Beyond the pitch and the results there are still lots of reasons Graham Potter is still the manager at Chelsea. Fans will, rightly or wrongly, question how much of the off-field stuff should matter when it is, after all, a results business.
This in itself raises questions which can veer into moral and ethical codes. Ultimately it is in the eyes of the beholder. Sport can be for different people very different things and that is exactly how Chelsea are right now.
To the club's new owners it is the start of their journey, one they have had success with in America and MLB. The issue is that this is simply a long way from the attitude of most fans. Not only have they been on a diet of winning, success, chaos and trophies for nearly two decades, supporter groups will be at different places within themselves.
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For example, a younger fan may want to win immediately to satiate their desire to see the club be the best. An older fan may simply want a positive atmosphere at matches having been through many years of ups and downs. There is no right answer to this grand thing.
Although 40,000 fans let their voices be heard in the wake of the 1-0 defeat to Southampton it doesn't mean everyone is against Graham Potter. There are, yet again, varying shades of leniency towards the manager at any given time. The owners have a very different perspective and relationship with Potter to the fans.
Whereby Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali have shown patience with their LA Dodgers coach and interact with Potter on a consistent basis, the 47-year-old is merely a tool for most to get their team to win. If he doesn't do that then little else will matter. This is part of the reason it has been so hard to sell the 'project' under Potter to fans that have a lack of faith in improvement of progress.
The owners' continued backing of Potter should not come as a surprise though. It was only in December that Eghbali spoke at SporticoLive's "Invest in Sports" Summit, and his words are, in a sense, strangely prescient. It was during a period that Chelsea were far from settled on and off the pitch and things hadn't turned like the past week showed, but the consistent wider view taken by the owners was set out.
"We thought Chelsea was a good beachhead, it was frankly an asset, a business that was not terribly well managed on the football side, sporting side or promotional side," he explained of why the Blues were a sought-after club to buy. What he then described in terms of progression for the club does reverberate now as they are urged by many to continue the hire-fire process at Stamford Bridge.
"You've got to win. Your content, your asset is that play and I think the opportunity to make it a platform is there. These things [football clubs] are generally not well-managed. They're not optimised, some of the US ownership, Fenway Group with Liverpool or Abu Dhabi model with Man City have done it well but for the most part, these things haven't been optimised.
"We looked at it and we think European sports are probably 20 years behind US sports in terms of sophistication on the commercial side, and sophistication on the data side. I had one super high-level sporting director at the world's biggest, top three club tell me when I asked about their approach to data and said the data is my eyes. He has six scouts, no data and using some of the data points we know of the good sports teams of any league, here there are 20-30 data analysts that we use for data."
Immediately the worry for some could be that Boehly/Clearlake are willing to wait to view Chelsea's success once European football catches up to American ways. Evidence of the time ripple does appear to be true, even if it doesn't mean that there are ways to be successful now.
With amortisation coming into footballing prominence only recently and the data analysis point being demonstrated with the impact of Michael Lewis' baseball book Moneyball now being commonly referred to in the game, there is logic to the explanation.
Chelsea fans aren't going to be convinced that their club should need this sort of timescale to make an ascent on the top of the Premier League table though. After all, 18 months ago they won their second Champions League title and up until last week were champions of the world too.
It is the willingness to look beyond the immediacy that perhaps separates US sport and English football, with promotion and relegation, the most. It is also likely to be a factor as to why many fans are disconcerted at the prospect of blindly affording Potter time for what they see as a lost cause.
The patience and point at which Boehly/Clearlake think a line has been crossed in terms of no return are going to differ majorly from the matchgoing fans. This doesn't help the here and now but may well offer further insight into why Potter is still in charge despite all percieved footballing wisdom implying that he would have been sacked from most clubs at most levels for his form, regardless of the many mitigating factors.
"That is one analogy, one place we think there is a lot of runway in terms of European sports which, by the way, have a global audience, a global opportunity," Boehly's partner continued. "I think 90-95% depending on the team, of the top teams in England the fanbases are outside of the UK. These are global assets, global audiences which we think we can certainly help grow."
It is growth that is at the forefront of their minds over the coming years but ultimately Eghbali also accepts what fans will want. "We think winning and a good product on the pitch and commercial success go hand in hand. You have to have a good product to generate sponsors for the content to work.
"The ESPN special worked because Michael Jordan won. Luc Longley didn't have a special during COVID, it's just the way it is. You've got to win. Winning on the pitch, you can do it efficiently as opposed to not, but you have to do that to have commercial success.
"If you're investing capital into a training facility, an academy, a stadium, if you're improving the team you're going to have a lot of public support and I think there are a lot of untapped niche markets that are avidly supportive of the teams."
These last points will be music to the ears of fans with doubts. Although they may not see the action taken against Potter just yet, if the belief from widescale investors is to create a winning structure for commercial purposes then they will not be beating around the bush or waiting around to foster that environment.
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