Premier League football is a game where you run around very fast for 90 minutes and at the end Manchester City win, even when they aren’t playing. The champions - and, it already appears, champions-elect - were not the only leading team to spend £100 million on a player they chose to leave out this weekend. But they are the only ones who can spend £100 million on a player, and not need him to succeed.
Actually it’s hard to imagine that Romelu Lukaku would have had much effect on the game between Chelsea and Liverpool - the match was so fast, it probably would have passed him by. Yet there must be regret at Chelsea that nearly £100 million of their summer transfer spending could not be brought to bear at a moment of such importance.
“The thing got too noisy,” Thomas Tuchel said before the match. But the noise hadn’t all come from Lukaku’s side. Tuchel could have played this situation another way. Lukaku’s last two performances had, after all, been among his better ones for Chelsea. He had scored against both Brighton and Aston Villa, his first goals in the league since September. And Chelsea were missing several injured attackers. In the circumstances, some managers might have picked Lukaku regardless of noise.
To understand why Tuchel decided on a hard line, you have to see it from his point of view. He is coaching at a top club, one capable of attracting the best players and winning the biggest titles. He made a sensational start, turning the team around mid-season and winning the Champions League to earn the respect of players, fans, and media. He is living in a great city and earning a gigantic salary. For a football coach, this is as good as it gets.
When a club spends nearly £100 million on a turkey, the internal politics start to revolve around the question of blame. Whose fault is this?
And yet he knows Chelsea sack managers at a rate of about once every 15 months, and he will pass 12 months in charge if he makes it to January 26th. It seems crazy even to entertain the prospect of Chelsea sacking Tuchel only nine months after winning the Champions League, but the last Chelsea manager to win the Champions League lasted only six more months. The last two Chelsea managers to win the Premier League title lost their jobs the following season.
He knows too that Chelsea has traditionally been one of those clubs that is run by the players, not the coach. It may not quite be on the level of Tuchel’s last club, PSG, where, he recently said, “I felt like I was the sports minister - I had to manage family members and friends of the star players.” But it is a club where even the most successful coaches, like Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte, have been fatally undermined by player revolts.
It’s clear that Lukaku is now a major problem for Tuchel, not because he said some silly things in an interview, but because he has been a turkey. It’s not just that five league goals is obviously a poor tally for a supposed super-striker at the halfway point of the season. It’s that he has failed to achieve even minimal relevance to what the team is trying to do. In 13 league appearances, he has had only seven shots on target.
When a club spends nearly £100 million on a turkey, the internal politics start to revolve around the question of blame. Whose fault is this? Is it Lukaku’s, for failing to live up to the standards he set at Inter? Is it Tuchel’s, for failing to find an effective way to use him? Or is it the fault of the club officials, led by executive director Marina Granovskaia, for spending all that money on the wrong player?
Into this tense situation, Lukaku drops an interview which constitutes an enormous finger of blame pointed at Tuchel. Chelsea fans were always going to be annoyed by Lukaku’s tactless declarations that he dreams of rejoining Inter and ideally never would have left them in the first place. But the real sting for Tuchel is the suggestion that Lukaku’s return to Chelsea has flopped because “the head coach has decided to play a different system, but I need to keep working hard and be professional.” We are left to surmise that if only Tuchel had stuck with the original plan, then the player’s performance would not have been so pathetic.
Tuchel made it clear what he thought of that: “I don’t know [what he means], we decided actually not to play a different formation, it’s a surprise on many levels.” Looking at how Chelsea have lined out throughout the season you can see that while there have been occasional switches to 3-5-2 or 3-4-1-2, they have overwhelmingly used the same 3-4-3 system they have been using since Tuchel arrived. Back in August, Lukaku told Belgian paper HLN: “I love the system that we play [at Chelsea] because it’s the same system as here [with Belgium], only the emphasis is different. For me it’s fantastic because I play in a team that dominates.”
In that same interview, Lukaku admitted that he had been shocked by the intensity of his first training sessions back at Chelsea, and now we might be getting closer to the source of his problems than his recent apparent disillusionment with the system he once praised.
'Training, playing, training, sleeping, eating good, training, playing, sleeping, eat good, drink a lot of water, sleep, train and don't give interviews'
Lukaku often looked off the pace at Manchester United, who were pleased to get rid of him when Inter offered them the chance to recoup the money they had paid Everton. He had apparently been reborn in Serie A, claiming that Inter’s enlightened nutritionists had identified a digestive ailment that had been missed at United, enabling him to lose several crucial kilos that had been holding him back. It was a nice story, but more relevant is the fact that Lukaku was bullying defenders in a league that Zlatan Ibrahimovic is still able to dominate at the age of 40.
When United played at Chelsea a few weeks ago, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lukaku both started on the bench: the two top scorers in Serie A last season, kept out of their respective teams by players like Timo Werner, Callum Hudson-Odoi, Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho.
If Lukaku wants to compete in the Premier League he will have to be even fitter than he was in Serie A. And is he? It’s clear that Tuchel feels he could do more. Asked what Lukaku should do to get back in the team, he pointed the finger of blame right back at the player: “Training, playing, training, sleeping, eating good, training, playing, sleeping, eat good, drink a lot of water, sleep, train and don’t give interviews.”
These are a list of basic things a player should be doing, and it sounds unlikely that “not giving interviews” is the only area in which Tuchel deems Lukaku to have fallen short. The team’s spirited performance against Liverpool suggested the other players still have faith in their manager. If Tuchel does win the power struggle against the record signing, we may be seeing something new in the Premier League era: a Chelsea team which is run by its coach, and not its players.
