Liam Rosenior chewed up by BlueCo’s bizarre ChatGPT version of Chelsea

It had long since become clear Rosenior was destined to become just another note in the BlueCo era. This is a regime so fundamentally strange it would come as no surprise to discover it is in fact a public art happening, the work of brilliant pranksters designed to demonstrate the emptiness of corporate life, the vapidity of commodified sport, the comic potential of what happens when the self-appointed cleverest guys in the room turn out to be the stupidest.

Todd Boehly is one of the main culprits in Chelsea’s slide into dysfunction. Photograph: Paul Childs/Action Images/Reuters

Above all the current Chelsea are a warning about the future. This isn’t just about mistakes made. It’s a way of operating that is deliberately destructive. We have known the basic game here for some time. Hedge-fund ball. A clearing house for talent. A portable leisure brand. A short while back the club announced it would be building a luxury Chelsea tower block in Dubai featuring lion statues, starlit spa, and best of all, “a lifestyle that rivals match-day energy”, copy presumably written by someone who doesn’t go to a lot of matches, unless the new lifestyle must-have is angry men in Peaky Blinder caps repeatedly calling you a wanker.

But this is not just the standard brand over substance blah. The Chelsea project is about tearing down, deconstructing, reimagining in the name of super profits. Last year Todd Boehly gave a remarkably candid speech at the Financial Times leaders in sport conference where he talked about the grail of using the Premier League to create some kind of global tech platform, with football as the chief cut-through, not just a SoccerFlix, but a world-shaping omni-app. Burn a billion on talent? So what, we’re unlocking Bezos money here.

Which probably sounds like a good idea in a room with other finance bros. But at this point the basic incompetence of its operation must also be factored in. Graham Potter had it right in one of his press conferences when he said, well, they must know what they’re doing, they’re billionaires. But it turns out the first lesson of BlueCo Chelsea is quite the opposite.

Chelsea’s owners have applied their distressed asset template from the start. Most obviously they have created a very silly team, world champions of a sort, but also lacking any kind of gristle, spleen, sense of itself.

The initial, enduringly disastrous move was to allow Boehly to act as a sporting director, buying players, as he has since admitted, based on whether other teams wanted them too, because this is just like trading stock, right?

What Boehly and his successors have created is a ChatGPT version of sport, a team with no balance, no intelligence, no human qualities. In recent conversations with fans one Chelsea director claimed it was “obvious” Chelsea are building one of the best teams in world football. What is obvious is that the club’s key decision makers have no idea what talent looks like. And that aggressively monetising a complex centuries-old industry with your super-slick finance dude skills might actually be harder than it looks.

It also emerged the club has decided, based on commissioned data, that managers are essentially interchangeable, that here is another way of gaming the game. It is hard to think of a more self-evidently incorrect conclusion, a theory that can be disproved by reading Jürgen Klopp’s Wikipedia page, by watching Pep Guardiola and Mikel Arteta face off in the last few weeks.

At the end of which we have not just a castle built on sand, but a castle that thinks sand is the number one castle-building location of all time, and also doesn’t actually know what sand is, or what a castle is. But which feels pretty sure it’s definitely right about all this, because it has a helicopter. Do you have a helicopter?

Enzo Fernández looks at the ground during Chelsea’s 3-0 loss to Brighton at the Amex Stadium. Photograph: Dylan Martinez/Reuters

It’s not just the stupidity though. The really chilling part of BlueCo Chelsea is its emptiness, the sense of something you love and cherish and feel connected to being hollowed out and petrified. This is the wider horror of Chelsea 3.0, reflected in those Sky Sports pictures at the final whistle at the Amex as the players communed with the fans, the look of men who have stared into the abyss and found the abyss staring right back into them.

Many things have been billed as the death of football, from hooliganism to the scrapping of the wage cap. Maybe this is what will kill it in the end. Drift, commodification, pricing out, the death of its status, even now, as a source of cultural connection. Let us leverage you, reconfigure you, and in the process entirely alienate you.

In the short term there is no way to fix Chelsea, other than for its ownership to leave or accept its ignorance, to reinsert footballing knowledge into the machine. For now BlueCo Chelsea feels like football’s own state of the art expression of late-American capitalism, an empire that’s still out there driving the world, but also clogged by its own arrogance and isolation.

There they go, up to their elbows on some foreign field, no clear endgame, entirely ignorant of the true nature of their opponents, money, energy and will being expended. But with the sense that someone at the top of this is still going to walk off with a trolley load of gold, whatever mess they happen to leave behind.