GRAEME SOUNESS: Todd Boehly blames Thomas Tuchel but the blame is on him… the American owner’s £300m spending spree is insane – he doesn’t get our game
- Thomas Tuchel was sacked as Chelsea manager after his 100th game
- The Blues lost their third consecutive away game against Dinamo Zagreb
- But Todd Boehly had decided to sack the German ahead of Tuesday’s 1-0 defeat
Thomas Tuchel’s sacking doesn’t surprise me because it’s so typical of the way Todd Boehly decided to manage Chelsea.
Boehly is a very wealthy man who is an entrepreneur and I am sure he has made money in many different areas. A man who looked at football and thought, “This is a straightforward and straightforward business – and because I’m so smart in so many other areas of life, I can handle it.”
So he’s personally overseeing the spending of almost £300m, wondering why it’s not working and, as always, the victim is the manager. Alarm bells went off for me from the moment Boehly announced he was appointing himself as interim sporting director at Chelsea.
New controlling owner Todd Boehly (right) waited just 100 days before changing managers
As I said on these pages on Saturday, Boehly decided he didn’t need three people at the club who had guided him so successfully – Bruce Buck, Marina Granovskaia and Petr Cech. Whether he got rid of them or they left voluntarily, at that point he needs to surround himself with football people.
It will certainly take some time for Boehly to realize that it’s not as easy as he thought, that recruitment isn’t just about spending large sums of money and that recruitment is also the most important part of running a football club.
At the risk of sounding boring, try to get Sir Alex Ferguson out of retirement, send him to the LA Dodgers and ask him to rate baseball players playing at other clubs to build a team. He wouldn’t know where to start.
Thomas Tuchel has been handed £300m to spend on players in the summer transfer window
Boehly has blamed Tuchel’s door for Chelsea’s poor start to the season but he’s the one responsible for some very questionable signings and has paid well over the odds for Kalidou Koulibaly, Marc Cucurella and Wesley Fofana.
Chelsea never ran the English football management business model under Roman Abramovich.
He sacked 14 managers – some, like Roberto Di Matteo, who had just won trophies: the greatest of them all, the Champions League, along with the FA Cup in 2012.
Boehly joins a long list of foreign owners who believe they can find instant success in football
But this hire-and-fire regime was successful because Abramovich eventually brought in people who knew the business of football and understood the importance of recruiting. That’s a big part of why they’ve been so successful.
Boehly joins a long list of wealthy people who have been under the delusion that they could come into our football business and find instant success. Like Ellis Short. Like Mel Morris. Like Farhad Moshiri. You never got it.
Graham Potter has to weigh that now as he holds talks about becoming Tuchel’s successor. Potter did a fabulous job in Brighton. But going at that point from managing the players he has in Brighton to managing the players in that Chelsea dressing room will be very, very different for him.
