Boehly has to find a new star for latest episode of Chelsea sitcom

T he problem with modern clubs pitching themselves as content producers is that you can never quite be sure whether what you are watching is real. Take, for example, Chelsea. Are they a football club or a slightly heavy-handed sitcom?

You have a brash American owner certain he has spotted a way to do things beyond the comprehension of the unambitious Brits who have been running clubs hitherto (in reality, most of them are also American). You have a coachload of superstars and overexcited young talents all desperate to play. In charge of them you place the epitome of English reserve, a polite and thoughtful man who responds to setbacks by pointing out the xG of what’s just gone wrong is pretty low so it probably isn’t going to happen again and ends up reduced to answering questions about whether he’s angry enough to manage Chelsea.

That modesty is something that dogged Graham Potter. Football isn’t, in any sense, a rational game. A large constituency of fans just want to be entertained, if not by the football itself, then at least by the machiavellian histrionics of the managers. Potter may be emotionally intelligent, somebody who has adapted wherever he has been, from the ninth tier of the English game to semi-pro football in Sweden via the Ghana women’s team, but his one concession to managing Chelsea was to buy a new rollneck. The result of which was that he looked quite smart standing in his technical area like Ahab on the bridge, desperately scanning the horizon for the quarry he has hunted all these years: a centre-forward who can score.

Nice understated men don’t win titles. Manuel Pellegrini was aggressively boring in press conferences, but there was a darkness in his eyes as befits a man who once faced down