Chelsea has been trying to become “Barcelona in Blue” for years. Maurizio Sarri has made the hardest push but it is time to let Chelsea be Chelsea again.
In a scrappy contest, Chelsea defeated Crystal Palace. After the match, then manager Jose Mourinho was asked how it happened. Asking for a pen and paper, he simply wrote “big balls“.
It is fair to say that is not the case now. Everyone will have an opinion as to why and who is to blame. But it might be a simple as saying Chelsea had a culture as a club and somewhere along the line that was deemed not good enough.
In just a few short weeks, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer has provided the perfect example of what happens when a club returns to its culture. Solskjaer has let Manchester United be Manchester United again. And it is high time Chelsea is allowed to be Chelsea once again.
The Blues began to lose their way when Pep Guardiola exploded onto the scene. What Guardiola did at Barcelona caught Roman Abramovich’s eye. All of a sudden, there was a strong desire to be “Barcelona in Blue”.
The Blues bought highly technical player after highly technical player. They tasked Andre Villas-Boas with removing the players not up to task. He failed and Roberto Di Matteo won a double playing the Chelsea way.
When Jose Mourinho was appointed for a second time or Antonio Conte after him, it seemed as though the Blues had given up on becoming Barcelona. But the dourness of Conte’s last months, just two years after Mourinho’s implosion, seemed to reignite a desire to be Barcelona. It likely helped that Guardiola was setting the Premier League alight with Manchester City at the same time.
So Maurizio Sarri was hired and supported in his task of making Chelsea the new “Barcelona in Blue”. And it has mostly gone the same way it did under Villas-Boas. Players have been ostracized in nearly every way simply because they are not seen as useful. A very small, select group of players is relied upon as the same plan in the same format happens again and again. All while Sarri says he only knows “his way” and wants the team to play “his football”.
But “his football”, whatever that may actually be at this point, is not Chelsea’s football. A fair question to ask is “what is Chelsea’s culture, their style of play?”. The answer was always there, people simply chose to ignore or despise it.
The Blues have succeeded off empowering leaders. Not just having good ones, but by giving them the ability to make decisions and take charge of themselves. This did create a player power issue that some managers have faltered under. But by not empowering leaders, Chelsea has lost the grit that made them special.
The Blues could soak up anything even Guardiola’s “best team of all time” could throw at them. And after they soaked it up, they would counter like lightning as the players decided what they were going to do. There were no circuits or rehearsed routines to be found.
From top to bottom, Chelsea had the steel to weather any storm and the silk to knock the opponent back down. The Blues could adapt to the task at hand no matter what it was. But it was not always pretty, so as Guardiola rose again, so too did the belief that football can only be played one way.
Solskjaer’s United is a perfect example of what a club’s culture means. United under Sir Alex Ferguson was not a team of good players. Most were average. But he tweaked and played around until he found the right formula to turn average individuals into a world class team. He looked at their strengths and used them, but most of all, he trusted them to make the right decisions. “His way” was whatever made his side feel the most comfortable with themselves.
United lost a lot of that in the years following Ferguson’s retirement. David Moyes did not command the same respect. Lois Van Gaal did not show enough trust in the players. And Mourinho failed to instill in United the steel he instilled in Chelsea the first time around. But all that has changed under Solskjaer.
For most of this season, United has been a team of terrible players playing terribly. Even those blaming Mourinho for everything would have said the squad was not good enough. But Solskjaer came in and trusted the players. He let United be United again. And they have only been on the rise sense.
If Sarri is the manager going forward, he needs to let Chelsea be Chelsea again. He can have “his way” in time, but for now he needs to trust his players. He needs to see what they can and cannot do and he needs to put them into a position to succeed. If he does that, if he lets Chelsea be Chelsea, the Blues can turn this around and Sarri can earn “his way”.
But if Sarri refuses to do what he needs to do to save himself and Chelsea, he will be sacked and rightly so. The Premier League does not allow for pure ideologues at the top. Even Guardiola adjusts as needed. Then the question will become who is coming in next?
The answer should be “someone that lets Chelsea be Chelsea”. Chelsea can one day become Barcelona in Blue, but it will not happen with one manager change and a rebuild. In the meantime, the Blues need to do what has made them successful for so long. And whoever comes in needs to understand that if he is to survive.