http://www.chelseafc.com/news-article/article/2987554/title/benitez-appointed Chelsea Football Club can confirm Rafael Benitez has been appointed interim first-team manager until the end of the season. "The owner and the Board believe that in Benitez we have a manager with significant experience at the highest level of football, who can come in and immediately help deliver our objectives. The 52-year-old Spaniard is due to meet the players at the training ground in Cobham tomorrow. The two-time UEFA Manager of the Year comes with outstanding pedigree. He began his managerial career in his homeland, most notably at Valencia where he built a reputation as one of Europe's top coaches by winning the Spanish League twice and the UEFA Cup. He then spent six years at Liverpool and led them to their fifth European Cup and an FA Cup."
Rafa taking that job is a sign of a desperate man. Will it restart his career? Or be the nail in the coffin? Time will tell.
Hmmm puts him in the shop window. Win things/do well and walk away and potentially straight into another job. Do poorly and he will probably still get a job, Chelsea's board certainly won't be letting him sign his own players, that's for sure. He's had a few offers for jobs, we shall see how he gets on!
He'll undoubtedly still be able to get a job somewhere, but if he cocks up at Chelsea after tailing off with Liverpool, and doing terribly at Inter, you wont see many top clubs banging on his door.
Robert Di Matteo was never going to succeed. He won the FA Cup and Champions League by fluke and the team were just happy not to be managed by AVB. How could you not offer someone who won those respective trophies the job? I don't see RDM as a motivational manager and that is why I think they didn't bounce back fairly quickly and why this bad run of form has continued. Rafael Benitez is worth a shot; he's certainly got an impressive CV and I think he was treated harshly by Liverpool-they have had a couple of worse managers after his disposal! Any sane man would prefer Pep though.
Roberto Di Matteo's time at Chelsea was the equivalent of blind-folding a man and tying his hands behind his back, loading a couple of shells into a 12 gauge, and then telling him to run. You can be Usain Bolt or Mo Farah, but you're not going to outrun the shotgun.
Haha, what a great analagy! I don't think that Di Matteo was ever the right man for chelsea. Not enough experience, or the right kind of personality to motivate them. I agree with Jose Fonte Baby's assessment that he got a bit lucky really. He has the potential to be a great manager, but at the same time Chelsea can't afford to have an inexperienced manager at the helm. This should have been addressed at the start of the season. Not a quarter of the way in, the week before they play City.The board are bonkers, they had to stick with him once they had made him the permanent manager. Benitez was awful at Inter, I really wonder what makes them think he will be any better at Chelsea
Abramovich makes Cortese look like a pussy cat. I have to admit to a feeling of smugness that all those who bet on Adkins being the first to go have lost their money. Chelsea need stability. Nothing against Rafa, but he has the look of a man who yet again wasn't first choice.
The trouble with Abramovich is not so much his impatience with managers but his love affairs with certain players, Shevchenko and Torres for example. Clubs can be run perfectly well on the "Continental" model, with a Director of Football responsible for maintaining the squad, and a coach whose job is simply to get the best he can out of the players at his disposal. Short term managerial appointments, maybe just a single season, are common with this system. But Abramovich fancies himself as the real Chelsea Director of Football. That's where the problem lies IMO.
I think you are definitely right. You have to admit though, if you had Abramovich's money and you had bought a football club, it would be extremely hard to not throw your weight around and aquire players that you had a personal preference for! I'd be terrible for it, I doubt anyone would want to manage my team, i'd probably accidentally end up with the Saints team at my club, with a couple of international superstars thrown in for good measure.
Abramovich has been pretty successfull with the trigger happy approach to managers though hasn't he? How many trophies have they won over the last 8 years compared to say Arsenal who have remained loyal and won nothing. I'm not saying its wrong or right, but you never hear that he has tried to avoid paying out the contract which would be scandalous - he clearly thinks that a change in manager can result in immediate changes to results on the pitch.
I read earlier that an expert has claimed that by the year 2018 you will never be further than 6 feet away from an ex-Chelsea manager.....
Managers have come and gone but the success has been founded on the one thing that has stayed constant since the Mourinho years, the spine of the team (the "mental" spine as much as anything): Cech, Cole, Terry, Lampard, Drogba. It started to come apart two years ago when it dawned that that squad couldn't go on for ever. Di Matteo is credited with winning the European Championship, but in truth he did it by restoring the old spine and putting the "senior" players more or less in charge. The actual game plan against Barca and Bayern was simple enough, but it was the players not Di Matteo who won the games. Arsenal faced this same predicament a decade ago, when Wenger first had to rebuild; first time round he did it very successfully. Second time round he has had to do it with the club focussed on financing the move to the Emirates. If they had decided to go down the Abramovich route, and sell to an owner prepared to put £100M or more of his own money directly into the club, the last seven years would probably have been very different. Even then, if just some of the players who have left over that period had been a bit more loyal and patient, they would almost certainly have won trophies with Arsenal. What I'm saying is that the difference between Arsenal and Chelsea is not a matter of their differing policies as regards their manager, but their different values when it comes to the financial principles on which they are prepared to operate their club.
I heard that Abramovich has paid 70 million out to get rid of ex-managers. What a waste of money. I can't believe he wouldn't have done just as well if he stuck to one manager.
