Chelsea are facing one of the most important summers in their modern history. A club that has become so accustomed to being part of the elite in the Premier League and Champions League have become unrecognisable.
It appears certain that they will fail to qualify for the Champions League for the third time in four years since the Todd Boehly-Clearlake consortium took over in 2022. If they do not beat Manchester City in the FA Cup final on May 16, it will also be the third time in four years that they have not claimed any silverware.
They have suffered the embarrassment of losing six league games in a row for the first time since 1993 and are in danger of finishing in the bottom half of the table.
Clearly, more is going wrong than right, so how can they fix things? The Athletic earmarks some key areas that need to be addressed.
Get the next coach appointment right
An obvious one, but one of the most significant decisions. The owners will be hiring their fifth permanent head coach in four years, illustrating how they have not found the best man for the job.
When the Todd Boehly-Clearlake consortium took over, the message from Stamford Bridge was that the revolving door in the managerial dugout under previous owner Roman Abramovich would be a thing of the past. Yet their record is even worse. At a mere 18 months, Enzo Maresca was their longest-serving head coach. In fairness, Chelsea sources, who spoke under the condition of anonymity to The Athletic to protect relationships, have said they did not want to make a change at the start of January this year before the Italian’s exit.
That meant Calum McFarlane became the third person to have a spell as an interim head coach, following Bruno Saltor and Frank Lampard (both in 2023). McFarlane is in charge again, following the sacking of Liam Rosenior.
The lack of stability in such a prominent position is inevitably going to have a detrimental impact. Unlike the Abramovich era, Chelsea do not have serial winners in the dressing room to carry on winning regardless.
Chelsea need someone who can galvanise the players and the fans. Someone everyone can believe in. The club do not want to rush the appointment and will make an announcement after the end of this season.
Names on the shortlist include outgoing Bournemouth coach Andoni Iraola, Fulham’s Marco Silva and former Real Madrid coach Xabi Alonso.
Give the coach more say/power
The evidence of BlueCo’s four previous head coach appointments is that coaches who publicly question Chelsea’s unique structure or decision-making (Mauricio Pochettino, Maresca) create untenable tension, while coaches who are happy to work quietly within this environment lack the authority to deliver the results that meet Chelsea’s on-pitch expectations.
It will always be a job that attracts plenty of interest, but is coaching Chelsea attractive enough to the calibre of coach the club needs? Most elite coaches are demanding personalities — of their players, their staff, their sporting directors and their owners. Many could reasonably be described as high-maintenance individuals.
The lesson that Chelsea supporters — and journalists who have covered the club for a long time — have learned over the years is that maintaining them is often worth it. They create elite cultures, drive winning standards and deliver trophies. Many burn out or wear out their welcome and ultimately do not last long, but then recent history suggests neither do the less established, more collaborative coaches that BlueCo and the sporting leadership have targeted.
Giving one of these elite coaches the keys to the castle is not necessarily a smart strategy either. But there is a reasonable balance to be struck, where a talented coach feels empowered to voice their opinions and even challenge decisions internally in service of making Chelsea better. Secure sporting executives must be comfortable with being a little uncomfortable.
Transfers in — improve in the right areas
When you spend well over £1billion and have so many people questioning the strength of your squad, it does not take a genius to figure out that the recruitment has not worked.
Just look at who was on the bench against Nottingham Forest. The only attacking option was Liam Delap. The other eight names comprised five defenders, two defensive-minded midfielders and the mandatory place for a backup keeper.
Injuries have not helped but the whole point of spending such a fortune is to build a group strong enough to cope with any setbacks.
Buying young players with potential to grow together — Chelsea have the youngest average age XI used in the Premier League for a third successive campaign, according to Transfermarkt — has not worked. Football is about winning in the present as well as the future.
Multiple sources say the club will tweak their strategy and buy more experienced, mature players. They are unlikely to be significantly older, but at least ready-made players will be targeted. They are looking at players who have played in one of the ‘big five’ European leagues and know what it takes to compete in Europe alongside domestic efforts. Handling the demands and pressure of such a schedule is seen as key.
Chelsea already have winger 19-year-old Geovany Quenda (Sporting CP) and 23-year-old striker Emmanuel Emegha (Strasbourg) joining this summer. A decision on whether to promote 20-year-old goalkeeper Mike Penders (on loan at Strasbourg) to the first team will also be considered.
Quenda is on the way to Chelsea (Miguel Lemos/AFP via Getty Images)
The club are still looking for at least one centre-back, midfielder and attacker to add to their ranks. But without the prestige and financial rewards of the Champions League, acquiring first-choice targets will be a lot harder.
Transfers out — get rid of deadwood
We have been here before. Chelsea’s need to sell well feels like an annual conversation in the BlueCo era, but it is only becoming more pressing in light of another season of failure to qualify for the Champions League.
The list of players out on loan who are surplus to requirements is much shorter than in the past, but if Chelsea are set on upgrading around their core, there are plenty of candidates on the fringes of the current first-team squad who could potentially depart to raise funds.
