Chelsea lost 3-0 to Brighton and Hove Albion on Tuesday, and Liam Rosenior said that defeat against Brighton made it clear his position was no longer tenable. Asked whether the result had effectively sealed his fate, he said: “Judging off that performance, it looks that way.”
Rosenior gave his final press conference as Chelsea head coach after the club’s fifth successive league defeat without scoring a goal, and he did not try to soften the result. “I won’t lie. That was unacceptable,” he said. Chelsea concluded that his position was untenable, even though he remained well regarded by the hierarchy as the club’s slide sharpened.
The collapse had been building for weeks. Chelsea were already wobbling before Tuesday’s defeat, with the slide deepening last month when Filip Jorgensen passed the ball straight to Bradley Barcola in the 74th minute of the Champions League tie at Paris Saint-Germain. After that elimination, Enzo Fernandez and Marc Cucurella went public to question the decision-making of the ownership and sporting leadership.
Rosenior rejected any suggestion that he had lost the dressing room. “I don’t feel there’s a disconnect between me and the players,” he said. “We work very closely with them in training, in individual meetings, in team meetings. We are giving everything to the players.” He added that “there is a lack of spirit, a lack of belief that can create that perspective,” while also saying, “I can’t argue with that at the moment because the run we’re on is unacceptable and that performance definitely was as well.”
That cut both ways. Chelsea had long known Rosenior was not arriving with a deep elite managerial record, but they still backed a coach whose previous jobs included an interim spell at Derby County, 18 months at Hull City and a similar stretch at Strasbourg, the BlueCo sister club. His only winner’s medal came in 2003, when he lifted the Football League Trophy with Bristol City. In the end, the issue was not whether he could speak to the players. It was whether the club could afford to keep standing behind a run this bad and call it anything else.
