discern, from the outside, before Tuchel was dismissed, and one that seemed to be entirely of its own making — had come and gone. Just like nature, though, soccer abhors a vacuum.
So it was fortunate, in many ways, that by 8.46pm Italian time, Liverpool had stepped forward to produce arguably the worst Champions League performance of Jürgen Klopp’s tenure. Within 45 seconds of kick-off in Naples, Napoli had broken Liverpool’s holographic back line and hit the post. It went, it is fair to say, downhill from there.
By the time the game ended, Liverpool had officially occupied the chaos space so recently vacated by Chelsea. Klopp, the coach who guided the club to two trophies and a Champions League final barely four months ago, was asked in his news media conference after the game if he was worried about being fired.
Even by the standards of the Premier League, this was pretty good going: not just one major team in crisis, but two, and both of them on the same day. It is only a couple of weeks since Manchester United was afforded that status, a consequence of Erik ten Hag losing his first two games as coach, but that already seems to belong to the dim and distant past. Ten Hag’s stock is soaring: he has collected two more points than Tuchel, and three more than Klopp.
It was difficult not to be struck by the speed with which crisis descended. Liverpool were humbled in Naples
It is not ridiculous, of course, to suggest that both Chelsea and Liverpool have disappointed a little this season. Both have stuttered, in the Premier League and the Champions League alike. Both have seemed to be less than the sum of their parts. Both are not meeting the standard they set for themselves.
Analysing and interrogating why that might be is a legitimate exercise. Tuchel had seemed a little frostier, a little more downbeat than habitual in recent weeks; he seemed to chastise his team on a fortnightly basis in what proved to be the last couple of months of his tenure at Stamford Bridge. Rarely, if ever, did he indicate that he knew quite what was wrong, or how to fix it.
That is the challenge facing Klopp, too. Liverpool, ordinarily so dogged and so fearsome, have looked distinctly fatigued through the opening weeks of the season. They have stirred themselves only in patches, succumbing for vast periods of most of their games to a form of stagnant ennui, as if the players were running on fumes after six exacting years under Klopp.
In those circumstances, it is in the nature of the world’s biggest teams that the scrutiny should be intense. That, in essence, is the bargain. Chelsea, like Liverpool and Manchester United, has been complicit in creating a sporting ecosystem in which they are expected to win all of their games, in which almost any defeat is unacceptable. The pressure, the hyperbole, when it comes, is the flip side of the bargain.
And yet it was difficult not to be struck by the speed with which crisis descended. Liverpool were humbled in Naples, it is true, but it was still only their second defeat of the season, and only their fourth of the calendar year. Chelsea had stumbled against Leeds and Southampton, but are only five points adrift of Arsenal, the Premier League leaders. It would be a stretch to suggest that, for either team, all is lost.
Part of that rush to judgment can be attributed — point your fingers here — to the media, to the breathless coverage of the major powers of the Premier League, to the desperate need to fill the bottomless digital maw, to the talking point culture that has slowly consumed soccer (and then everything else) in the past two decades.
Partly, too, it is because these clubs expect the best and have paid handsomely for it. Chelsea invested €300 million on players this summer and happily would have spent more if possible. Liverpool spends more on the salaries of its current squad than all but three or four teams in the world, one of which is Manchester United. Those fortunes are paid out, essentially, to ward off things like teething problems and dips in form. That, again, is the deal.
And, partly, it is because of the game that these superclubs have created: one in which the default assumption, now, is that the team that claims the Premier League title will do so with an almost impossible points tally, in a league in which Manchester City continue to roll on, seemingly unstoppable, Erling Haaland trampling opponents underfoot, and everyone else knows that losing any ground at all now means spending the season treading water, waiting for a chance to start again. There is a fragility, a desperation, an awareness that there is no room for error.
It is difficult, though, to believe that any of this is healthy: not for the players and coaches commanded to maintain almost superhuman standards or risk being branded failures, and not for the fans, always awaiting the moment the gloom descends.
Most of all, it is not in the best interests of the game as a whole, which increasingly seems to exist on a bloodthirsty knife-edge, eagerly awaiting its next victim, the next chance to cry crisis, to dissemble its latest false idol, knowing full well that it will not have to wait very long at all. — New York Times
