The Clearlake Error: Everything Wrong with Chelsea's Ownership.

Graham Potter’s words in the aftermath of a humiliating 1-0 loss to bottom-place Southampton are lost to the wind. 2 wins in 14 games. 23 goals in 18 games; City had scored almost three times as many. That is all that the fans see.

The Clearlake ownership brief their support for Potter during a tumultuous transition between ownerships, reiterate they intend to build for the long term. Less than 50 days later, Potter is gone. 3 years on, that Potter quote could be attributed to any of Chelsea’s managers since, and quite worryingly, it wouldn’t feel out of place.

From the very beginning of the Pochettino reign, there was little doubt as to how highly the Argentinian manager regarded the then 24-year-old Trevoh Chalobah. In his first game in charge vs Wrexham, with the average age of his side a precarious 19, with Raheem Sterling, Ben Chilwell and Thiago Silva on the bench, Pochettino handed Chalobah his childhood dream - the Chelsea captaincy.

An injury in the second-to-last friendly against Fulham saw the hierarchy dip into Laurence Stewart’s old club Monaco to buy Axel Disasi. Within weeks, Chalobah was linked with a move away to Bayern and Forest, forcing Pochettino to speak out in Chalobah’s defence. That was his first mistake.

His second was no different than the first. Pochettino’s insistence on overpowering opponents by running faster & working harder saw another Cobham graduate stand out. Conor Gallagher’s career high 12 G/A, the selflessness to play on the wing to accommodate underperforming big-money signings & sparkling underlying metrics capped off a season in which he was comfortably the best player after Cole Palmer.

Pochettino handed Gallagher the captain’s armband, repeatedly highlighted his excellent displays & publicly stated he would want the young Englishman to sign a new contract, which the club’s hierarchy were not keen on handing out.

A few days after his glowing endorsement for a new deal for Gallagher, Pochettino was forced to change his tune.

That one sentence was a remarkable departure from his bullish tone on his decision-making prowess earlier in the season - a submissive admission that he could not beat the system, that he was another puppet on strings at the mercy of hands that made him dance to their tunes. In that same conference, Pochettino answered two questions with “no comment.” A third question asking why he wasn’t offering any response finally made him snap.

By May, Pochettino was visibly fed up with whatever was going on behind the scenes and was in open rebellion against those above him. One of his last press conferences offered telling insight into the strain placed on the few threads by which an unhappy union was precariously dangling.

2 weeks later, Pochettino was gone too - after an internal review that failed to take into any account lopsided squad-building, ridiculously poor purchases & repeated interference by the very people conducting the review. A few weeks later, Chalobah is dropped from the preseason squad and forced out of his boyhood club.

Maresca in his first season would have been easy enough to control. But a European title and a Club World Cup later, especially the manner of Chelsea’s dismantling of PSG in the final, had swayed public opinion powerfully in the Italian manager’s favour. Maresca knew that better than anyone else. There would be no more toeing the party line.

This was Maresca’s first act of defiance, one loud enough to suggest he was not going to be a ventriloquist’s dummy. Disasi, Badiashile, Fofana had all proven unreliable one way or another, and the part about having to look for internal solutions was a subtle reveal of what the instructions from above were. He aired those frustrations out regularly during the transfer window.

As if to drive home the point he made about lacking the right profile in Levi’s absence, Maresca played Hato at LCB against Qarabag. The young Dutchman endured a nightmare, easily the worst game of his senior career. He was bullied off the ball leading to Qarabag’s equalizer, then was dispossessed again before conceding the penalty for the Azerbaijani side’s second.

The (in)famous “worst 48 hours at the club” comment was a grenade tossed straight into a petrol station. It was Maresca reaching the tipping point of his predecessors.

At this point, it matters little how you view the success of Thomas Tuchel, Graham Potter, Frank Lampard, Pochettino or Maresca under the new regime. There is only one common thread tying all the turbulent patterns together, and it is desperately trying to convince you otherwise.

Ironically, an entity calling itself the ownership has refused to take any for its constant failings. For all their wheeling and dealing, the current squad still looks like it needs a significant overhaul. Buying Omari Kellyman for £19m, Felix for £45m & Mudryk for £61m classify closer to money laundering & even without the gift of hindsight, are sackable offences individually, let alone together.

Thomas Tuchel was sacked shortly after suggesting, post a poor run of results, that “we have the same issues because we have the same players.” Three seasons on, no one is doubting that every manager has the same issues because the same Sporting Directors are buying the players.

The questions for Clearlake continue to pile up and there is no one there to answer them. Who can explain the catastrophic failure to find a front-of-shirt sponsor for two seasons running? After a revolving door of executive-level changes, how far has the new stadium progressed in 3 years? How many Sporting Directors spend 1.5b to produce 5/42 hits and live to tell the tale let alone be offered contract extensions?

No amount of data will reveal the extent of corroding patience with every new young signing brought in for the future. The lenience afforded to Nicolas Jackson is not & will not be afforded to Liam Delap - and that’s not Delap’s fault. Not even God can save Emmanuel Emegha if he doesn’t start like Diego Costa.

Maresca is not without his faults, of course. His lineups, rotations, his substitutions, and his press conferences have all come under fire. But something within the Chelsea fandom has changed. For the first time in the Clearlake era, there is more faith in the manager than in manufactured discourse.

It is a fine line though, and fan opinion is fickle. That Maresca and his side have lost as many up until now as they did at the same point in the Tuchel-Potter season is a stark reminder of where the nadir of this season could be. Should the Italian fail to stem the December rot, Chelsea’s hierarchy would simply have to keep to the shadows as fan unrest and the media do the rest.

But for now, Chelsea’s hierarchy are in uncharted waters. Fans are watching the results on the pitch and most are pointing right at the Director’s box. No one is listening to their messengers - in fact, many fans are willing to shoot them. Maresca’s “worst 48 hours at the club” comment increasingly feels a comment less borne of naivety and more of a real willingness to walk out from Clearlake’s cultural clusterfuck. And if he does, Clearlake might just face their biggest PR nightmare yet.