Chelsea: Maurizio Sarri’s reasons for leaving undercut his puffed up mystique

Maurizio Sarri is taking an active role in his premature departure from Chelsea. That fact, along with any number of his motivations, should give the lie to many of the narratives around him.

Maurizio Sarri keeps taking Chelsea into new directions. When they hired him he was the first permanent manager to arrive without a trophy to his name. He was the first Blues coach to wear maternity clothing during games and the first to chew nicotine products during games, let alone do both simultaneously. After many other firsts and idiosyncracies throughout the season, he may conclude with the rarest trick of all: terminating his contract by mutual consent.

Sarri has reportedly directed his agent to negotiate with Juventus and Chelsea for the Italian club to buy out his contract. Chelsea do not seem much inclined to argue. The club are looking for simply the face value of the second year of his contract.

For their part, Chelsea do not have much a choice. If Sarri wants to leave, he will not be particularly effective if the club binds him to stay. For all the talk about fractured locker rooms and palpable discord in years past, those managers were fighting to keep their jobs. Even more so than a player, when a coach wants to leave, the club pretty much has to let him go or face avoidable and, well, palpable consequences.

The two leading explanations for Sarri’s desire are as credible as they are laughable. Each one undercuts a narrative on which he arrived at the club and which made the discourse around Chelsea so ghastly this season.

First is the transfer ban. Chelsea have yet to appeal the ban to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, suggesting they are going to take the ban now and get it out of the way. Various Italian outlets have said Maurizio Sarri is not willing to go into another season without new players, both because he does not have what he wants in the current Blues squad and because – and remember, this is them, not us saying this – he does not trust the available youth players, including those on loan.

But we understand why you think it may have been us saying it. We’ve been saying it for over a year now.

Sarri himself has said he is not interested in the goings-on of transfer markets and would rather work with the players he has. Jorginho and Gonzalo Higuain are £65 million worth of disproof.

His janissaries have amplified this lie by saying Sarri takes particular pleasure in developing youth players. Despite not having brought any academy players into Napoli’s first team and giving hardly any players under 23 substantial playing time, Sarri was heralded as the man equal parts pragmatic and idealistic: he goes to war with the army he’s got, and likes nothing more than to bring the academy into the senior squad.

Any review of playing patterns at Napoli or Chelsea (like the ones we did last summer) show this is not true. The 2018/19 confirmed that, barring some major externality, perhaps one originating in Germany.

It makes perfect sense for Maurizio Sarri to want to leave if Chelsea acquiesce to the transfer ban. He desperately wants more players, different players, “his” players.

He believes – rightly, but for different reasons than he thinks – that he cannot teach Chelsea’s players any more and some of them are resistant to more Sarriball. Relying on youth and returning loanees – gasp! they’re unfamiliar to him! – is an abject nightmare. Sarri might think his circuits are as demanding as his devotees think they are, which would explain why he believes young players cannot handle them.

If Roman Abramovich is as cunning as many people think, he is declining to appeal the ban because he knows it’ll get rid of Sarri faster than a “no smoking” sign.

Second, Sarri would rather be where he is loved, and that is not Stamford Bridge. Sure, no one wants to be nor should be subjected to the inbred affronts too common in football grounds worldwide. On the other hand, sadly, it is part of the job. And Sarri has had an easier go of things with Blues fans than almost any of his predecessors, a smooth ride all the more remarkable for how little he has given fans in return.

Sarriball was to be an immediate cure for the malaise supposedly affecting Chelsea fans fed up with “boring,” “negative,” “anti-football” of Conte and Jose Mourinho. Whether anyone outside of a digital mob actually felt that way is a different topic. Sarriball would make Chelsea thrilling again, with extended periods of excitement and offensive nous.

Instead, fans received a Dickensian lesson in what a “regista” looks like in the modern Premier League. Chelsea watchers figured out Sarri’s circuit-based play about as quickly as the Blues’ opponents did. They kept waiting for some spark – a substitution, a tactical reorganization, a moment of brilliant team play – that would signify that Sarri did anything other than shift Chelsea from a moderate-possession team to a high-possession team.

It never came. Not only that, Sarri did not seem all too satisfied with his work in reshaping how Chelsea play. Even as the team entered the era of peak – and then plateau – Sarriball in mid-Setpember, Sarri did not do anything to show his own happiness or signal to the fans “This! This makes me happy and it should make you happy, too!”

Sarri was always going to lag behind his immediate predecessor in the charisma department. Antonio Conte made every effort to endear himself to the fans even before he won the club a Premier League title.

Jumping into the crowd after goals and aggressively hugging each player after a win are not Sarri’s personality. That’s OK. But he did nothing to win over the players, other than the ketchup in the canteen and fun training sessions which had nothing to do with the late-season injury spurt. Nor did he make efforts to reach out to the fans.

He is hoping that by returning to Italy, where he is a known personality and better understands the football culture, he will be welcomed and accepted from day one. He underestimates how much Juventus fans like winning. The bianconeri’s love will be even more conditional than that of the Blues’.

Maurizio Sarri is doing Chelsea an immense favour by taking the initiative to leave. He is sparing them the usual drama and payouts that go with a managerial turnover.

Sarri has valid reasons for wanting to leave. Sadly, those same factors would have been valid reasons not to hire him in the first place and forego this whole episode, had anyone other than Travis and me bothered to spend a few hours last summer on YouTube or TransferMarkt doing basic research into the man’s managerial patterns.

Those patterns did not change this season and they will probably not change at Juventus. That will be their problem, and they have even less excuse to expect otherwise than Chelsea did.