ROSENIOR A RABBIT IN HEADLIGHTS AT THE BRIDGE BUT HE WASN'T THE FIRST AND WON'T BE THE LAST

CHELSEA have sacked another manager and, at this stage, it barely registers as news. It's what they do.

- camondunphy

Since the arrival of the American ownership, the one thing they've shown real consistency in is pulling the trigger.

Managers come in, managers go out, and the cycle continues with a kind of grim inevitability. Good managers, proven managers, have been discarded along the way. That's the context.

This time it was Liam Rosenior who paid the price. The official reason is straightforward: a 3-0 defeat to Brighton on Monday night, five consecutive league defeats, and not a single goal scored in that run.

The numbers are brutal and in elite sport numbers tend to win the argument. But numbers rarely tell the whole story at Chelsea.

Rosenior had been in the job for 104 days. That's not a typo. Just over three months.

He was handed a six-year contract worth around £24 million, despite being largely unproven at this level.

That tells you everything about the thinking - or lack of it - at the top of the club. Long contracts for players, long contracts for managers, and very short patience when reality bites.

He got the job because of his work at Strasbourg, Chelsea's so-called sister club. That's part of the new model: a network of clubs, a conveyor belt of talent, and the illusion that success can be engineered through structure alone. But football doesn't work like that. It never has.

What happened to Rosenior is what happens to most Chelsea managers. The players stopped playing. It's as simple and as damning as that.

You can talk tactics, formations, and philosophy all you like, but when players down tools, the manager is finished. That's the culture that has been allowed to fester at Stamford Bridge for years.