Chelsea are speedrunning their way into a death spiral

Logic has long left Stamford Bridge, quaint crises like “Huddlegate” now distant dreams. Having sacked Liam Rosenior after 106 days, Chelsea are beginning “a process of self-reflection”, as though they’ve just committed a hate crime on reality TV. Estêvão’s hamstring has decided to divorce his femur, following injuries to Cole Palmer, João Pedro and Reece James. Apparently Marc Cucurella has a barber, perhaps the real harbinger of the apocalypse.

Hiring Rosenior in the first place was yet another example of BlueCo's cruel disregard for its employees, its lack of foresight or responsibility or morality. This is largely not the fault of Rosenior, so clearly underqualified and underprepared, but a desperate swing repackaged as the roundly loathed multi-club model bearing fruit. He was never going to turn down an offer which should never have been made.

None of this is to say the Rosenior era has not been miserable and damaging, an exercise in managed decline, in what happens when a conscientious human meets the conscientious-human-eating machine. He called Tuesday’s 3-0 disintegration against Brighton “indefensible”, although Trevoh Chalobah tried his darndest. “I thought personally that the boys were running their socks off,” Chalobah said. “Everyone in the changing room is tired. It’s nothing to do with effort.” For the 34th consecutive Premier League match this season, Chelsea were outrun by their opponents. Turns out delusion spreads fast.

It bears saying that Chelsea fans finding solace in Tottenham’s marathon tragicomedy might well be watching a preview of their own future. The traditional safety nets have been removed, the facade of invincibility stripped. We now know how wrong it can go, and there is every indication Chelsea are repeating the defining failures of Tottenham’s decline into indignity, just on a bigger scale, moving faster and breaking more things, speedrunning the road to nowhere.

Prioritisation of commercial metrics and financial “sustainability” (one way of describing last season’s English record £262.4m losses) over on-pitch performance? Check. Repeatedly hiring and firing unsuitable coaches with opposing philosophies and personalities? Check. Buying players out of opportunity rather than necessity with a success rate which would get you instantly fired in basically any other field? A rotating cast of arrogant yet incompetent executives desperate to protect themselves at all costs? Disregarding fans’ desires and priorities to the point of apathy and entropy, triggering almost constant protest and discontent?

Even then, Chelsea’s callow squad is uniquely placed for psychological collapse, for diffidence and indifference to set in at warp speed. What comes next is your few useful players leaving – a process already well underway if Enzo Fernández and Marc Cucurella’s recent comments are any indication – or being infected by the catching ineptitude and malaise.

Of Rosenior's 10 wins as head coach, six came against opponents either in the top-flight relegation zone, the Championship, League One or Cypriot First Division. They lost five of six matches against clubs in the Premier League top six, seven of their past eight matches against top-flight or European opposition. Tuesday’s defeat by Brighton means Chelsea have not lost more consecutive league matches without scoring (five) since shortly after the Titanic sank in 1912. The only people who seemed to respect him less than the fans were the players. Their remaining fixtures make finishing 13th somewhere between entirely feasible and likely.

Where do you go from here? For now, Rosenior’s assistant and former Under-21s head coach Calum McFarlane is back in the big chair. The Observer understands specialist interim manager Igor Tudor is available. Any coach willing to take the job should be instantly discounted, their attraction an obvious indicator of some psychological flaw. Executives finally appear to have realised the value of experience, just in time for anyone with said experience to realise that actually they don’t fancy jumping into the bearpit. That rising groan is the growing clamour for John Terry’s rehabilitation, which feels on multiple fronts like deciding Nigel Farage is the right man to heal your ruptured nation.

Of Chelsea’s 17 permanent managers of the Premier League era, five of the bottom six by points per game were hired by BlueCo (Andre Villas-Boas is the only exception, with only Enzo Maresca slightly outperforming him). What suggests they will get the next one right? Or the one after that? Of course any number of sporting directors and executives should follow Rosenior, but they’ve somehow formed a collective shield of ineptness, so many cooks that it is impossible to tell who is spoiling the broth. However rapidly non-League approaches, the owners cannot legally sell the club until 2032.

The next phase of the grand “project” is, as per Eghbali, adding “more ready-made players”, an unquestionably vital volte-face. And yet, of the 51 permanent signings under BlueCo, eight – generously – have been successful, with no more than two of those signed in the same window. Within the past two years, the sporting directors have signed Alejandro Garnacho, Jamie Gittens, Liam Delap, João Félix, Marc Guiu, Axel Disasi and Omari Kellyman. As with coaches, what evidence is there that they will be better at signing established players than teenagers? What evidence is there that any of this is working, or is going to work?

“When you get punched in the face, you’ve got to fight back,” co-owner Eghbali said recently, at one of those conferences by billionaires, for multi-millionaires. Sage advice, perhaps, but BlueCo’s four years in west London have been defined by repeatedly swinging for all comers with such grand ambition and all-encompassing incompetence that the only nose that ever ends up bloodied is their own.

Photograph by Chris Lee / Chelsea FC via Getty Images