RomansRoubles

An extremely hard post to write here on the forum, but our legend and moderator Coco passed away this morning.
He's a private person and only shared details of his illness with me and Loz recently when he knew the outlook wasn't good for him.
His son kindly logged in to his account to share the news.
Coco has always been around on the forum and before that, many years ago on the CSR Forum. I will miss him around here terribly, the place won't feel the same. He loved it here and at times, it felt like he ran things on his own. He even requested to move into a different member group when the time came. He will be truly missed and our thoughts go out to his family.
I would say sleep well coco, but you won't be sleeping and will be powering up Motorbikes on the other side.

Sell Gallagher because he starts ahead of one of their £100m signings and they can't take that.
Sell Chalobah because he starts ahead of their expensively assembled defence.
Dash Pochettino because he's the only one involved with elite football pedigree.
Who thought 10 years of being locked in was a good idea?
We had every manager under the sun who was available interested last season, you choose Pochettino for whatever reason and only gave him a 2 year contract. Then he leaves anyway....
I just don't understand why they brought an elite football club why not buy a mid table one where the fans aren't used to certain standards and then they can try their wacky methods. I don't think they understand this is some of our lives. 
I generally compare the situation to having a child. Imagine you have a daughter and then she gets pregnant by some utter waste of space loser and then even worse she marries the loser. Now you're stuck with him for however long until he eff's off. Its sad because you love your daughter and grandchild but you can't stand this person who's joined your family. That's how I feel about this ownership and its how I would compare being a fan of this club 😂
Roman leaving broke my heart, Tuchel leaving broke my heart. Pochettino for all his faults felt like light at the end of the tunnel and even that's gone. Seriously how bad of an infrastructure must we have for a man who put up with Levy for 5 years to be done with us after 1..... 

Tuchel if we want to compete for trophies. The rest is just flavour of the month.
I read about McKenna out of curiosity, it’s pretty impressive what he’s done at Ipswich.
He joined in December 2021, and he got them promoted to championship the following season. Then the very next season, straight promotion to premier league. Could he be the next big thing? It’s absolutely a massive risk and could backfire spectacularly. One of them high risk high reward options I guess.

Interesting that you've forgot to include our win against Everton at Goodison. We didn't start the season well but if not for arguably the worst refereeing decision in the sports history against Spurs were Mike Dean the VAR ref openly admitted to cheating after the game we'd have had 12 points from 6.
That's a far cry from the 1.3 PPG we've averaged under 4 managers since we bought all this crap deadwood.
 

Remember when Tuchel out-thought Pep about 3 times in a row including the biggest game of the season?
When has Pochetinno ever done anything except get out-coached by lower midtable managers? A top class manager can make a big difference, even with poor players. Look how Emery has turned around Villa, with basically the same players Gerrard had.

As recent as 21/22 we were seen as genuine title challengers. And we were as we were top of the league until December until we got hit with more sh*t in six months than we've possibly ever been hit with. Players and staff didn't even know they had a club to play for next season so we fell off but no injury crisis and no sanctions/chaos and we could have been crowned Champions about a year ago.

Boehly and Clearlake have destroyed this club.

Don't care about the moral side of things with this sponsor. Nike has been our sponsor for years now and they don't have a good history when it comes to being moral, where is the outrage about that? 
My biggest concern is that these owners of ours could only find a temporary deal. It's very concerning. It shouldn't be this difficult to find a long term sponsor for a club like ours. The fact that these owners couldn't find one good enough suggests that sponsors don't value us as highly as they did only a year ago.
Is there anything they have done yet that hasn't had us concerned? can we say one single decision they have made that really paid off in the past year?

Enzo is a great player, but again how did that negotiation go? Reports of us reneging on verbal agreements to pay the clause, nearly scuppered the deal, and left us in a pretty bad place in terms of our relationship with Benfica, and also the knock on effect of not sorting Ziyech's loan to psg out, which has also put a bad feeling between us and psg.
Now if this Ugarte deal was a one off, then I would happily agree that it's the media just making stuff up, but it's just another tale of incompetence. Cant all be made up surely? We seem to be fishy, always looking for a deal, always looking for loopholes. 
I just dont believe the owners know what they are doing. More money than sense. Hopefully they can get the right people in charge of the decision making. Already read some pretty negative things about Winstanley though, hoping that isnt true. 
Not at all optimistic mate, and usually I'm pretty positive about the club.
 

