Thomas Tuchel — Where It Went Wrong

Thomas Tuchel is my favourite Chelsea manager of all time — more than Mourinho, more than Conte, more than Ancelotti, more than anyone else. I’ll always hold him close to my heart for his tactics, for his personality, for his conduct and for a long list of other things. But I love Chelsea more than any manager.

It is important to remain rational and not emotional. This sacking hurts everyone equally. We all wanted him to build a long-term plan with us but it did not happen.

I do not aim to belittle Tuchel or make him sound bad. He did a phenomenal job in every sense of the word and was perhaps the best ambassador we’ve ever had. It pains me to write this because I wanted him to be our Sir Alex. But he has not worked out and now it is time to analyze why this is the right time to part ways.

The biggest headline-grabber is our form in 2022. While there are mitigating factors, our league form since January has been poor. The transfer ban, injuries and all the other chaos around the club do not explain Chelsea possessing the underlying statistics of a mid-table team for 9 straight months. We should have been better. However, this is actually not the biggest reason behind Tuchel’s downfall.

More than our form, Tuchel’s downfall was primarily caused by the direction he was wanting to take. We kept talking about rebuilds only for us to buy extremely experienced and/or expensive players. When you do that, there is no rebuild. There is only immediate results. Tuchel’s words and actions kept referring to this too — he was in no mood to build a young team from the ground up. He wanted to win and he wanted to win now. That’s certainly a fair pursuit but we clearly haven’t been winning for a while. So what gives?

Do we want to keep giving him millions or do we want to recognize things aren’t working?

We could have digested Tuchel playing a bunch of 20-year-olds and losing. Losing with a young team means you are going through a crucial part of the learning curve. There is the promise of a brighter tomorrow. Losing with a bunch of 30-year-olds is not fun. There is nothing to look forward to. It just means things are not right — either tactically or with regards to personnel.

There is no “process” in a team with 37-year-old Silva, 33-year-old Aubameyang, 33-year-old Azpilicueta, 31-year-old Koulibaly and 31-year-old Jorginho. The squad had been gradually getting older throughout Tuchel’s tenure.

Tuchel was given the opportunity to retain and introduce younger players — either from the market or from the academy — but opted against it in order to have experienced players. He asked for a super experienced team so that he could win this very moment. He asked us to judge him based on this. And that’s all we are doing —…