Chelsea: “Sarriball” was always a case study in branding, not football

Maurizio Sarri was not the mastermind of nor even an accomplice to the “Sarriball” mania at Chelsea. He was merely its beneficiary, until he became its victim.

One of the more obnoxious ways to make a lot of money very quickly is to take something people have always done, repackage and brand it, then monetize it as a personal or professional lifestyle identifier. Oh, how my life would be different if my mother had written books (Instagram was still some ways into the future) about how we should “find joy” in our yearly cull of clothes and toys that we would truck down to the mission at St. Patrick’s. Alas, the world would have to wait 25 years for Marie Kondo, and here I am.

Maurizio Sarri’s devotees found much more joy in the promise and promotion of Sarriball than they ever would in its execution at Chelsea. Most Sarritologists are now making their way through the stages of grief.

To be sure, a few of the staunch hold-outs are rocking in the corner repeating “Sarriball is coming. Sarriball is coming.” They spend their days watching YouTube highlights of Napoli, explainers of Sarri’s training sessions and a few clips from Chelsea’s preseason – the same clips they trumpeted throughout the summer to herald the end of “sufferball.”

As my colleague Travis Tyler often points out, a summer evening with a few videos of Sarri’s training told him everything he needed to know about the season ahead. As Twitter gadfly Sebastien Chapuis often points out, Sarri’s circuits and training methods are quintessentially Italian. They are literally by the book, and both Chapuis and Sarri have likely bought the same books at some point in their education.

The only thing that distinguishes Maurizio Sarri’s methodology, passing circuits or tactical set-ups is the brand name “Sarriball.” Take the last name of any midtable Serie A or Serie B coach, append the word “ball” and the on-pitch product would look much the same.

The boastful stroking that accompanied some of those early videos reveal even more in retrospect about the Sarriball phenomenon than they did at the time. The hard, fast passing that covered the length of width of a pitch with no opponents; the short clips of a passing sequence leading to a shot; endless segments of Jorginho’s one-touch passing. These all speak to Sarriball working perfectly in a highly-controlled environment, or at least Serie A.

The brand affinity to Sarriball led to the proliferation of taglines: “Do you understand regista?” “Kante is not technical enough.” “Did you even watch Napoli last season?”

These were deflections, not defences. None of them explained Sarriball, nor did they distinguish it in any way. Their main function was to insulate Maurizio Sarri from criticism. They reinforced his worst tendencies to think that what he is doing is right and good. To this day, Sarri has still not taken a gram of responsibility for the failures of his methods, tactics or strategy. He still sees no reason to adapt anything he did at Napoli to the Chelsea players in front of him or the league in which he competes. Successes are his, failures belong to others.

We’ll even give the people who said such things a free pass on their insufferably self-superior use of words they scarcely understood. All they were doing was building the expectations around Sarriball far higher than any coach could do with the rudimentary and unsuitable methods Sarri grafted onto the Premier League.

Their purveyors’ belief that this was something new, something innovative, something that would transplant with no need for translation from Serie A to the Premier League was complemented by their belief in its inscrutable complexity. Sarriball would take years of work with the best players (certainly better than Chelsea’s current squad, they say) to come into fruition. Only fans who understand registas could understand the preachings of the high priest, who was stymied by the tactical and technical ignorami he inherited at Stamford Bridge. Hence, Jorginho. Hence, Gonzalo Higuain.

The whole situation was a curious inverse of Williamson’s First Law. That law holds “Everything is simple when you don’t know a f***ing thing about it.” In this case, Sarritologists wanted us to believe everything was complicated, because they didn’t know a f***ing thing about it.

A more critical look at those videos would have spared them their present hardship. It may even have spared Chelsea FC this current hardship, as it is increasingly hard to escape the conclusion that fan outcry contributed to the decision to hire Sarri.

Despite lacking the physique, fashion sense, hairline or charisma of a brand influencer, Maurizio Sarri may be the perfect coach for the Instagram age. He wowed a bunch of gullible buffoons by doing a mundane thing that his countrymen have been doing and teaching for decades, did it moderately well in a way that lends itself to empty-calorie consumption and superficial understanding, and has a name that readily fits a hashtag.

Chapuis inveighs against the scourge of “laptop managers.” Little did we know we had an Instagram manager in our midst this whole time.

Roman Abramovich will surely find his joy tidying up the remnants of this failed experiment.