Chelsea’s revolving door at the managerial position kept spinning on Wednesday when Liam Rosenior became the fifth permanent head coach sacked by the Boehly and Clearlake ownership since they took over at Stamford Bridge in 2022.
Rosenior’s dismissal followed a five-game Premier League losing streak in which Chelsea failed to score a single goal, a run described internally as indefensible and one the club’s own statement acknowledged had made stability impossible to maintain.
The sequence ended with a 3-0 defeat at Brighton, which proved to be the final straw, despite Rosenior having started brightly with six wins from his first seven games after replacing Enzo Maresca in January following the latter’s own sacking.
Caretaker Calum McFarlane has been handed interim charge for the remainder of the campaign, with Chelsea sitting seventh in the table and seven points adrift of Champions League qualification, a season that will end without European football unless something dramatic changes.
The search for a sixth permanent head coach is now underway, and two names have emerged at the top of the shortlist: Andoni Iraola, who departed Bournemouth earlier this month, and Cesc Fabregas, who has guided Como to fifth in Serie A in his first full season managing at this level.
Como president Mirwan Suwarso publicly cleared the path for Fabregas on Friday, telling City AM: “If that makes him happy, that’s him. You want your employees to stay with you for as long as possible but at the end of the day we don’t own him and he’s free to go to Chelsea if he wishes.”
Fabregas, who won two Premier League titles at Stamford Bridge as a player, responded with deliberate caution: “I don’t know anything about it. It would be stupid to think about things that aren’t important now, because this isn’t important to me.”
At 38, he is the most emotionally appealing candidate given his history with the club, but also the least experienced at elite level, having spent less than two years in management before this potential leap to one of European football’s most volatile jobs.
Iraola, by contrast, overachieved consistently at Bournemouth across three seasons and arrives without the complication of an ongoing project elsewhere, making him arguably the cleaner appointment from a pure management perspective.
Diego Simeone, Filipe Luis, and Frank Lampard, who pointedly declined to rule out a return while stressing his commitment to newly promoted Coventry City, are among the other names circling, though the club is said to be taking its time after the speed of the Rosenior decision clearly went wrong.
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