Johnny Phillips: Chelsea - the craziest club in mad world of football

Back in August, the idea that Frank Lampard would be sitting down at a pre-match press conference in April as Chelsea’s third manager of the season was utterly inconceivable. It is a story of impatience, waste and muddled thinking.

When any new owner arrives at a football club the best course of action can sometimes be no action at all.

When Todd Boehly and the Clearlake Capital consortium took control of the west London club at the end of May last year they inherited a side that had finished third in the Premier League, runners-up in the FA Cup and lifted the Club World Cup.

The team was some way short of Liverpool and Manchester City in the final league analysis, but there was every reason to be optimistic heading into this season with an elite coach in the mould of Thomas Tuchel at the helm.

The best approach from the boardroom would have been to take on the role of observers. This should have involved a fact-finding spell, getting feet under the table while gaining experience of the day-to-day operations at one of Europe’s biggest clubs.

Immediately the new owners made a statement, like strutting peacocks determined to show their colours.

Over £250million was spent in the summer transfer window, including an eye-watering £70m on Leicester City’s Wesley Fofana and £56m on Brighton full-back Marc Cucurella. Yet after just six Premier League games Boehly saw fit to remove Tuchel from his post.

“We just did not have a shared vision for the future,” Boehly stated.

The inference was that Chelsea going forward would be a club of joined up thinking from academy level through to first team, with an administrative structure in place to support the first team.

Tuchel may have been a forceful personality to deal with but he was coming from a position of strength and knowledge.

In searching for a replacement, there was logic to appointing Graham Potter, with his proven ability to improve players individually and teams collectively.

But the timing was all wrong.

Potter had never worked with such a big squad of widespread talents. And if ever a coach needed a pre-season to work with his players then it was this one.

The right time to bring in a coach of Potter’s strengths is the day after a season finishes, not four weeks into one.

He started well but it was not long before cracks appeared.

Tuchel’s final signing, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang was quickly cast aside. As the club’s league position dropped over the following months the last thing Potter needed was a January transfer window to clutter the squad.

Incredibly, another £300m was splashed out, bloating an already over-sized squad. Over £100m of that was spent on Argentina’s Enzo Fernandez alone.

Potter did not know which way to turn as he attempted to create a side from a squad thrown together in such haphazard fashion.

“I reckon he’d have gone home after he’d been sacked and felt an element of relief,” said Gary Neville on Sky Sports.

“He’ll have seen what was going on behind the scenes – they lost Petr Cech and Marina Granovskaia at the start of the season, that wasn’t planned.

“They lost Tuchel, that wasn’t planned. He’s come into a club in massive transition, spending millions of pounds. They don’t know what they’re doing. And he’s probably thinking, ‘These lot are mad.’”

It’s hard to disagree with such a brutal assessment. And what happened next? The man sacked by relegation-threatened Everton in January walks in to guide the ship through to the end of the season.

Lampard has already been dismissed by Chelsea once, although in fairness to the current owners that was under a previous regime.

Surely he can’t believe his luck? There did not appear to be a way back into the Premier League for Lampard when he left Goodison Park.

Any managerial ambitions that still burnt would probably have to be realised at Championship level before finding his way back to the top division.

Now, two-and-a-half months on from his dismissal at Everton, Lampard is not only back in the cut and thrust of England’s elite but also has a glorious chance of taking Chelsea to the final of the Champions League and actually winning the thing.

“Everyone can have a clean slate right now,” said the interim manager, speaking about the players when that remark was just as applicable to himself.

A clean slate is exactly what Lampard needs after such a dispiriting end to his time on Merseyside.

He arrives with his Premier League credentials very much in question.

But maybe Chelsea fans won’t care.

The majority just seemed to want to see the back of Potter, a man considered entirely unsuitable for the role by most in the stands.

Lampard returns to Stamford Bridge proudly wearing his Mr Chelsea badge, safe in the knowledge that he can at least be a unifying force for the next couple of months.

And if it goes better than expected? Who knows what might happen next in the mad world that is Chelsea’s 2022/23 season.