Maurizio Sarri may be getting very concerned at how quickly his tenure is looking like Jose Mourinho’s and Antonio Conte’s. The blank motivation of his Chelsea squad is the latest similarity.
Maurizio Sarri provided on Saturday another example of what my colleague Vishnu Raj wrote about on Christmas Eve. Vishnu cited a few ways in which Sarri’s player usage and tactics echo similar flaws that led to Jose Mourinho’s and Antonio Conte’s downfalls. Sarri’s experiences with an “extremely difficult to motivate” group of players is one more thing he will someday commiserate about with his predecessors.
None of Mourinho, Conte and now Sarri have been able to tap into these players’ psyches for more than a short burst. Chelsea’s players are so difficult to motivate in part because, unlike the coaches, no one really knows what does motivate them.
Jose Mourinho is motivated by an almost obsessive-compulsive desire to amass campaign-level victories. Under different circumstances his psychological profile would land him on an episode of “Hoarders.” He’s a collector, and trophies from the top levels of football have become his target. Notice how rarely he celebrates a goal or a win. Note, also, how quickly a trophy loses his luster and he has to move on to the next one. He barely has time to enjoy one victory before he needs the next. Sometimes I wonder if he has any intrinsic love of football or if his immense erudition, passion and devotion are simply the necessary conditions he endures for the end products he craves.
Antonio Conte, on other hand, has a burning desire to win every moment of life. He celebrates individual midseason goals more intensely than Jose Mourinho celebrates a Premier League title. Conte has to win every tackle, every aerial battle, every tactical movement off the ball, every shot, every game, every season. You see this in how he pantomimes 90 minutes of action from his technical area and how he cannot sleep for days after a loss.
We don’t really know what motivates Maurizio Sarri. This is partly because so much of how we think about Chelsea is in the context of winning, and Sarri has no experience with it. Perhaps that is why he is so dogmatic about his playing styles and why he came into Chelsea making vague offerings about entertainment and fun – they are all he knows he can offer.
Whatever it is, he is not communicating it and instilling it in his players. It is hard to fault him for this, though, since his predecessors had the same issue. But they at least had a few players who could understand them to some extent.
John Terry and Diego Costa, for example, both have Antonio Conte’s passion for winning absolutely everything. Terry’s comments about how he will not even let his children win games around the house – they have to win things honestly against him – and Costa’s borderline insanity show they always have to stay on top.
Didier Drogba’s penchant for the big game moments shares Mourinho’s understanding of what the whole thing is about. Drogba loved scoring and produced memorable moments and game-winners from August through May. But when everything was on the line, he wanted the ball on his head and his foot. He wanted nothing left to chance when it mattered most, and he knew he was the best chance.
None of Chelsea’s players share such a psychological understanding with Sarri. Jorginho is supposedly his tactical translator, but he is doing nothing to bring the locker room into line. Gonzalo Higuain may have a forceful presence and relationship with Sarri, but he will have limited impact coming in as the hired gun.
Part of the manager’s job is to motivate his players. This entails understanding the players’ motivations enough to relate to them. Jose Mourinho’s and Antonio Conte’s motivations are so enmeshed with their personality they may not be able to relate to any others, let alone tap them.
Very smart people are often not good teachers because they can’t understand how a concept that is so easy to them is so hard for someone else. The same could apply for motivation. Jose Mourinho, for all his intelligence, may not be able to understand why anyone would play 60+ games each season if not for the trophy at the end. Antonio Conte probably cannot understand how anyone could not have the same intrinsic levels of motivation for football that he has. He has so much internal drive that he cannot comprehend, and perhaps not respect, anyone in his line of work with less.
If Chelsea’s players were motivated by winning in any form they would have found ways to work with Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte. Instead, many of the individuals and, as a result, the collective cracked under the pressure these men applied. Their desires for goals, wins and trophies were less than what they were willing to do for the coaches.
To whatever extent Chelsea FC identified Maurizio Sarri as an antidote to the ruthless pressure of Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte, he is not the corrective they sought. Sarri promised fun and the players are not having fun. He promised entertainment and no one is entertained by the results. He promised a new philosophy of football at Stamford Bridge, and his players seem as uninterested in playing for enjoyable aesthetics as they did for matching Mourinho’s and Conte’s intensity.
If Jose Mourinho, Antonio Conte and Maurizio Sarri all encounter the same problems as each other, that should be a sign that the problem lies with whatever is constant across their tenures than with any of them. That constant is the players. They are extremely difficult to motivate, and that is on them as much as the coach.
Players like Terry, Costa, Drogba, Branislav Ivanovic and Mikel John Obi have the “battling mentality” Sarri said is missing in this squad. That mentality is the sine qua non of motivation. It is the kindling waiting for the spark. In some cases, the fire is already burning. But without it, the most motivational coach in the world will fail. Motivation cannot fill a void – it must act on something already there. Sarri’s post-game press conference was him wondering if there is anything there.
Maurizio Sarri must keep trying to motivate these players because they sadly hold the fate of his job. However, he will be in good company if he leaves Stamford Bridge having never found the keys to understanding this squad. Sarri may find truth in my age-old coaching maxim: You can lead a horse to water, and sometimes you just have to hold its head under and drown it.