Tosin Adarabioyo, Benoit Badiashile, Marc Guiu, Alejandro Garnacho and Delap are all players who could be sensible sales given their contributions to playing time and impact. A key consideration with all of these situations, and any others that may emerge in the market, is whether a fee could be realised that actually moves the needle for Chelsea’s budget.
But generating significant revenue from selling marginal contributors is a much easier and more palatable path to improvement than selling a big name.
Injury record/get Palmer back to his best
Some of their injuries have been bad luck, some of it is baked into the heavily curtailed pre-season that followed the Club World Cup triumph, but the sporting leadership would be remiss if they did not consider how the club’s medical and performance department could improve the situation.
This squad is also not fit enough. Running stats are an imperfect measure of a team’s effort, but Chelsea have been outrun by their opponents in all of their Premier League matches this season.
Palmer is emblematic of both issues. Is going to this summer’s World Cup in Palmer’s best interests? It is not a question that he or England boss Thomas Tuchel will want to countenance, but it needs to be asked in light of his miserable season.
Euro 2024 was broadly positive for Palmer. He did not play as many minutes as he liked or probably deserved under Gareth Southgate, but he raised his stock significantly with a brilliant goal off the bench in the final against Spain. There is a world in which the World Cup could afford him similar opportunities to change the narrative around him for the better.
Palmer has been in poor form (Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)
But last summer’s Club World Cup exertions took a toll on Palmer. He spoke openly at the time about how much he was looking forward to his post-tournament break, which proved brutally short. He has also been candid about the difficulties he has experienced dealing with a nagging groin injury for most of this season.
That is the physical element. There is also a stylistic one: Palmer’s individual numbers have plummeted in direct correlation with Chelsea leaning into a slower, more deliberate and choreographed style of possession play. The improvisational genius that flashed regularly during his breakthrough under Pochettino has receded from view.
Chelsea’s next head coach will need to find a way to bring it back out — but for that to happen, Palmer also needs to be physically right again.
Get fans back onside
Perhaps the hardest task of all, because the relationship is not great, to say the least, right now. There have been chants against the owners in every match for several months. Two protests have taken place outside Stamford Bridge, the second of which (last month) was far more attended than the first in January. More events have been planned for the FA Cup final and the last home game of the season against Tottenham Hotspur.
The atmosphere at home games has been terrible, making it an easy environment for opposition teams. Chelsea have lost seven times at Stamford Bridge in 2025-26 — only the bottom four teams in the Premier League have been beaten more on their own pitch.
An upturn in results and performances will have a major impact on getting people back on board. But it runs deeper than that.
Despite the creation of a fan advisory board, supporters complain of a greater disconnect between themselves and the club. Ticket prices and the difficulty of buying them are a real source of angst.
The lack of a long-term front-of-shirt sponsor, plus any news on whether the club will rebuild Stamford Bridge or construct a new stadium, has added to the dissatisfaction with how the club is being run.
Convince players of the project
Recent months have made it clear that some of Chelsea’s most important players are questioning where this BlueCo project is going. The club would point to club captain Reece James and Moises Caicedo signing new long-term contracts at Stamford Bridge, but Enzo Fernandez and Marc Cucurella have made clear that their faith is not universally shared.
Much of the feeling of progress, of upward momentum, was tied to the work that Maresca had done with this Chelsea squad in his first season. The Italian’s departure in January and BlueCo’s misguided decision to hire Rosenior to replace him have shattered that positive atmosphere. To rebuild it, the choice of the next head coach is critical.
It may be that Fernandez, Cucurella and others are satisfied in the short term with pay rises and more contractual security. But that will not last if Chelsea remain mired in the middle of the Premier League table and outside the Champions League. Many of these players were pitched on joining the most ambitious project in world football when they arrived at Stamford Bridge.
They want to earn salaries that reflect their belief in their own value, but they also want to compete for and win the biggest trophies. If they lose all hope of that happening at Chelsea, the reality of football is that they and their representatives will find ways to get them to other clubs who can meet their career goals.
Get a prominent ex-Chelsea individual on the coaching staff/around the club
Perhaps one of the reasons Chelsea’s standards have dropped is that no one who set those standards is around the first team now. Former captain John Terry has a part-time role acting as a mentor in the academy, and that is about it.
Given Chelsea has a large group of serial winners from the last 30 years, it seems odd that no one has been asked to be part of the coaching staff or just be in and around things.
Not only could their guidance be of great help to the players, but it would also give the fans someone to identify with.
Terry, a controversial figure over the years, is not going to be promoted. The club had two chances following the departures of Maresca and Rosenior and did not take them. But there are other options.
Thiago Silva is just one example. The pictures of the former Brazil international, who won the Champions League with Chelsea in 2021, watching their defeat to Nottingham Forest from the stands showed a man who cares greatly about what is going on.
Remarkably, he has just won a league title with Porto at the age of 41, but his playing career will have to end at some point. Current first-team players James and Levi Colwill are just two who have praised the huge influence Silva had on them while he was at Chelsea. His son, Isago, is progressing well in the club’s academy, so the connection remains very strong.
Why not consider offering him a position?