At the beginning of 2019, Liam Rosenier sat down in the Sky Sports studio and gave his honest assessment of Chelsea’s financial situation.
“The club’s recent history is that when things start to go wrong and things don’t go the way we want them to go, we change managers,” the pundit told Sky Sports’ debate show at the time.
“There will come a time when you say, ‘He’s our manager for the next two years. The reason we brought that manager in is to build something.’
An unbelievable situation has come full circle. Rosenior was to become the man tasked with stabilizing another rocky ship at Stamford Bridge. Chelsea are still free to appoint and fire head coaches, even after the Roman Abramovich era that Rosenior alluded to.
Todd Boley may not have Abramovich’s ruthless nature, but Rosenior will still be Chelsea’s fifth permanent head coach in almost five years of Bruko’s regime.
Thomas Tuchel stayed for 100 days during his time at Bailey, while Graham Potter stayed for just over 200 days. Mauricio Pochettino was only given one season and Enzo Maresca was given two trophies but two seasons without.
Rosenior enters the Chelsea world in a very different capacity than his BlueCo predecessor. His previous clubs were Hull, Derby and Strasbourg, and he does not have the stature of Tuchel or Pochettino, nor the Premier League experience of Potter.
Liam Rozenier Career Profile
He is more in line with Maresca, who also enjoyed success in the Championship before moving to west London. However, following the success of Mikel Arteta and Vincent Kompany at other top clubs, the Italian was hired as Pep Guardiola’s acolyte.
So far, the closest Rosenior has come to Guardiola is reading Guardiola’s books during his time at Hull City.
“I remember him reading Pep’s books when we were at Hull, when we were still in our late 20s,” Davies told Sky Sports.
“He started studying the game more and understanding why certain tactics work and others don’t. He’s just a very meticulous person.”
Rosenior’s obvious progress as a coach caught the attention of Brighton, his last club before retiring, and he was subsequently appointed assistant boss of Simon Rask’s Under-21 team.
Rosenior started out as a youth coach at Brighton.
“What I really admired about Liam was that he was determined about coaching,” Rask told Sky Sports. “He probably could have played a little longer, but he was clear: ‘No, no, I need some coaching practice.’
“One of the traits that I felt from very early on was that he was going to be a courageous coach. Like all successful coaches, it takes a single-minded attitude.”
Courage is something that has continued throughout Rosenior’s career. His management projects included working with Derby during its lowest economic period.
He was also the manager of Hull City, who have had five managers in four years. Sound familiar, Chelsea fans? – and almost made it to the play-offs when the club almost finished in the bottom half of the table.
But perhaps his most daring feat came at Strasbourg as a young English overseas manager, where he almost qualified for the Champions League, a huge rarity in modern football.
Throughout his coaching career, Rosenior has impressed with his tactical nature. It was notable that while Wayne Rooney was the front man at Derby, Rosenior was a talented player behind him.
Rosenior worked with Wayne Rooney in the derby
“If Wayne Rooney just told me one thing about how to make a certain pass or whatever, I would just put up with it because it was Wayne Rooney,” recalled Davis, a senior leader of the Derby team.
“But what he had in the background was Liam Rosenier, who paid close attention to detail. Wayne may want you to make a certain pass and do it a certain way, but the other 90 per cent of the breakdown of why you do this pass, why you get into that space, it was all Liam.”
“He was literally detail-oriented. The reason it didn’t work out so well for Wayne was probably because he was spoiled by the fact that he had Liam in the starting job. Wayne had a lot of coaching staffs, but no one was as detail-oriented as Liam.”
All of this has contributed to your overall tactical philosophy as a head coach, but what is that?
“His teams are willing to play under high pressure in a possession-based game, which is really fun to watch and a joy to the eyes,” Rask said.
Liam Rosenior’s Strasbourg stats
“If he wants to play from the back, you do it his way,” Davis added. “The big thing about him is that he would rather do it his way because he knows why it works.
But Rosenior isn’t locked into one style and has the ability to shake things up at the last minute. “He’s willing to adapt,” Davis says.
“You basically go through a training week, you have four days to prepare for the game, and then you can kind of throw that out the window during the game because it gets a little bit harder.
“He’s very enthusiastic. If I set you up for this week, if I choose to change it means I made a mistake and I’m going to take it upon myself.”
