Frank Sinatra once called London on a Saturday afternoon from his house in Palm Springs to inquire how Chelsea had got on. Sinatra explained his guest by the pool was actor and soon-to-be Chelsea director Dickie Attenborough.
Raquel Welch once sipped brandy watching a game at Stamford Bridge and let Peter Osgood know when she was leaving. Somehow Osgood stayed on the pitch.
In 2005 at a Champions League game against Bayern Munich, José Mourinho hid in a laundry basket, having been given a two-game stadium ban by Uefa for previous misdemeanours in Barcelona.
Several years later Mourinho’s boss, Roman Abramovich appeared in a London court to discuss Russia’s “aluminium wars” of the 1990s and said he was reluctant to get involved because “every three days someone was being murdered”.
Way back in 1905, Chelsea signed the 6ft 2in 22-stone goalkeeper William “Fatty” Foulke to generate tickets sales as much as win games. A goalkeeping successor at the Bridge, Benjamin Baker, was 6ft 3in and his party trick was “to kick out the lightbulbs from chandeliers”. Baker was joined at the club by a Scottish forward with, indisputably, the greatest name of any footballer ever: Jimmy Argue.
Blue is the colour, they sing, but Stamford Bridge has been home to its own Chelsea rainbow of delights for a century and more.
Even by this club’s standards, though, the past week, taking in the dismissal of Graham Potter last Sunday and the re-appointment of Frank Lampard on Thursday, has been kaleidoscopic.
Potter, remember, was the coach Chelsea’s new owners hired in September on a five-year contract; he was sacked 33 days after the closure of a transfer window in which Chelsea spent £286 million (€326 million) to acquire eight players to add to the 25 senior professionals already in-house and 48 hours before they embarked on a sequence of five matches in 15 days including both legs of a Champions League quarter-final against Real Madrid.
You might think then, at senior management level, they would see this as not a moment for disruption, but for steadiness, a time to demonstrate they know Chelsea’s domestic slump is not all down to the coach of seven months and 31 games.
Perhaps such honest self-reflection has occurred, perhaps there were early misgivings about the appointment of Potter and actually Chelsea’s hierarchy waited as long it could before acting. Yet for such seemingly modern businessmen, they have come to a very old-fashioned conclusion: it’s one man, the coach, who is the problem.
For almost two decades at Chelsea this short-termism had been the long-term strategy; the new ownership was meant to be different.
The cult of the manager is one thing; the cult of firing managers has become another. And the Potter decision does not end questions – it raises more, one of which concerns how these men operate in other spheres. Do they conclude on a day-to-day basis that after all the millions spent, players and staff accumulated, that these matter less than the department head who picks the team twice a week?
Did they consider basic football context? For example, when Chelsea exited both domestic cups it was away at Manchester City each time. Was the unfavourable draw Potter’s fault? Manchester United, by comparison, got two home draws, as of course did City. Both are in the FA Cup semi-finals and United have won the League Cup.
On Tuesday night against Liverpool would it have been Potter to blame for Kai Havertz, Joao Felix and Mateo Kovacic missing those presentable chances?
Maybe. This after all is Sinatra’s Chelsea and they do it their way. On another esoteric night in 2012, Chelsea won the Champions League with an interim manager, Roberto Di Matteo, in charge, allegedly. But does anyone consider Di Matteo’s input into that triumph the equal of Didier Drogba’s?
Other factors matter, players matter, players who take responsibility, who assume leadership via performance or personality. Do the hierarchy not think the current group of players carry some responsibility for the downturn in results? What about recruitment – has that been perfect, has that been appropriate? What about those who appoint the heads of recruitment?
Such was the volume of players assembled over the past two windows, it was written this week there was not enough room on training-ground dressing-room benches to accommodate them, so some players got changed in corridors. Presumably these will be sought-after stars on whom fortunes have been spent.
It is not coherent. In football’s evolving jargon “aligned” is the buzzword, but one of the reasons some distrust this new language is that it seems superficial. Certainly Chelsea are not “manifesting” alignment.
One man who could tell them all about management and leadership is a 47-year-old coach called Graham Potter. Potter did an MSc in leadership: personal and professional development. He is someone who thinks beyond the superficial. He is someone who once asked: “How do we develop responsibility, self-awareness and empathy? That’s the most important thing in a football team, that environment.”
Potter knew how much surroundings – practical, logistical, intangible – also matter. He was, and is, refreshingly grown-up in the bazaar world of football freakonomics.
In a telling interview earlier in the season, he said: “Staying alive is part of the consideration when you take a job. You ask: ‘What are the chances of being myself here? Do they understand how I have got to this point?’
“Because there is no point going somewhere and them expecting something completely different to what you have always been.”
With hindsight maybe Potter would accept it was an error, albeit understandable, to go to Chelsea. What were the chances of him being himself there? Staying alive at a club where there have been 16 permanent appointments since Abramovich pushed his Soviet Union laundry basket through the door is a 24-hour fist fight, not a process.
So now it is back to the other Frank, Lampard. Previously, as they say in the TV dramas, Lampard succeeded Maurizio Sarri and preceded Thomas Tuchel in the endless cast list.
Chelsea restart at Wolves today, then it’s Real Madrid in the Bernabéu next Wednesday. Given the dismissive nature of his Chelsea dismissal – in a corridor at Goodison Park – Carlo Ancelotti might be motivated. So, too, Antonio Rudiger, whom Potter could have done with.
If it is all down to the manager, then being in Madrid in the last eight of the Champions League is Potter’s achievement. But of course it is not his alone.
Chelsea’s longstanding theatrical ensemble know that, as the man said, all the world’s a stage. “They have their exits and their entrances.”
