Revealed: Why Boehly sacked Tuchel as Chelsea manager
FT Desk
- 14 Sep 2022 01:42 CDT
- 3 min read
Chelsea spent nearly €300 million in the summer transfer window before sacking Thomas Tuchel six games into the new Premier League season. Now, Todd Boehly has explained why.
Chelsea made Wesley Fofana the most expensive defender of all time when they acquired him from Leicester in a £75m/€86.4m deal, while Marc Cucurella is the costliest left-back after his £62m/€71.5m move from Brighton.
Other stars of the world game like Raheem Sterling, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Kalidou Koulibaly were also brought to Stamford Bridge, with the new ownership keen to get closer to Manchester City in trying to win a first league title since 2017 this season.
Chelsea spending money in the transfer market: pic.twitter.com/uFamAR9Cfv
— Football Transfers (@Transfersdotcom) September 6, 2022
Chelsea made a mixed start though, and were five points off the pace before losing 1-0 to Dinamo Zagreb in the Champions League, after which Tuchel was replaced by Cucurella's former Brighton manager Graham Potter.
"When you take over any business, you have to make sure you are aligned with the people in the business," Boehly explained at the SALT Conference in New York. "And Tuchel is obviously extremely talented and obviously someone who had great success with Chelsea.
"Our vision for the club was to find a manager who really wanted to collaborate with us, a coach who really wanted to collaborate.
Walls to break down
"There are a lot of walls to break down at Chelsea. Before, the first team and academy didn't really share data, didn't share information about where the top players were coming from. Our goal is to bring a team together; all of that needs to be a well-oiled machine.
"The reality of our decision was that we weren't sure that Thomas saw it the same way we saw it. No one is right or wrong, we just didn't have a shared vision for the future. It wasn't about Zagreb, it was about the shared vision for what we wanted Chelsea to look like.
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"It wasn't a decision that was made because of a single win or loss. It was a decision that we thought was the right vision for the club."
After Tuchel's departure friction over transfer decisions came to light. Boehly had wanted to sign Cristiano Ronaldo from Manchester United this summer while Tuchel resisted the idea, worried about the Portuguese's influence on and off the field.
Ronaldo aside, Boehly has been keen to implement hi "Vision 2030", and the signing of young talents like Carney Chukwuemeka and Gabriel Slonina fit that, but Tuchel also didn't want to sign England under-21 winger Anthony Gordon from Everton, with the 33-year-old Aubameyang his preferred solution in the final third.
