Chelsea Manager Gets Fired, As All Chelsea Managers Do

As of Wednesday, three teams in the Premier League have fired at least two managers this season. Two of the clubs are Nottingham Forest (who has fired a whopping three managers within one season) and Tottenham Hotspur, both mired in the relegation battle to varying degrees. In those cases, the firings make sense: These are two clubs who had European qualification expectations, and they are cycling through managers to try and avoid dropping into the Championship, even though these replacement hires have left no room for a bright side. Chelsea, the third club, doesn't have relegation woes to contend with, which makes its decision to fire Liam Rosenior on Wednesday all the funnier. Rosenior was always going to have one foot out the door at Chelsea. After all, every manager at Chelsea, dating back to the Roman Abramovich days, has had one foot out the door, so that's not saying much. But Rosenior was an especially bold hiring back on Jan. 6, when he took over after Enzo Maresca was fired. Rosenior's main qualification for the job seemed to be that he was already in the broader Chelsea ecosystem: Prior to taking the top job at Stamford Bridge, Rosenior was the manager at Ligue 1's Strasbourg, the other club owned by BlueCo, Chelsea's owning company. This internal promotion earned him a new six-year contract at the time. As Billy Haisley wrote when Chelsea fired Maresca, this type of move was perhaps doomed from the start for everyone involved. Rosenior's record at Chelsea speaks for itself, but I'll reiterate it anyway: In 13 Premier League matches with the 41-year-old at the helm, Chelsea picked up just 17 points: five wins, two draws. Even that record flatters the trajectory of his tenure. Four of those wins came in his first four matches, a clear example of a new-manager bounce; the opponents in those four matches were Brentford (ninth place), Crystal Palace (13th place), West Ham (17th place), and Wolves (already relegated). Draws against bottom-third teams Leeds and Burnley followed, as did a 2-1 loss to Arsenal, before Rosenior's final Premier League win, a 4-1 victory over Aston Villa on March 4.