Chelsea: Conte still coming to terms with Mourinho’s legacy on transfers

Antonio Conte knew he was entering a troubled club when he took the job at Chelsea FC. At the end of his second season, he is still encountering new fractures left by his predecessor.

Whoever said time heals all wounds never had to clean up after Jose Mourinho. Mohamed Salah’s extraordinary display in the Champions League this week brought up all the old questions and jibes about his short time at Chelsea. Those conversations inevitably include Kevin de Bruyne, and from there they splinter off into any of the players Jose Mourinho marginalized, sold or consigned to the loan army.

Wherever Chelsea finish this season they will be looking up at reminders of Mourinho’s transfer legacy. Salah at Liverpool. De Bruyne at Manchester City. Romelu Lukaku alongside Mourinho at Manchester United. Chelsea’s board are as aware of this as you are, and it will be on their minds when Antonio Conte makes his requests for incoming and outgoing transfers.

The novelty of it all defined Mourinho’s first tour at Stamford Bridge. The spending, the trophies, the intensity and the fall-out were all things Chelsea – and most of the Premier League – had never encountered. Those events and emotions would have left a mark anywhere, anytime. But Mourinho was writing his name in wet cement. When he returned a decade later, his mark was still there.

Despite the passage of time, the first spell potentiated the second. The highs were higher, the lows were lower, and the patterns were unmistakably stark. Mourinho once again set about imposing his will on the club, and the club once again went along with him. It worked before, so they thought it would work again. But Mourinho did not adapt his approach. He was building a team in 2015 to survive under his terms circa 2005. He brought the same ideas on football, tactics, player development, mentality and player relations to a much different Chelsea competing in a much different Premier League.

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Mourinho did not stay at Chelsea long enough to feel the long-term consequences. As usual, the short-term consequences engulfed him. But the club have had the intervening three years to watch Kevin de Bruyne and Mohamed Salah reach the pinnacle of the Premier League and the Champions League. They see both the goals and the pounds that could have been at Stamford Bridge. And they see an aging subset of the loan army, players who watched the depth chart fill in ahead of them during the years they were supposed to be breaking through.

Having been burned twice by the same manager, Chelsea resolved never to be burned by any manager again. To protect themselves they built a firewall between the coach (he would not be a manager) and the front office. Michael Emenalo’s reward for outlasting Mourinho was immunity from Antonio Conte’s efforts to shape the club in his vision. Antonio Conte could make requests, but they would remain justthat. Conte would have the players Emenalo and the board deemed he would have. If those players overlapped with his needs, excellent. If they did not, that was Conte’s problem, not theirs. Because the last manager’s problems were still very much their own.

The current situation at Manchester United validates this interpretation of the Mourinho era. Adam Bate of SkySports argues that Anthony Martial is in the same position Salah and de Bruyne were in at Mourinho’s Chelsea. Eerily so. Bates points out that Martial will finish the season seven days younger than de Bruyne and 58 days younger than Salah were on their last appearances for the Blues.

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Chelsea will not grant their manager a fraction of the influence Jose Mourinho had until they learn to trust again. Unfortunately, building trust takes time and the club is showing no signs of investing time into their relationships with their coaches. Perhaps a series of coaches will allow the club to eventually move on, even if no one coach in that progression enjoys a significant voice in the process.