Chelsea management 101 courtesy of Rafael Benitez: Get over your ex

The similarities between Rafael Benitez and Maurizio Sarri keep on coming. John Terry spoke about how Benitez kept telling Chelsea to do things as he did at Liverpool.

There’s no easier way to ruin a first date than to keep talking about your ex, and there’s few more cringe-inducing ways to ruin subsequent dates (if, somehow, you make it that far) than to continue talking about your ex. Because football is life and life is football, this lesson applies to management as well. When you’re coaching Chelsea, the easiest way to lose the locker room is to keep talking about Liverpool.

Rafael Benitez was never going to have an easy time at Chelsea. His Liverpool teams often had their way with the Blues, and he added his own criticisms of the club to the mix. What Jose Mourinho was to Arsenal, Benitez was to Chelsea.

Even as the players set aside those aspects and did the professional thing by welcoming him and his achievements, Benitez still had an uphill battle. The Blues were defending Champions League champions, and Benitez was replacing a club favourite and the inspiration for the Champions League title, Roberto di Matteo.

Benitez failed some early tests of man-management and winning the locker room. Talking with Jamie Carragher for Sky Sports, John Terry explained some of Benitez’s obvious and completely avoidable gaffes:

"Every meeting we had it was: ‘We used to do this at Liverpool, we done this.’I had to have a few conversations with him and say: ‘Gaffer, you’ve got to forget Liverpool, you can’t keep saying “we” this, you’re at Chelsea now, it’s not going down well with the lads.’"

Carragher said the Liverpool players never pushed back on Benitez in such a way. They did what Benitez told them to do. But whatever issues they may have had with Benitez from time to time, as all teams and players do, at least he was coaching them as Liverpool. He didn’t spend his time at Liverpool talking about Valencia or Tenerife.

Carragher and Terry speculated that Terry’s pushback may have contributed to why Benitez did not play the captain very much.

Not long ago, my colleague Kevin wrote about how similar Benitez and Maurizio Sarri are. As times goes on, the similarities between the two accumulate and go a long way to explaining what happened at Stamford Bridge last season.

Maurizio Sarri may not have explicitly mentioned Napoli at training (although no one would be surprised if he did), but his entire methodology was a total transplant. Obviously, part of that is because “his” way of teaching “his” football is the only thing he knows how to do. Unlike Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte, who were the biggest influences over Benitez’s and Sarri’s squads, respectively, Benitez and Sarri did not tailor their training or tactics to the Chelsea players in their charge.

Benitez wanted to recapture his Liverpool glory. Sarri wanted to continue doing what he had been doing at Napoli. And in both cases, the players and the fans rejected the xenotransplantation.

Neither Benitez nor Sarri appreciated dissent, nor gave much credit to the role of captain. Benitez partially sidelined Terry for his feedback, even though advocating for the players to the manager is part of a captain’s job. Whatever tactical or technical quibbles Benitez may have had with one of the two best centrebacks in Premier League history, Terry makes it sound like Benitez’s biggest issue was the dissent.

Obviously, we all know Sarri’s perspective on dissent, open communication and coach-captain relationships.

Travis likes to say that managers are their patterns. Rafael Benitez and Maurizio Sarri certainly are, and this is something that future clubs will need to consider when hiring them. Their style of coaching and communication may go down better at some clubs and in some football cultures better than others, but the hiring club has to know that.

But regardless of where or what level they are coaching at, a manager cannot expect to win over a room of professionals by consistently talking about his previous club – even worse when he talks about them as “we.”

For every positive lesson in management Chelsea provides, they offer a “what not to do.” Just as fans expect players to kiss the badge, players and fans have every right to expect coaches to be part of where they are and who they are leading.