Rewind the clock 13 months and the phrase that kept coming out ofChelsea regarding their search for a new head coach was “exhaustive and thorough”.

Co-sporting directors Laurence Stewart and Paul Winstanley would take their time to identify a permanent successor to Graham Potter, a man they sacked — but did not appoint — at the beginning of April 2023, leaving no stone unturned as they interviewed a multitude of candidates, assessing their relative strengths, weaknesses and projected fit with Chelsea’s squad and sporting structure before making their selection and recommendation to the ownership.

This deliberate approach came at no small cost, as performances and results that had been unsatisfactory under Potter utterly nosedived in the final stretch of the 2022-23 season under his caretaker replacement Frank Lampard. But any short-term pain would be worth the long-term gain of making sure the right candidate was hired.

Stewart and Winstanley’s choice at the end of this “exhaustive and thorough” process wasMauricio Pochettino: a perfectly legitimate pick, having been linked with various elite clubs for much of the previous decade and considered by Chelsea twice before.

“Mauricio’s experience, standards of excellence, leadership qualities and character will serve Chelsea Football Club well as we move forward,” they said in the club’s statement announcing Pochettino’s appointment. “He is a winning coach, who has worked at the highest levels, in multiple leagues and languages. His ethos, tactical approach and commitment to development all made him the exceptional candidate.”

Pochettino was the sporting directors’ choice to take Chelsea forward (Darren Walsh/Chelsea FC via Getty Images)

Yet, one year on, here we are again.

Chelsea and Pochettino mutually agreed to part ways on Tuesday, and many of the reasons why the club became dissatisfied with the Argentine after just one season together are detailed inThe Athletic’s big read on his departure: his resistance to the club’s sporting structure, his approach to tactics and training and, ultimately, his results.

The last of those is the easiest for Stewart and Winstanley to brush off. There are countless variables that go into whether or not a coach wins at a rate in line with his club’s expectations, many of which are not controllable or even necessarily foreseeable when he is hired. But the other points of tension are more difficult to explain because the Pochettino we saw at Chelsea this season was almost entirely consistent with the previous chapters of his career in terms of the way he conducted himself and approached his job.

Chelsea might contend that Pochettino initially indicated he was on board with the club recruiting a specialist set-piece coach before rubbishing the concept publicly, but his desire for influence over all departments of a club’s sporting operation was very evident throughout his very successfulTottenham tenure.

Training was brutally intense at Cobham, but Pochettino and his staff have always been known for working their players particularly hard on a daily basis. On the pitch, Chelsea consistently tried — and on their bad days often failed — to play an identifiably Pochettino brand of football. There were no major surprises here, no radically different reality on the ground to the 40,000-foot view; only various manifestations of Pochettino being Pochettino that could — and arguably should — have been predicted by an “exhaustive and thorough” recruitment process.

It is very hard, then, to view Pochettino’s departure one year into a guaranteed two-year contract as anything other than a tacit admission from Stewart and Winstanley that hiring him was a mistake — and not the kind that only becomes clear in hindsight, but a more fundamental misidentification in the moment of Pochettino’s profile as a coach and his fit with Chelsea.

That reality is not lost on the club’s more perceptive supporters.

Stewart and Winstanley watch Chelsea’s Under-18s play Millwall in February (Chris Lee – Chelsea FC/Chelsea FC via Getty Images)

It is telling that even many of those who were never convinced by Pochettino have reacted to his Chelsea exit with emotions ranging from unease to outright anger. For them, agreeing or disagreeing with this decision is secondary to the knowledge that the next one over his successor will be made by the same co-sporting directors whose approval ratings are lower than the head coach they just reviewed.

Fan discontent with the co-sporting directors is not reflected inside the club. Stewart and Winstanley retain the total confidence and unequivocal backing of Chelsea’s ownership. As two talented recruiters promoted from more junior roles at smaller clubs, they have effectively been handed the keys to Cobham. The moment Pochettino spoke publicly against them in a press conference, even in veiled terms, he crossed a red line.

Clearlake Capital and Todd Boehly want stability at Chelsea to come not from the head coach, but from the sporting structure they have built over the last two years, a structure they hope can be in place for a decade. Stewart and Winstanley will be evaluated over a period of years on the functioning of every sporting department at Cobham, the BlueCo multi-club model and the player recruitment operation, which the ownership believes has assembled one of the three most talented squads in thePremier League.

But picking who gets to work with that squad is one of the most important decisions of all, and there are few ways for any lead football executive to more quickly erode the faith of their employer than to repeatedly choose the wrong coach. Chelsea’s handling of Christopher Vivell, sidelined a matter of weeks after being hired fromRB Leipzig as technical director in December 2022, showed this ownership’s ruthlessness is not confined to the man in the dugout.

Complicating the task for Stewart and Winstanley is that Chelsea are looking for something exceedingly rare: a progressive, modern coach capable of developing young individual players and a team identity over the years while still satisfying the immediate objectives ofChampions League qualification and winning trophies that proved beyond Pochettino this season.

They are moving much faster towards an appointment than last time, with no public emphasis on being “exhaustive and thorough”. The only thing that matters is that they get it right.

(Top photo: Mike Egerton/PA Images via Getty Images)