In Premier League, Crisis Is a Constant

Chelsea managed to cycle through it all in nine hours, give or take. First, bright and early on Wednesday, came the announcement that the club’s owners had decided to dispense with the services of Manager Thomas Tuchel, after a reign encompassing a mere 19 months and one measly Champions League title.

The window for shock was a relatively brief one. Chelsea had only just concluded a summer of spending unlike anything the Premier League had ever seen — two months of shock and awe and photos of Todd Boehly, the club’s co-controlling chairman and interim sporting director — most of it seemingly conducted in accordance with Tuchel’s wishes.

But no matter: An explanation emerged swiftly, centered on the desire of Boehly and the rest of his consortium to change the culture at Chelsea and their belief that Tuchel was not the right figurehead for that shift. Quite what form that new culture will take, and quite why the 49-year-old Tuchel could not be part of it, has not been adequately explained, at least not yet.

Still, there was no time for questions. Graham Potter, the impressive coach of Brighton, had been installed as favorite to succeed Tuchel by lunchtime on Wednesday. Chelsea had been in touch with his current employer by dinner. He had “verbally agreed” to take the job — as opposed to agreeing by interpretive dance, presumably — by the time darkness fell.

And just like that, Chelsea’s crisis — one that had been difficult to discern, from the outside, before Tuchel was dismissed, and one that seemed to be entirely of its own making — had come and gone. Just like nature, though, soccer abhors a vacuum.

So it was fortunate, in many ways, that by 8:46 p.m. Italian time, Liverpool had stepped forward to produce arguably the worst Champions League performance of Jürgen Klopp’s tenure. Within 45 seconds of kickoff in Naples, Napoli had broken Liverpool’s holographic back line and hit the post. It went, it is fair to say, downhill from there.

By the time the game ended, Liverpool had officially occupied the chaos space so recently vacated by Chelsea. Klopp, the coach who guided the club to two trophies — and a Champions League final — barely four months ago, was asked in his news media conference after the game if he was worried about being fired.

Even by the standards of the Premier League, this was pretty good going: not just one major team in crisis, but two, and both of them on the same day. It is only a couple of weeks since Manchester United was afforded that status, a consequence of Erik ten Hag’s losing his first two games as coach, but that already seems to belong to the dim and distant past. Ten Hag’s stock is soaring: He has collected two more points than Tuchel, and three more than Klopp.

It is not ridiculous, of course, to suggest that both Chelsea and Liverpool have disappointed a little this season. Both have stuttered, in the Premier League and the Champions League alike. Both have seemed to be less than the sum of their parts. Both are not meeting the standard they set for themselves.

Analyzing and interrogating why that might be is a legitimate exercise. Tuchel had seemed a little frostier, a little more downbeat than habitual in recent weeks; he seemed to chastise his team on a fortnightly basis in what proved to be the last couple of months of his tenure at Stamford Bridge. Rarely, if ever, did he indicate that he knew quite what was wrong, or how to fix it.

That is the challenge facing Klopp, too. Liverpool, ordinarily so dogged and so fearsome, has looked distinctly fatigued through the opening weeks of the season. It has stirred itself only in patches, succumbing for vast periods of most of its games to a form of stagnant ennui, as if the players were running on fumes after six exacting years under Klopp.

In those circumstances, it is in the nature of the world’s biggest teams that the scrutiny should be intense. That, in essence, is the bargain. Chelsea, like Liverpool and Manchester United, has been complicit in creating a sporting ecosystem in which it is expected to win all of its games, in which almost any defeat is unacceptable. The pressure, the hyperbole, when it comes, is the flip side of the bargain.

And yet it was difficult not to be struck by the speed with which crisis descended. Liverpool was humbled in Naples, it is true, but it was still only the second defeat of the club’s season, and only its fourth of the calendar year. Chelsea had stumbled against Leeds and Southampton, but it is only five points adrift of Arsenal, the Premier League leader. It would be a stretch to suggest that, for either team, all is lost.

Part of that rush to judgment can be attributed — point your fingers here — to the news media, to the breathless coverage of the major powers of the Premier League, to the desperate need to fill the bottomless digital maw, to the talking-point culture that has slowly consumed soccer (and then everything else) in the past two decades.

Partly, too, it is because these clubs expect the best and have paid handsomely for it. Chelsea invested $300 million on players this summer and happily would have spent more if possible. Liverpool spends more on the salaries of its current squad than all but three or four teams in the world, one of which is Manchester United. Those fortunes are paid out, essentially, to ward off things like teething problems and dips in form. That, again, is the deal.

And, partly, it is because of the game that these superclubs have created: one in which the default assumption, now, is that the team that claims the Premier League title will do so with an almost impossible points tally, in a league in which Manchester City continues to roll on, seemingly unstoppable, Erling Haaland trampling opponents underfoot, and everyone else knows that losing any ground at all now means spending the season treading water, waiting for a chance to start again. There is a fragility, a desperation, an awareness that there is no room for error.

It is difficult, though, to believe that any of this is healthy: not for the players and coaches commanded to maintain almost superhuman standards or risk being branded failures and not for the fans, always awaiting the moment the gloom descends.

