Exclusive claims crucial detail about Chelsea option they turned down to satisfy Pochettino | OneFootball

The news of Mauricio Pochettino’s sacking broke at around 7pm last night.

By 9, several reporters had been briefed by the club and were already publishing lists of reasons and candidates they had suddenly found out about.

But the most in depth piece on Pochettino’s parting didn’t come until 2am in the Daily Mail.

There Kieran Gill’s piece went into significant detail on what had happened to take Chelsea from a settled situation to total chaos in just a few days.

One really worrying aspect of it is that it wasn’t a decision that was made entirely because there’s a bigger better option on the way that the club are willing to sacrifice Pochettino for. It’s come without even much forethought A significant part of it seemed to have literally been decided in the last 48 hours.

Gill’s piece claims that Pochettino had asked for an addition to his current contract, set to expire in a year’s time. This was in order to secure create a sense of “stability and security.”

We can see just why he pushed for that – the last few weeks saw him peppered in press conferences about his future, and it was very destabilising. Going into the last year of his deal would only have made that worse. A club option could have been exercised to keep him at Chelsea for two years beyond this summer, creating at least a short term platform.

Longer term concerns

This was combined with longer term concerns about Pochettino’s training methods, and his desire to be involved in transfers and form a more experienced core.

Given there were those concerns, the club decided it wasn’t worth activating the option or offering a new deal. In fact, their assumption was that the divide between their vision and Pochettino’s would only grow, so a break-up was the only solution.