By David Cohen

Four years into BlueCo’s Chelsea era and three months into Liam Rosenior’s tenure, the Blues are stuck between a long-term plan and short-term chaos. A fan’s honest state-of-play.

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There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes with being a Chelsea fan in April 2026. It is not the loneliness of losing — every club loses — but the loneliness of not quite knowing what you are supporting anymore. Is it a football club, a private equity thesis, a development academy, or a four-year experiment in proving the old ways wrong? Some days it feels like all four. Most days it feels like none of them are working.

And yet I find myself wanting to believe. Not in Todd Boehly, exactly, and not in Clearlake’s spreadsheets. I want to believe in Liam Rosenior — and that is where the honest part of this column begins.

The state of play, for anyone who has stopped watching closely

Let’s get the facts on the table. Chelsea are currently sixth in the Premier League with 48 points from 31 games, one point behind Liverpool in fifth. Rosenior has been in charge of 19 games, winning 10, drawing two, and losing seven — averaging 1.7 points per game, slightly better than Enzo Maresca’s 1.6 earlier in the season. On paper, that is not catastrophic. It is European-qualification territory, and it is incremental improvement on what came before.

The problem is that the numbers do not capture the texture of the last month. Chelsea needed extra-time and a man advantage to scrape past Championship side Wrexham 4-2 in the FA Cup fifth round, then threw away a 70-minute lead against PSG to lose 5-2 in the Champions League last 16, lost 1-0 at home to Newcastle, and ended March with back-to-back 3-0 losses — to PSG again in the Champions League and to Everton at Hill Dickinson Stadium. The home game against Manchester United is expected to see a joint-fan protest between Blues supporters and those from BlueCo’s other club, Strasbourg. When your two fanbases coordinate a protest across national borders, the problem is bigger than a bad run.

Then there is Enzo. Rosenior confirmed that vice-captain Enzo Fernandez has been sanctioned and ruled out of both the Port Vale cup tie and the crucial Manchester City fixture, saying: “A line was crossed in terms of our culture and what we want to build.” That is a head coach asserting authority — but it is also, inescapably, a head coach voluntarily weakening his squad before facing Pep Guardiola. You can admire the principle and still wince at the timing.

The case against optimism

The case against optimism writes itself. Rosenior became the sixth manager at Chelsea under BlueCo, the ownership is coming under increasing pressure from the fanbase, and former executive Keith Wyness has said Rosenior could be sacked if there is a “big collapse” between now and the end of the season. Six managers in four years is not a project; it is a rotation. Every new arrival inherits a squad built for someone else’s system, by a recruitment team that keeps signing players under 23 as if youth were a tactic rather than a demographic.

The injury crisis is the other face of the same dysfunction. Jamie Gittens picked up what looks like his third hamstring injury, and two of Chelsea’s most pivotal players, Cole Palmer and Reece James, have struggled with their respective injuries — something that has been largely responsible for the club’s ongoing problems. Under-23 squads have under-23 bodies, and under-23 bodies break when asked to play three competitions a season under rotating tactical schemes.

And Palmer himself — the player the entire project was supposed to be built around — is a worry. Palmer is yet to fully get to grips with Rosenior’s ever-changing system, while Premier League teams seem to have changed the way they defend him, throwing double and triple teams at him to stifle his influence. When your franchise player looks stuck and your manager’s “ever-changing system” is part of the problem, you have to at least ask whether those two things are connected.

The case for cautious optimism

And yet. Here is where I come back to Rosenior, and why I am not ready to write this off.

Three things make me believe he might be the right man, even if he is the wrong man for this exact month. First, he is a genuine football obsessive. At the age of nine, he reportedly read the FA Coaching Book of Soccer Tactics and Skills by Charles Hughes, and he maintained a childhood “tactical ritual” with his father where they would spend Friday nights eating fish and chips while analysing the following day’s match lineups and set-piece routines. That is not a CV; that is a vocation. Chelsea have had coaches who arrived for the pay cheque and coaches who arrived for the brand. Rosenior arrived for the tactics board.

Second, he has already shown he will say the quiet part out loud. Rosenior has confirmed that he would like Chelsea to change their transfer strategy this summer, wanting his squad bolstered by more “battle-hardened stars” — players with “emotional stability, different characters who can, in difficult moments, understand what is needed to win.” That is a direct, public critique of the BlueCo recruitment model, delivered by the man they have just given a contract that keeps him at Chelsea until 2032. Either they let him reshape the strategy, or they sack the man they built a six-and-a-half-year plan around. The internal logic pushes them toward listening to him.

Third, the message from Stamford Bridge is that BlueCo are still committed to the 41-year-old as part of a long-term project, even if Chelsea do not make the Champions League next season, because the club do not think the rest of this season should be judged based on his time as manager. You can be cynical about this — Chelsea ownership messages have a short half-life — but the alternative is a seventh manager in under five years, and even Clearlake must see that the diminishing returns on managerial change have gone past zero.

Add to this the emergence of Estevao, who Rosenior described after the Port Vale win as someone who will be a “real, real plus” in the run-in, and the raw material is still there. Palmer. Estevao. Mheuka scoring 36 goals across club and country. A coach who actually thinks about the game. A contract structure that forces the owners into patience for the first time.

Where this leaves me

I cannot pretend the last six weeks did not happen. I cannot pretend an FA Cup is the same as a title. I cannot pretend that “trust the process” has not become the saddest sentence in modern football. But I also cannot pretend that sacking Rosenior in June would fix anything — it would just reset the clock on the next doomed project.

So here is where I have landed. I want Chelsea to win the FA Cup. I want Rosenior to get his summer — the one where he brings in, as he put it, players with emotional stability. I want to see what this squad looks like when the manager has actually picked it. And I want Boehly and Clearlake to finally, for once, hold their nerve long enough to find out whether Liam Rosenior is the answer, or just the most likeable wrong answer we have had yet.

Optimism, in April 2026, is not a position. It is an act of will. Up the Blues.

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