What I’m Looking for in a Coach as a Chelsea fan

In the context of another new manager, one that I personally am massively excited about (though with the learnt cautiousness that comes from having supported the club through the RA years), it’s interesting to consider the things we as fans are looking for; what would, ultimately, make us Chelsea fans happy in a coach?

My personal list in no particular order is as follows:

1. Youth integration – For Lampard, a coach with very little tactical acumen, the fact that we saw players like James, Mount, Gilmour, Tomori being trusted with opportunities gave us fans some optimism for the future, even when results weren’t great.

Why is youth integration so important? I guess it’s about a sense of ‘belonging’ – of course, the idea of ‘local’ isn’t even remotely realistic any more, and many of our youth players are poached early on for the academy from other academies, but when a player has been at the club since the age of 8 or 10 it seems likely they will care more about the club. This was probably the biggest mark against Tuchel (and pretty much every other manager we’ve had since 2004, Ancelotti and Lampard aside) .

Maybe most managers at Chelsea simply don’t feel the security to give youth a try. But the most frustrating thing, not just in the last six months but in many other managerial cases historically, has been watching the team labour with the same senior players underperforming. We might not have won with youth players, but they’d surely have injected a bit of energy and at least the sense of building for the future would have made that palatable.

(I guess the counter argument here is that managers/ coaches don’t want to throw a youth player into a team that’s playing badly for fear of ruining their confidence, and possibly their career – but at the end of last season every Chelsea fan I knew was baffled as to why Tuchel refused to give a single youth player a chance in the last game of the season when the positions were already decided, bringing on Kenedy and Barkley, two players it was clear didn’t have a future at the club. It was a similar story in our disastrous pre-season, and seemed to suggest something wrong at the club when integrating the academy, making it work, has definitely become more of a priority in the last few years. )

2. Attacking football – The outside perception of Chelsea’s ‘style’ (when many lazy pundits reference it, for example) is probably encapsulated by the first of the two legs against…