Just catching up on this Ugarte saga. These guys in charge are turning us into a circus. Why cant we just have normal negotiations? Every step of the transfer is leaked all over the media. Offering to buy stakes in clubs to get transfers over the line? The whole thing is brash and American. 
Then we announce the signing of a 15 year old that cant even come here for 3 years as some sort of distraction or silver lining to hide that yet again, despite all the different sporting directors, we are looking like a joke of a club in public again. 
Roman had his fair share of bloopers especially in the early years, but it seems we have an issue weekly with Boehly and co. 

I don't think Potter was setup to fail. 
He had 1/2 seasons (maybe more) to show what his plan was for this team. Until the end of this tenure, I still didn't know. 
 

A former Chelsea player wins a former Chelsea coach the Bundesliga. Shame we couldn't keep both at the club, especially Musiala. I do think that Pochettino is a better fit for the new owners style and aspirations. Just hope we can make it as easy as possible for him to succeed.

Too much blame on the players, yes they all dropped their levels but let's look at the crux of the situation. 
Boehly and Co inherited the best team in the world (literal reigning world champions). Now part of the team was already guaranteed to be leaving (Christensen & Rudiger). Yet despite them both being big loses our defence hasn't actually been much worse (until Lamps joined again). 
The system itself needed reinventing and had TT been given time I would assume he would have had us playing adequate enough to finish the season between top 6 and top 4.
Here's the most important part of my personal analysis of this season. Boehly and Co allowed TT to build his team in the summer. This is crucial because the makeup of the squad is very specific to Tuchel's Chelsea style, not many managers imo would be able to get this specific squad (pre Jan window) playing their specific style due to the limited playstyles/characteristics of the squad. Both their strengths and weaknesses were factored in and presumably Tuchel has an idea of how he wanted this set of players to play.
Sheer ignorance from Boehly and Co meant we sacked TT after he had designed his squad for the season and expected Potter to do a better job with Tuchel's style and players (a man that won us the UCl in 6 months and too us to the final pinnacle of football to say we truly have won it all). 
Ok so you sack TT and put all your eggs in Potter's basket, surely you give him the conditions to succeed by letting him asses the squad and bring in a small number of key additions that the squad was missing. Instead we splashed £300m+ and brought in almost a second team.
Meaning we disrupted the squad further after a sacking, Boehly then expected these additions to all fit in smoothly like they had been playing together for years. 
He then kept Potter for far too long up until the point where he would have been better off (and this is coming from a Potter out fan) keeping him until the end of the season provided we never slipped into a situation where relegation was likely. 
He then brings in Lampard a coach who is inferior (I love Lamps but I'm a realist) tactically and also less experienced than Potter and again expects things to turn for the better. 
To say the man is clueless would be an understatement, by all means criticise the players but what do you genuinely expect. Nothing he did made sense this season.
The worst part is they got rid of our two proven strikers (Lukaku had to leave we all know that and Timo and TT fell out) but they failed to adequately replace them. Aubameyang made little sense when you look at his final 6 months at Arsenal. To sign him for TT and then sack him the very next day is beyond ridiculous.
Fair play Broja got injured, but they had only one need in the Winter window and that was a striker. They signed Fofana, but he barely got mins as he's a raw talent. But how can you sign Felix, Mudyrk, Maduake, Enzo and a few more but not a proven striker. Even if we assume there wasn't any available on the market the planning was so poor.
They chose to get rid of all the previous upper management thinking they could do everything themselves despite the offer for Marina and Cech to stick around and help with transitioning, which I even though at the time came across quite arrogant. This will hopefully be a humbling experience for them, football is nothing like their American franchise sports. We have real competition and proper planning is essential to compete at the highest level. The only reason we didn't get relegated was those 10 points TT secured us. 
To sum up I'm sure many on here harbour resent to the players for this season and they shoulder a fair amount of blame don't get me wrong.
Yet the old saying rings true if you fail to prepare then you prepare to fail. Boehly and Co had literal no clue and very nearly cost us our top flight status. This was nothing like the 15/16 season because this wasn't players dropping their league winning form.
This was management and their continued poor decision making. In terms of business management it's hard to even comprehend how badly they got this first year wrong. Don't get me wrong I respect the willingness to spend and get involved. But if they had just looked around at the other elite clubs they would have seen that they were the odd ones out in everything that they did. No team does what they did this season. Continued disruption to all aspects of the club from management, coaching and playing staff. 
They treated our club like they were playing fifa or football management. So poor, I can understand how any investor would loom at this season and think they can trust Boehly and whoever else was working with him. There's a reason reports are coming out that he's taking a step back. He's probably been told to from the higher ups/other investors.

