Now what for Chelsea? Liam Rosenior’s sacking leaves few good short or long-term options for owners
As Chelsea struggle to stay in the race for a Champions League spot, what’s the path to winning and profitability for their owners?
By
James Benge
Apr 22, 2026
at
1:33 pm ET
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9 min read
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Liam Rosenior has found his way out of Chelsea. Now, supporters might be asking, what is their owners? Both in the immediate term and with regards the big picture question of what happens when the owners at Stamford Bridge need to generate a return on their investment, it is hard to puzzle out a sense of how this club might become what its owners have professed they want to build since taking charge in 2022.
The nature of any investment from private equity is that it will eventually cash out. When Clearlake Capital, who own just over 61% of investment vehicle BlueCo, do eventually go, what will they leave behind? A club that can generate a billion pounds in revenue as Clearlake’s Clearlake’s Jose E. Feliciano suggested in 2022? Not likely when they can’t even secure access to the wealth of the Champions League on a regular basis. The winning project that Behdad Eghbali spoke of earlier this month? Right now Chelsea are not even a scoring project, their attack displaying all the maneuverability and guile of the Titanic careening through the seas off Newfoundland. Not since that hubristically named endeavour went down in 1912 have Chelsea gone five league games without scoring.
That is why Rosenior is now out at Stamford Bridge. As Chelsea explained in a statement that did not lack for warm towards their outgoing manager, replacing him with Under-21s head coach Calum McFarlane was what they viewed as the best avenue to salvage a season that is in danger of ending without silverware of even qualification for Europe. That the hierarchy have vowed to “undertake a process of self-reflection” before making another appointment is perhaps the best news to come out of this season.
It has gone so badly wrong that Rosenior’s employers are having to offer up the Notes app screenshot of sackings. It’s not you, it’s us. We need a little time to think it over. We need a little space just on our own. We need a little time to find our freedom.
Funny how quick the milk turns sour, isn’t it? It really wasn’t that long ago that Rosenior could at least point to performances trending in the right direction even if results weren’t. There is still a case to be made that this team, which had the fifth-best non-penalty expected goal difference per Premier League game during their manager’s brief tenure, have been unfortunate to turn 73 shots worth 5.51 xG into zero goals. The underlying metrics of his tenure would have you believe that this is a quite good team who might achieve a lot if they just ironed out their disciplinary issues.
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Everything changed after Tuesday’s 3-0 defeat to Brighton, a comprehensive blowout that seemed inevitable from the moment Rosenior lined up in a 5-4-1 with Liam Delap and Pedro Neto the only natural attackers on the field. It would be hard to make an elite attack when Estevao Willian, Cole Palmer and Joao Pedro were among those sidelined, but blowing up the system at halftime to introduce Alejandro Garnacho was an acknowledgement of how badly the Chelsea boss had misjudged things.
“In the basics, in the pride that you should have in wearing the shirt, that was unacceptable,” Rosenior reported in his final media duties as Chelsea manager. “I’ve defended the players, and I am accountable. I’ve always reported that. After tonight, I think the players as well need to have a look in the mirror for what they put in. You can talk about tactics, tactics come after the basics. Having more courage to play, winning duels, winning headers, tackles, and conceding terrible goals. That was an unacceptable performance tonight.
“Something needs to change drastically right now. I think the players need to have a look in the mirror for what they put in. You can talk about tactics… tactics come after the basics.”
It is rarely a good idea for a manager to start talking about something needing to change. Even at a club as committed to churn as Chelsea, there was only one quick fix available to them in April.
One of the great skills of top managers is their ability to quell the noise when required. The defeat to Brighton was bad, Rosenior’s very public dressing down of his squad only turned up the volume. That wasn’t the first time that this relatively inexperienced head coach, in his third permanent job, brought the wrong kind of attention to the club. There was the curious refusal to come out and play in the second leg of an EFL Cup semifinal where Arsenal held the lead. Entrusting Filip Jorgesen with the first leg of a Champions League tie against Paris Saint-Germain backfired spectacularly. Away from matters on the field, there were those who questioned whether a two-game suspension for Enzo Fernandez for suggesting he might one day like to live in Madrid was something of an overreaction.
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They feel like the actions of a coach who is experienced enough to have big ideas but not quite experienced enough to interrogate how they might fall apart. There is little that Derby County, Hull City, and Strasbourg can throw up that prepares a 41-year-old for life as the figurehead of one of the most talked-about and widely supported clubs in the world. Before and after BlueCo, this has proven to be a job that chews up and spits out big-name managers. Rosenior’s employers at sister club Strasbourg did him a disservice by shifting him to a job he could scarcely turn down. Since his first day in the job, he has been the subject of external mockery that his promising but ultimately limited CV could not negate.
