Roman Abramovich has a net worth of 12.6 billion dollars but surely he hasn’t been as impetuous and irrational in his business dealings as he’s been as the owner of Chelsea.
Prior to his arrival in 2003, Chelsea was a very competitive club and capable of winning FA Cups. They made sporadic cameos in the UEFA Champions League, and flirted with the top three of the Premiership, but were never a reckoning force.
That said, we’re used to ambitious new levels of spending in the Premiership, aren’t we? Manchester City’s economic eruption didn’t shock us to our cores because we’d seen it already, to a somewhat lesser extent, with Chelsea several years prior. It’s a little like Pixar animation. The first time you see it, it doesn’t look like your standard cartoon, but by the time you end up taking children to see eight or nine Pixar films, it becomes a lot more accepted that it’s how an animated film is supposed to look.
Abramovich overhauled the Chelsea culture overnight, and the club went from challenging the big boys in the schoolyard to being the biggest boy in the schoolyard. When Abramovich wanted something, he got it. Chelsea couldn’t win the Champions League his first season, but Porto did with Jose Mourinho as manager. Months later, Mourinho was managing Chelsea.
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Players from other teams became transfer targets in those first couple seasons, although many didn’t work out (Scott Parker, Damien Duff, Andriy Shevchenko) and others were utter disasters on the pitch and obviously on the balance sheet (Hernan Crespo, Adrian Mutu, Juan Sebastian Veron). But for the most part, when you spend, you will win. Chelsea used the mix of new players and the brilliance of Mourinho to scald the rest of the Premier League in Abramovich’s second year, losing only one of 38 League matches, giving up 15 goals, and obliterating second place Arsenal by 12 points.
Life was good, or so it seemed, but Mourinho didn’t achieve Champions League success, and what seemed a perfect marriage between owner and manager splintered. Since then, it’s been a roller coaster ride for Chelsea managers, players, and supporters, and just five years and a few weeks after Mourinho’s shock departure, Chelsea hasn’t had stability at the position they need it the most.
Avram Grant was a successful John Terry penalty away from making Chelsea champions of Europe in 2008. Terry slipped. Terry missed. Grant was gone.
Enter Luis Scolari, the most sought-after manager at the time. He was gone by February despite Chelsea still being in the Champions League, the FA Cup hunt, and in the top three of the Premiership.
Guus Hiddink, a handy pinch-manager if there ever was one, led Chelsea to victory in the FA Cup final, but sorry, third in the Premiership and reaching the semifinals of the Champions League wasn’t good enough. Despite the Dutchman being a fan favourite, Abramovich didn’t seem tempted to lock Hiddink in long-term and though he wasn’t dismissed and “left of his own accord” to go back and manage in Russia, there wasn’t much of a full-court press put on to entice him to stay.
No matter, Chelsea went and landed Carlo Ancelotti. He’d won as a player, he’d won as manager. He was looking for a new challenge and Chelsea fit the bill. This one, it seemed, would last. In one of the most competitive Premier League campaigns I’ve ever seen, Ancelotti led Chelsea to both the Premiership title and the FA Cup.
The next season, Chelsea got bogged down in second place in the Premier League and crashed out of the FA Cup in the third round. Ancelotti couldn’t even match previous Chelsea managers in the Champions League, getting only to the Round of 16 and quarter-finals, and the latter loss stung greater because it was Manchester United that dumped them out in aggressive fashion. Abramovich had won three league titles, three FA Cups, two League Cups and even the always-irrelevant Charity Shield in a scant eight seasons as Chelsea owner. But he missed the one trophy he craved the most, and Ancelotti was sacked very late in the 2010-11 season.
That brings us to last year when Abramovich went out and hired Andre Villas-Boas away from Porto. But the gig got away from the highly-respected “AVB” in a hurry. From tactical issues to the fan base not embracing him, to incredibly inconsistent team performances, this might be the one hiring/firing where Abramovich might have been fully and utterly justified for moving so early. Wrong guy. Wrong place. And certainly wrong team.
It was clear early on the senior players couldn’t and wouldn’t play for Villas-Boas, and while the players have to take accountability for such actions, tactics and motivation were obviously lacking once the dismal results began to pile up and after dropping to an unheard of fifth place in the Premiership. Three days before Valentine’s Day, the Portuguese manage was gone.
Roberto Di Matteo had been working as AVB’s assistant and the job was his on an “interim” basis and most of you reading this know exactly what happened. Though he couldn’t put together too terrifying a streak in the Premiership – Chelsea still finished sixth – the UEFA Champions League was set afire. Chelsea survived a tough series against Napoli to advance to the quarter-finals. They took out Benfica, Barcelona and Bayern Munich to become champions of Europe. The rest was elementary, as Di Matteo was retained, becoming the permanent manager and it seemed as if he’d sick around.
It felt like a new era at Chelsea, albeit with some familiar holdovers in Terry, Frank Lampard, and Petr Cech. Eden Hazard, Oscar, and Juan Mata have been the talk of the Premiership all season and with early struggles for Manchester United and a couple surprising draws for Manchester City, Chelsea roared to the top of the table and life was grand in West London.
But a bizarre defeat to Shakhtar Donetsk in the Champions League, was followed days later by a loss at home against Manchester United, and despite some extremely controversial calls and the now-infamous “Clattenburg inquisition," the loss seemed to hound Di Matteo. Chelsea would continue to stumble with no wins in its next three league matches, and despite the fact there’s hardly any shame in losing to West Brom, it was compounded with a horrible result away at Juventus, and that was that.
Chelsea fans are of two minds on this, although the outrage and disappointment for Di Matteo, who won trophies at Chelsea as a player, is immeasurable. Do they want an owner who demands excellence and won’t settle for fourth place finishes, quarter-final exits from the Champions League, and listless FA Cup performances? Well, sure, but isn’t there something to be said for allowing managers to grow into roles, and the ebb and flow of player/manager relationships?
At this level, I think we overrate cliches like “momentum” and “motivation” but I actually believe we underrate “consistency” and “routine," and those critical characteristics seem so undervalued at Stamford Bridge, especially to the point where I don’t know how it can’t impact performance. So much of soccer is about timing, too. Last year’s team was far from the most skilled in the Abramovich-era and yet that happened to be the squad that won the Champions League.
It’s a dream of most Chelsea supporters that Mourinho will one day return to Stamford Bridge, and it’s a living nightmare that someday he’ll magically appear at Manchester City, or take over for Arsene Wenger when his run at Arsenal is over. Though you can’t argue Di Matteo’s popularity matches that of Marcel Desailly or Gianfranco Zola, I can assure you it is agonizing watching someone you perceive as “one of your own” go down in flames. As a lifetime Detroit Tigers fan, it was sorely painful watching Alan Trammell manage a 43 win/119 loss team in 2003. Imagine how a Toronto fan would handle a Doug Gilmour or Wendel Clark-coached Leafs team which could only manage 22 wins in an 82 game schedule.
Either way, the problem now is that there’s a gun already to the head of Rafa Benitez, and the chamber gets cocked Sunday against what should be a very ornery Manchester City squad.
Supporters not wanting Di Matteo to have been sacked won’t take kindly to mixed results from Benitez. Chelsea just fired a popular manager who’d won the Champions League, and who had Chelsea four points from the top of the Premier League. No pressure, Rafa.