After Chelsea lost 4-2 at home to Wolves on February 4, Mauricio Pochettino’s prospects looked bleak.
His team were 11th in the 20-strong Premier League, a position mirroring that of Graham Potter’s Chelsea shortly before his dismissal by the west London club 10 months earlier. The Stamford Bridge crowd, who had been largely unsold on Pochettino — formerly manager of capital rivals Tottenham — from his appointment at the start of the season, were desperately unconvinced. The end did not feel far away.
At that point, you might argue that this was the second superclub in a row Pochettino had failed to fully wrap his arms around.
After performing at par in 18 months at Paris Saint-Germain in his previous job, he needed his Chelsea reign to be a success to re-assert his status as one of the best managers in the world. If he could not do that then people would look at this phase of his career as a mis-step, and wonder whether he was better off at aspirational clubs, such as previous English employers Southampton and Spurs, rather than elite ones.
Less than four months on, Pochettino has left Chelsea — by mutual consent — after one season as their head coach. And yet the feeling right now is radically different than it was that Sunday in early February. Because from that point on, Pochettino had successfully turned the ship around.
Chelsea lost only one of their final 15 league games (an admittedly chastening 5-0 defeat at another of their London rivals, Arsenal). They won their last five. They finished sixth, just three points behind Tottenham. They ended with 19 more points than they did last season.
Maybe it was not precisely the season Chelsea’s owners had in mind when they spent so much money on new players last summer.
It still means another year out of the Champions League, with all the damage that does to a big club’s finances and image. Chelsea lost an FA Cup semi-final 1-0 to Manchester City and a draining Carabao Cup final by the same score, after extra time, to an inexperienced Liverpool side. Perhaps victory there, in a game they dominated for long spells, would have secured Pochettino’s standing with the fans and the club’s bosses.
But given the realities of coaching Chelsea in the Todd Boehly/Clearlake era, it feels as if the second half of this season improved Pochettino’s reputation rather than damaged it. Inheriting an expensive but unbalanced and inexperienced squad, he eventually succeeded in turning it into a functional team, one that could run hard for him and play his positional game.
Watching Chelsea in the last few weeks, you could finally see his imprint on the group. Yes, they needed even more additions in the summer. But you could glimpse a competitive team in the near future, playing this way.
Now Chelsea’s future will belong to someone else.
There is no point in criticising the logic of removing Pochettino at precisely the moment it became clear that he had got them heading in the right direction. There is plenty of room for that elsewhere.
More interestingly is where this all leaves Pochettino.
Because he has proven in the past few months that he is still capable of going into even the most dysfunctional clubs and instilling his ethos and values. He has a style of play — hard running, organised with and without the ball, pressing high — which remains entertaining and effective. And even if he was never quite his charismatic, optimistic old self at Chelsea, his strength of personality was enough for the players to buy into him. As their reactions to his departure have shown.
Things could have been different had Chelsea won the League Cup final (Chris Lee/Getty Images)
Other clubs will have noticed Pochettino’s work at Chelsea.
This has been a summer where many top sides have tried to enter the marketplace for a new manager and found the shelves to be bare. The list of the leading candidates to replace Pochettino is itself proof that the game is not awash with proven, high-profile managers just waiting for a phone call.
In January, Barcelona were prepared to let Xavi leave this summer, but then appeared to have second thoughts a couple of months later.
Bayern Munich similarly agreed for Thomas Tuchel to leave at season’s end, failed to land any of Xabi Alonso, Julian Nagelsmann and Ralf Rangnick, resumed negotiations with Tuchel which went nowhere, and are now focusing on Vincent Kompany, even after his Burnley team were relegated from this season’s Premier League with just 23 points and five wins from their 38 matches.
Manchester United have not yet announced a decision on Erik ten Hag’s future, but they have clearly gone backwards in their second season under him.
So if Pochettino is now suddenly on the job market for this summer, it changes things.
Of course, it may be that he wants to take time out after a tiring season. He waited just over a year between leaving Tottenham and joining PSG and just under a year between his PSG exit and signing for Chelsea. But if he is available now, it could change the thinking of clubs who felt they were out of options this summer.
It is impossible not to wonder if he might be the solution to United’s problems.
Pochettino has been connected to the Old Trafford job ever since the then Spurs manager was revealed to have lunched with United royalty Sir Alex Ferguson in May 2016. Something about his style of play, his sense of history and romance, and his trust in young players just seems to fit with the ethos there, but it has never quite worked. Pochettino always wanted to stay loyal to Tottenham when United were interested in him back then, after the dismissals of Louis van Gaal in 2016, a couple of weeks after that lunch with Ferguson, and Jose Mourinho in December 2018.
When United sacked Ole Gunnar Solskjaer in November 2021, they were reluctant to negotiate with PSG about his release. And in the summer of 2022, when Pochettino had left the French club and was available, they decided to go for Ajax coach Ten Hag instead.
It is not a big leap to imagine that United would be in a better place right now if they had gone for the Argentinian instead two years ago.
Perhaps that thought will occur to the people who are running things at Old Trafford now.
And if that sparks a competition for Pochettino among clubs who want a manager who plays attacking football using young players, knows the Premier League and can turn around difficult environments, maybe it will raise the question at Stamford Bridge about whether they have got this decision right.
(Top photo: Darren Walsh/Chelsea FC via Getty Images)
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