I'm amazed how many fans seem to think that simply employing Pochettino is all that is required to go flying back up the table and winning trophies again.
This is like my fitness routine; spend a few months watching what I eat and going to the gym, then going on a two week holiday and eating and drinking a ton whilst barely moving. Then wondering why it takes four months to undo two bad weeks.
With this pathetic squad and certifiable club management, even Pep couldn't get a tune out of it.
Welcome to the new normal.

Unfortunately, you are spectacularly right. Gaslighting is a good word because one of the first things we saw from the new management was a coordinated PR campaign (primarily via American media such as The Athletic) that bemoaned the existing coaches, scouts, data analysts, medical and fitness staff. Many fans  wholly bought into the carefully crafted narrative to the point that even now, people criticise the most successful English team of the last 20 years as somehow being a rank failure.

We can make a direct comparison to Abramovich's team, who while making a similarly whirlwind entrance, did not at any point criticize or seek to diminish the existing establishment at the club, much less coordinate attacks on the reputation of Ken Bates, Colin Hutchinson etc and in fact kept on staff willingly. There were genuine and similar problems later under Kenyon but it serves to show what happens with brash, arrogant individuals outside the sport think they are uniquely placed to revolutionise one of the oldest sports in history.

I think the most impressive thing is how he managed to gaslight so many into believing that this club was a mess before he arrived. Those same fans would be speechless if what is happening now had happened under Abramovich. None of them would be coming out with crap like "this has been on the cards for years". If we asked any of these fans where we would be 2 years on from winning the Champions League, not a single one of them would seriously answer with 43 points and scoring fewer goals than the league's top goalscorer. 

Sterling has been awful this season but I disagree with the bolded part. Guardiola is fairly ruthless in letting go players that can't adapt to his tactics, but has been saved by fate a few times. It was not long ago that City were trying to hock Bernardo Silva off as the "misfit" to all and sundry, only failing because Barcelona went bust. City have sorely missed both Cancelo and Zinchenko in the league, saved only by the generational talent that is Haaland and enduring class of de Bruyne.
Sterling was coming off a season as one of City's best players and is far from on the decline. His problem is mentality, having always been a luxury player in any squad he's been part of. That's lead to a situation where our experienced players - 28 yo Sterling, 31 yo Koulibaly and 33 yo Aubameyang - are the worst shrinking violets in the squad rather than providing the leadership sorely needed. Sterling looked like a great signing statistically but his mentality is not what the squad needed.

There was nothing at our club that needed urgent drastic action and changes.
Todd should have done a football apprenticeship before he steamed in and wrecked everything. 
 

Wouldn't go that far. Klopp was a proven winner when he took over at Liverpool, Pochettino on the other hand has been mocked by most fanbases for being a bit Spursy.

Why can't we all just trust the process. They have it all organised, don't worry

Anyone else open this thread in the hope of seeing Boehly agreeing to sell Chelsea?

I don't think he can because right now he would likely give everyone an F on mentality and committment as everyone's given up. Even Thiago Silva who's Mr.Professional have very clearly given up so you can't really judge anyone at the moment as far as i'm concerned.
I think the task facing us in the summer is way bigger than most realize. There will literally be close to 40 first teamers in the squad so there are so, so many who needs to leave and who's going to decide that now? Pochettino after less than a month in the job and after zero competitive games and zero high intensity training sessions with any of them? Doesn't make sense to me.
 

The issue with this argument is that success in this day in age builds a brand image considering the money that has been thrown around since the 90s. Your argument is like asking United fans to feel content with being average considering they were irrelevant for more than 30 years prior to SAFs arrival.  SAF built them to the brand that they are now and standards and expectations have been set. This is the same notion with us, and how Roman built us into the brand we are now. A successful winning club. 
I'm not sure why fans wanting the club to retain these standards and expectations have you lot, who have had the pleasure of supporting this club for as long as you have, to create such animosity and condescending remarks. 

Your post is spot on, and this in particular. Amazing it lasted as long as it did. By defying the odds and going on for this long, it clearly tricked many fans into thinking it was the norm, rather than an anomaly.
 
While 20 years may be a long time for a fairytale such as we had to persist and enough to fool one generation, it’s an incredibly short period of time in the grander scheme. This is why fans need to stop with the “things can’t get any worse because we’re a big club” nonsense.

Absolutely spot on. It's said TB wanted to sign him, TT et al refused. Poisonous toad. Pompous preening narcissistic bully boy.