For Rosenior to have been a success, he would have needed to land in an elite sporting environment with the best-in-class practitioners surrounding him. The Chelsea fans who protested against their owners on Saturday afternoon already know whether they believe that to be true. Recruitment over the last two seasons has delivered its success — Joao Pedro, Estevao, Jorrell Hato — but neither Enzo Maresca nor Rosenior were really afforded a squad that could kick on dramatically from the improving outfit of Mauricio Pochettino’s year in charge.
Particularly as Cole Palmer’s light appears to dim, in talent terms, it is not necessarily clear that this is a squad that can push to separate itself from the annual scrap for four and five Champions League places. Eghbali has spoken of the need for “ready-made players” to round out this young squad, the sort who might smash a few heads together so that when one goal goes in, it doesn’t become two or three as it did against Everton, Manchester City and Brighton.
Speaking at CAA’s World Congress of Sports event in Los Angeles, Eghbali framed Chelsea’s ownership as being at a point where “you tweak a model, you improve, you learn from mistakes”. And yet there seems to be a lot more than tweaking required to realize Feliciano’s goal of nine-figure revenue. Ultimately, the aim of private equity is to get its hands on a business, use its expertise to drive up earnings, and, eventually, cash out with a healthy return on top of the sales price.
There’s an open question as to how many buyers there are who can attach a premium to the nearly $3 billion that BlueCo paid for the club, with a commitment to a further $2 billion in investment, but right now that’s not the real issue. Right now, Chelsea don’t look like a team that could consistently generate the sort of revenue laid out by Feliciano in the early days post-Roman Abramovich. For the year ending 2024-25 the Blues stated revenue of £490.9 million ($662 million) — “the second highest on record” — and are understood to believe that this season the number could hit £700 million ($945 million).
That has been met with some skepticism, but few would doubt a year that will include a proportion of their Club World Cup earnings, and the money from their 10-game stand in the Champions League will boost revenue. It just does not look like it will be in a particularly repeatable fashion. They may well find themselves without any revenue from UEFA club competitions next season and, well, it’s hard to see them qualifying for the 2029 Club World Cup on their current performance trajectory.
As several of those clubs above them in the Deloitte Football Money League can attest, on-field success really is one of the best drivers of revenue in football. It is hard to see how BlueCo is excelling on the others either. Four years into the ownership the great conundrum that is Stamford Bridge is barely any closer to being resolved. It is a complex issue that requires the backing of supporters, a sizeable patch of prime real estate in one of London’s most affluent neighborhoods, and/or architectural ingenuity. Without addressing it, however, there are not enough premium seats that can make up for the fact that Chelsea will soon have 20,000 fewer seats than every other member of the Premier League’s big six.
Meanwhile, commercial revenue is growing at a snail’s pace. Per Deloitte, Chelsea earned around $245 million in 2022 and $280 million in 2025. In the same time period, the club that they might one day hope to replace as the biggest name in London went from $196 million to $369 million. It rather helped Arsenal that they have not had an empty slot on the front of their shirts. Chelsea are reported to be seeking a return for that prime advertising space comparable with Manchester City and Liverpool; in waiting for that, they have left an awful lot of money on the table.
All of that at a time when they are locked into high costs on the playing side. A wage bill of £359 million ($485 million) puts them ahead of the likes of Arsenal and Manchester United despite a strategy that had been based on securing young talent to long contracts on low wages.
Doing so at the great expense BlueCo has committed might have meant amortising the cost of some major fees over seven or eight years, but that also means that year in, year out, Chelsea are having to wrestle with a bill for past transfers that sits at £214 million ($289 million). Over 20 of their squad are contracted through to the 2030s. That means a lot of costs still on the books and a sizeable return that would be required to turn an accounting profit. For a player like Enzo Fernandez, the 25-year-old midfielder signed for around $140 million in January 2023, Chelsea would have to demand the sort of sizeable fee beyond the reach of all but a dozen or so teams to make money on a player currently contracted through to 2032.
These are the challenges that sacking Rosenior won’t solve. Perhaps they can only be solved by driving revenue through more sustainable means than selling a hotel, winning football matches on a consistent basis. It is now up to those who so fumbled this appointment to understand that simple reality.
