After spending a season with a coach who tried to shoehorn Chelsea players into various “roles,” the Blues may finally fill a truly necessary role: the Steve Holland role.
Petr Cech and Frank Lampard will be Chelsea’s headline hires of the summer, but the club will be filling positions throughout the staff with former players and academy coaches. Jody Morris will likely be Lampard’s assistant head coach, and Joe Edwards is expected to join the first-team staff after 15 years of coaching in Chelsea’s academy.
Edwards and Morris have moved up the ranks of the academy coaching structure over the last decades. Starting with the true kiddos, they progressively took on older age groups until Edwards was coaching the U18’s to back-to-back FA Youth Cups (a feat only previously achieved by Manchester United’s Busby Babes) and then the development squad. Meanwhile, Morris took the leap out of academy coaching to join Frank Lampard at Derby County for his first taste of senior-level coaching.
Few people at any level of the club know Chelsea FC as well as these two. They have worked with nearly every youth player over the last decade – from the ones whose careers Chelsea absolutely bottled to the ones who simply moved on with their lives away from football to those few who are now breaking into Chelsea’s first team. Beyond the individual players, they know the administration of the club from a relatively behind-the-scenes perch. And, bottom line, they are excellent football men.
This sets them up to give Chelsea something they have not had in several years: a point of continuity in the first-team staff.
As my colleague Kevin Peacock somewhat wistfully pointed out earlier this week, Frank Lampard is just another name in a 114-year history of managers coming and going at Chelsea FC. A legendary name, of course, and one in whom fans will be particularly invested. But even he will someday move on. He should know this better than anyone, considering he witnessed the pace of such comings and goings accelerating since 2004. Accepting your managerial mortality means knowing you are simply the guy until the next guy.
However, the recent trend in football of managers bringing and taking their full retinue of support staff sets the club up for instability and failure. For five years, Chelsea had Steve Holland to manage the transitions between coaches, working with the locker room leaders to keep training sessions going, covering press conference duties and occasionally taking charge of a game.
When Holland left to be England’s assistant coach, Chelsea lost their last first-team coach who was there for the club, independent of the manager. Antonio Conte’s retinue followed him out early last summer, and Maurizio Sarri’s staff are house-hunting in Turin as we speak.
Jody Morris and Joe Edwards can restore that sense of continuity for the Blues, along with technical advisor (hopefully that’s a prelude to technical director) Petr Cech.
When Lampard eventually leaves, Morris may want to hitch his wagon to Lampard and follow him to his next destination. This would put Edwards into the “Steve Holland role.” Or Morris may stay put, and continue being Chelsea FC’s first-team assistant coach, regardless of who is wearing the suit on matchday (yes, because proper Chelsea managers wear suits on most matchdays).
Eventually, they may want to move out of the assistant coaching box and take the top spot themselves. One of the best ways to do this is to build their experience under various managers or at various clubs.
Rui Faria was Jose Mourinho’s right-hand man from Porto to Manchester United, and is now the head coach at Al-Duhail in Qatar. Angelo Alessio was Antonio Conte’s assistant from Siena in 2010 through Chelsea last season. This week he took the head coach job at Kilmarnock.
At some point, Steve Holland may want to apply what he learned from Andre Villas-Boas, Roberto Di Matteo, Rafael Benitez, Jose Mourinho, Antonio Conte and Gareth Southgate (did I miss anyone in there?) to manage a club of his own. If he does, he will show the full career progression for players-turned-youth-coaches-turned-first-team-coaches like Jody Morris and Joe Edwards.
This deeply Blue pair – both played for Chelsea as youth themselves, and Morris played for the first-team – are already two of the best developers of talent in the English game. They are now about to add Chelsea’s first-team to their CV’s.
What they accomplish at Chelsea during and after Frank Lampard’s tenure will strengthen the club and will accelerate their careers at the top level, just as products of a leading football academy would hope.