According to multiple reports, Mauricio Pochettino has reached a verbal agreement to become the new manager at Chelsea.
Todd Boehly was on the hunt for a new manager after sacking Graham Potter and the owner had brought in Frank Lampard as the interim boss so that he could steady the ship for the remainder of the season.
Sadly, Lampard has failed to work his magic at the club and after a series of poor results, it looks like Chelsea have stepped on the peddle and gone out to secure the services of Mauricio Pochettino.
As per Fabrizio Romano, the two parties met on Monday and they are now negotiating the final details of the contract. talkSPORT’s Jim White has also claimed that Poch has reached a verbal agreement and the club intends to make it official by the end of this week.
Boehly was not ready to rush into naming a new manager but looking at Chelsea’s poor form, the owner seems to have backtracked on his decision. Or maybe, he thought that the new manager should be given the remainder of the season to have a look and strategize a plan for the upcoming campaign.
Will Mauricio Pochettino succeed as the new Chelsea manager be a major gamble?
One good thing for the Blues is that Poch won’t be rushed into things. There will be no immediate hopes pinned on him because Chelsea are currently 11th on the Premier League table and they have almost no chance of playing in Europe next season.
They still might qualify for the Conference League but in all honestly, Mauricio Pochettino would want to remain out of Europe rather than play a bunch of unnecessary Thursday night matches.
The 51-year-old is definitely not a bad choice but with the kind of mess that the London side are in, we don’t think he is the right man for the job.
Chelsea have lost more league games than they have won this season and they have managed to net only 30 goals in 31 EPL games so far. This is the lowest they have been since Roman Abramovich took over the club which is why we think they need a legendary manager to be able to take them out of this hole.
Poch’s first big job was with Spurs and that was his golden period in senior management where he managed 293 games, winning 160 of those. His teams scored almost two goals per match during this time and he used only 67 players in these 293 matches. Spurs were a mesmerizing side under the Argentine but unfortunately, they still did not win anything during his five-year stay at the club.
After Spurs, he moved to PSG and this is where he started to falter with all the big names and the pressure to win the Champions League. At Tottenham, he had the room to experiment and even a top-four finish was considered a great achievement but at PSG things were completely different. Chelsea are a club who are very similar to the French champions in the sense that they continuously challenge for the EPL as well as the UCL.
Mauricio Pochettino is someone who needs to be given time to sort things out and the shambles that Chelsea are in right now, the 51-year-old might need two or even three seasons to get them back to the top.
We doubt if Todd Boehly is going to afford him that luxury more so cause he already has gathered an oversized squad to choose from.
To be able to get Chelsea back to the top they need a manager who is a serial winner or has the ability to work under tremendous pressure and unfortunately, Mauricio Pochettino doesn’t have either of these attributes.
He is destined to fail just like Graham Potter but maybe he can get the squad back on its feet and start making them play proper football again so that his successor has a genuine chance of winning silverwares.
