Under the ownership of Roman Abramovich, Chelsea won the Premier League title,
the FA Cup, the League Cup, the Europa League and the Champions League. But
despite a Champions League win under Thomas Tuchel in 2021, the London club have failed
to challenge for the Premier League title since they last won it in 2017.
This raises a curious conundrum: even though Roman Abramovich carried Chelsea to the most
successful period in their history, did he also actually hold them back in the long term?
When Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea in 2003, they became competitive almost
immediately. Within two years, they had won a Premier League title under
Jose Mourinho’s management; a feat they went onto repeat the next year as well.
Over the course of the next couple of decades of Abramovich’s ownership,
they proceeded to win the big five cups 17 times: 5 Premier Leagues,
5 FA Cups, 3 League Cups, and 2 each of the Europa League and Champions League titles.
But despite this success, there was a clear decline in Chelsea’s ability to
challenge at the highest level as the Abramovich ownership went by.
Although Chelsea continued to win trophies throughout the Abramovich era, they last won
two trophies in the same season in 2014/15 when they won the Premier League and the League Cup
during Mourinho’s second stint at the club. Before that, they had won “doubles” on three occasions.
But the competition in which Chelsea’s decline shows up the starkest is in the
Premier League. With five titles coming across the Abramovich era,
the last one appeared in 2016/17 under Antonio Conte.
Since then, Chelsea have struggled to compete in the league at all, finishing between 3rd
and 5th in the five completed seasons that ended the period of ownership by the Russian.
This decline shows up even more strikingly if you compare the
points gap between Chelsea and the league leaders through that period.
Although there were poor seasons before the title win in 2016/17 - most notably
the Andre Villas-Boas season in 2011/12 and the end of Jose Mourinho’s second
stint in 2015/16 - the points gap to the title winner since then has always been
at least 19 points and was as bad as 33 points in 2019/20 under Frank Lampard.
So, what happened five years ago that suddenly made Chelsea no longer
competitive in the Premier League? Two things: Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp.
With Klopp joining Liverpool in 2015 and Guardiola arriving at Manchester
City the following year, the Premier League summit grew higher. In the
fourteen seasons under Roman Abramovich before the title win under Antonio Conte,
the average points total of the Premier League winner was just over 88 points.
Antonio Conte’s 93 points was the highest total by any Premier League winner in that period bar the
95 points that Jose Mourinho managed to win in his first season at the club in 2004/05.
In the five completed seasons that followed the Conte title win in 2017,
the average points total for Premier League winners has jumped up by an incredible 7
points to 95 points - an increase of around 8% on the 14 previous seasons of the Abramovich era.
In those five seasons, Antonio Conte’s 93 points would only have won the league on one
occasion in the following seasons - pipping Manchester City to the title in 2020/21,
although he would only have lost out on goal difference to City the following season.
Of course, there were many factors in play that influenced this shift in expectations
for Premier League success. But it is interesting that Chelsea never managed
to implement their own managerial dynasty during the Abramovich years.
Yes, Jose Mourinho won back-to-back trophies in his first stint at the club. But the other Premier
League titles of the Abramovich ownership came as one-offs: another one for Jose
Mourinho in his second stint and then singular titles for Carlo Ancelotti and Antonio Conte.
In the post-Conte Premier League era, Manchester City and Liverpool have traded blows, setting the
bar for Premier League success so high that only Arsenal this season have managed to get close.
This is a very different approach to winning the Premier League - one based
around a consistent process of gradual improvement - a far cry from the method
that got Chelsea titles across the last two decades where the club adopted more of a
galacticos approach to success: buying in talent and then supplementing this
talent with managers who could achieve short-term success before moving on.
At the time, this short-termism proved very successful. 17 major trophies in
nearly two decades attest to that fact and go a long way towards explaining
why Abramovich was so willing to fund such an expensive process.
But in recent years, it seems to have lost its effectiveness, prompting the suggestion
that the short-termism of the Abramovich era is actually holding Chelsea back in the present day.
None of which is to say that Liverpool and Manchester City haven’t achieved
their success through expenditure - they very much have. But expenditure
by itself is no longer enough to cut it as an approach to Premier League success. Instead,
what is needed is expenditure considered through a long-term lens.
No doubt Chelsea’s new ownership, the Clearlake Capital consortium headed up
by Todd Boehly have recognised this fact. Since arriving at the club,
they have implemented an extravagant spending policy. But they have matched this with an
attempt to implement longer-term infrastructure at the club. By complementing their expenditure
with the hiring of a process coach in Graham Potter, it seems clear that Chelsea are
now trying to mirror the approaches taken by Liverpool, Manchester City and, more latterly,
Arsenal - implementing a manager-focused attitude rather than simply a player-focused one.
Perhaps this will not result in immediate success. Chelsea are certainly at the back
of the queue when it comes to challenging for the Premier League as things stand. But surely this
is the correct approach to adopt if they are ever to compete in this new era of the Premier League.