Mauricio Pochettino has suggested he would walk away from Chelsea if he were unhappy and his end-of-season job review will not only be about whether the club’s owners want to keep him.
The manager, who takes his improving team to Nottingham Forest on Saturday in the hunt for a Europa League finish, moved to take control of a storyline that has developed in intensity over recent months and which he said had affected people at the club – albeit not the players.
Pochettino is under contract until the summer of 2025 – the club have the option of a further year on him – and it remains unclear whether he will continue. When the question has been asked, Pochettino has said he does not know and the owners, Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali, have offered no clarity, increasing the uncertainty.
Boehly did praise Pochettino’s work on Wednesday when he said the team’s most recent “two and a half games at least” – the second-half comeback at Aston Villa for a 2-2 draw and the home wins over Tottenham and West Ham – had featured “beautiful” and “fluid” football.
“The most important thing is to keep going if we are all happy – not only the owners happy with us, the sporting directors happy with us,” Pochettino said. “If we are happy … you need to ask also because maybe we say: ‘We are not happy and we need to split.’ It’s not going to be the first time that a coaching staff decide at the end of the season not to keep going.
“They [the owners] can say tomorrow: ‘Until here, we arrive [continue].’ Or maybe tomorrow, I can say: ‘Look, I want to leave.’ I don’t say that I am not happy but always it is lacking one side. Maybe the other side say: ‘OK, maybe until here’ and we split. It is not a problem. It is not going to be the end of the world.
“Maybe the owners want to keep us in our place and maybe we decide no. Always it’s two parts. But always [people] assume that it’s one part that takes the decision.”
Pochettino made clear he was preparing Chelsea for next season, in terms of planning the pre-season and having meetings about what would come after. He said: “I project myself here for a long period – more than only the one year that it says in my contract because we really trust in our work.”
Then again, Pochettino also said that it was about being professional. If he has a tendency to want to be all things to all people, he can sometimes give all answers to the question.
“Les Reed, who was the technical director we worked with at Southampton, always said to me: ‘Be professional until the end,’” Pochettino said. “This is always in my mind – be professional. You need to work like you are going to be here for a long time.”
Pochettino made the point, and not for the first time, that he had not created the commotion over his future. “The question is not for me, eh?” he said, and it was obvious who he felt it was for – in other words, the owners.
“It’s true that in the last few months the question is always coming,” Pochettino said. “You need to kill the rumours if that’s not true. If not, the rumour is there for a different strategy [reason]. If you ask: ‘Is it affecting me?’ It is not affecting me. Is it affecting the people working with us? I think yes. Because in the end you can kill the rumour, sack me and that’s it. That’s not a problem. It happens in a lot of clubs.”
Pochettino went on to say that the players “don’t need nothing, they are really focused”. He does not believe the situation has affected them. “But the fans and staff, yes,” he continued. “They need to know.”
What was striking was how deeply Pochettino appeared to be in the dark. At one point, he found himself speculating as to the thought processes of Boehly and Eghbali. “Maybe they are thinking that we have a contract so they do not need to clarify nothing in front of all the rumours,” he said. “Maybe the situation is that they are not worried about them. But it is true that there are too many rumours in the last few months.”
Pochettino, who reported that the captain, Reece James, could return to the squad against Forest after five months out with a hamstring injury, looked amused to say the least about Boehly’s “beautiful” football for “two and a half games” comment.
Pochettino would surely prefer that his team’s development after a tough opening 10 games to the Premier League season was acknowledged. Since then, they have taken 42 points from 25 matches, placing them fifth in a form table over the period. They have lost three of their past 17 games in all competitions and their recent record at Stamford Bridge reads: P8 W7 D1.
“Two and a half …” Pochettino said, laughing. “That is the damage of the result, no? I think in the whole season, performances were sometimes better than the second half at Villa or the Tottenham game. When the emotions are good, you can see things in a different way. Today is a sunny day, then you have some good news and it all looks better.
“Our responsibility is to see what happened in the past … [even] people who don’t understand football for sure understand that the situation wasn’t ideal [when Pochettino took over last summer].
“I was talking after the Tottenham game last week that it is to assess us at the end of the season but what is this? Maybe here [in this press conference] there are 20 people and they would assess us in different ways. But they [the owners] need to take the decision.”