Most of all, it is not in the best interests of the game as a whole, which increasingly seems to exist on a bloodthirsty knife-edge, eagerly awaiting its next victim, the next chance to cry crisis, to dissemble its latest false idol, knowing full well that it will not have to wait very long at all.

The Romance Business

For an hour, Celtic Park was the stage of one of the great Champions League nights. It bubbled and simmered and, as Real Madrid struggled to contain Celtic’s delicately cultivated spirit of adventure, it boiled and roared. Callum McGregor hit the post, and for a moment the noise was such that even the reigning European champion struggled to regain its composure.

The Champions League would be diminished beyond recognition without these occasions, of course. There is something visceral, something compelling about the precise sound generated inside one of Europe’s great stadiums — Celtic Park and Ibrox in Glasgow, Napoli’s Stadio Diego Armando Maradona, the Velodrome in Marseille — when one of the continent’s self-appointed elites rolls into town.

It is important to note, though, that the root of all the son et lumiere that makes those nights so special is an inequality so deeply entrenched that it can make Celtic — one of the world’s great clubs — feel like an impossible underdog, as if it were a part-time outfit made up of cobblers and dental hygienists on an unexpected cup run.

It is an inequality that has, to a large extent, been created and intensified by the Champions League itself, as it funnels more and more money to fewer and fewer clubs. As stirring, as emotive as those games can be, they come with a grim irony, too: At least part of the appeal of the Champions League can be traced to its ability to take the consequences of imbalance and turn it into spectacle.

How to Solve a Problem Like the Premier League

Toni Kroos, at least, is not worried.

“The television money has been significantly higher in England for years,” Kroos, a Real Madrid midfielder, said this week, when asked about the yawning chasm between the spending of the Premier League’s clubs and everyone else. “It hasn’t resulted in English teams’ winning everything.” Europe’s three club competitions last season, as he pointed out, were won by teams that were conspicuously not English.

Kroos is as articulate and thoughtful a player as they come — although he does harbor a worrying admiration for the music of Robbie Williams, a personal stain that cannot be disregarded — but his interpretation on this matter is a little glib. The contrast between the financial strength of the Premier League and the fragility of its rivals is a cause for concern.

It is something, though, that can be addressed, should UEFA find the will or the conviction to do so. There is nothing it can do, of course, about the amount of money that flows into the Premier League, either from television networks or from external investors, be they private equity firms or nation states.

But it can regulate the way that money can be spent. It has already imposed limits on the number of players a club can send out on loan. It could also increase the number of locally reared players each team must name in its squad or the number of players under a certain age. It could investigate the idea of regionalized leagues, too, to help decrease the competitive imbalance.

It should, though, do something. Because the alternative is that the major clubs of continental Europe will determine that the only solution — the only way to try to keep pace — is to cut UEFA, and their national leagues, out of the equation altogether.

Correspondence

As the adage has it, if there is one thing journalists like talking about — apart from other journalists, behind their backs — it is journalism itself. The craft. The art. The mission. The diminished expense accounts. Thanks, then, to Tim Lott for affording me the opportunity to clear my throat.

“Reading all the coverage of Chelsea, I’m struck by the narrative that (I suppose) Todd Boehly and his folks are selling,” he wrote. “There are certain themes common in all stories: Thomas Tuchel’s detachment behind the scenes, a minor spat over Cristiano Ronaldo, so many attackers wanting out.

“This has got me wondering about the sausage-making: How does everyone end up with mostly the same story? And why hasn’t anyone been able to report it beforehand?”

Tim is right: There are times at which various lines are pushed by various interested parties, all of them effectively competing to make their version of the truth the one that takes hold (but none of them, for the most part, are actually willing to put their name to it). The journalist’s job, on those occasions, is to pick through the morass, to find the common themes, to try to work out what is most cogent.

Tuchel’s dismissal is a little different. The reason most of the reporting covers similar ground this time is because — as far as my own investigation could gather — that is, largely, what happened. That it might have been reported earlier is a valid point, but there is a tendency, in soccer as in so much else, to reverse-engineer explanations, to determine cause only when consequence is clear.

We had an anonymous question, too, on one of the finer points of transfer reporting. “You mention that Erling Haaland’s true cost was approximately $100 million,” the Mystery Correspondent wrote. “Does this mean the published fees are regularly less than the actual cost?”

The answer to this is: kind of. As a rule, the fee that is reported has always been the amount the buying club pays the selling club. Increasingly, though, that convention seems inadequate, not just because salary is often the bulk of the cost to the purchaser, but because — as the Haaland deal illustrates nicely — a cheaper price can mean a higher cut goes to the agent(s). It is, perhaps, time to discuss transfers in terms of their total cost, rather than simply focusing on one aspect.

A great point, meanwhile, from Tom Karsay. “Maybe it should be pointed out that the money Manchester United [and everyone else] spent doesn’t come from owners’ pockets,” he wrote. “It comes from the advertising revenues of the television networks, which comes from our labor, the sweat of our brows. Maybe fans, keeping that in mind, would be less likely to cheer new acquisitions.”