“But when you have 10 of your 11 players wanting to get on the ball and start using it, and you have one guy who keeps breaking the ball, you’re going to have a problem with that guy. He’s going to pull you off the ball and make you understand why he’s being dragged.”
“He will be very clear about his non-negotiables.”
Of course, doing it at Hull, Derby and Strasbourg is one thing, but replicating it at Chelsea is an entirely different proposition.
At Stamford Bridge, he will face some of the best players in the world in their respective positions, including Cole Palmer, Moises Caicedo and Enzo Fernandes.
How will Chelsea’s big stars react to Rosenior?
“It takes discipline, and Liam’s roots are one of hard work,” Lusk said. “He was an incredibly hard-working player in games over 90 minutes, willing to push his limits, and without a doubt, he adapted that to his role as a coach.”
“I think what Liam is clear about is his non-negotiables. He will not only support and develop his players, both young and old, but he will have very clear standards that he expects. And I think there is no doubt that that is part of his success. Liam is a good person and will have high standards.”
Davies even said Rosenior gained respect through his tactical vision at Derby. “As a manager or a coach, it’s always easy to see a certain style and gain respect,” he reflects.
“That’s how he earned the respect of the older players. We all believed in what he wanted to do and we thought it was the right way to play with the talent we had.”
But one thing working in Rosenior’s favor is his record with young players who have followed him throughout his career.
At Brighton, he was instrumental in the development of the careers of Victor Goqueres and Robert Sanchez. He brought in the likes of Fabio Carvalho and Liam Delap on loan and they shone in the Championship with Hull.
Rosenia coaches Liam Delap at Hull
Financial constraints forced Derby to give debuts to more than a dozen youth team players, but the Rams remained competitive in the second tier.
And at Strasbourg, he is credited with contributing to the rapid growth of Andrej Santos and Martial Godo, who struggled at Fulham but revived under manager Rosenior. So imagine what he could do against a player like Estevao?
“When it comes to young players, he has the perfect balance of ‘tough love’ and ‘being there for everyone,'” Davis said.
“He’s never going to be that loudmouth guy who literally bullies his players and yells at them constantly thinking it’s going to get the best out of him.
“But he would be more inclined to put his arm around someone and maybe look at their clips and try to understand and make them understand what they did wrong.
“If you do that a couple more times, he’ll start to have a sharp voice that fires up the back. So he’s very well-rounded.”
Another boost for Rosenior is his existing working relationships with several of Chelsea’s sporting directors. At Brighton he worked with Paul Winstanley and Sam Jewell. The latter was previously Head of Under-23 Recruitment at the Seagulls and is now Director of Global Recruitment at Stamford Bridge.
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Gary Neville says Chelsea need experience at both management and player level following Enzo Maresca’s departure from West London
“They’re all good people and they work hard,” Rask said of Chelsea’s sporting directors. “They want to work in an elite environment and push things to their limits in the healthiest way possible.”
Is Rosenior a “yes man”?
However, one of the questions following Rosenior’s move to Chelsea is whether the young English manager is a ‘yes man’.
Some argue that Maresca’s departure from Chelsea was due to him coming out of his shell as a ‘yes man’ after winning a few trophies.
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Before being sacked from Chelsea, Enzo Maresca shocked the media by saying in his post-match press conference that the last 48 hours had been his worst time at the club…
“I don’t think Chelsea is naive enough to insist on a ‘yes man’ job,” Davis says. “They know they have to protect their values as a Premier League club, preferably by finishing in the Champions League.
“And Liam is not naive. He doesn’t have an ego or a chip on his shoulder. He’s not going to cry because people think he’s not the right person for this job. What he’s going to do is roll up his sleeves and show why he’s the right person for this job.”
After all, if the Sky Sports debate is anything to go by, there are signs that Rosenior will have a say, just as Maresca tried to do before his exit.
“At that time, Antonio Conte was very vocal about his dissatisfaction. Now we are bringing in another manager with a completely different philosophy,” Rosenior said on the show seven years ago.
“Are you going to support him or are you going to say that’s not going to work and jump to the next manager who’s going to say, ‘This is what it takes to get this player and this player’?”
“It doesn’t work that way. If you’re going to have long-term success, you’re going to go through some tough times.”
