As personality clashes go, Phil Scolari’s at Chelsea aren’t the most earth-rivening imaginable, largely because Phil Scolari’s personality at Chelsea seemed to exist in a weirdly crumpled state of defeatedness and timidity. Sure, he was Big Phil; yes, he was the manager who slugged players in their pampered jaws right in the middle of games; absolutely, he was hired to bring fear to an unruly dressing-room and blast away years of accumulated ego-grievances with the dynamite in his head. In practice, though? He sort of showed up blinking like a freaked-out grandfather, looked both ways before crossing the street, and gently patted the zipper of his windbreaker while respectfully answering questions. England made Mourinho bigger; it made Scolari, all of a sudden, very small.
Still, though: since the entire Chelsea circus, from the very beginning, has been about various competing alchemies of personality, it’s archivally interesting to read Big Phil’s interview with Brazilian TV on the squabbles and petty hatreds that ran through his time at the club. Ballack was jealous of Deco! Drogba was arrogant! Again, not exactly startling revelations, but the fact that Scolari still seems slightly flummoxed by the idea that Ballack would be insecure or that Drogba thought he was good at least suggests something about what must have been the anarchy of unmanaged character defects that reigned under Big Phil’s watch. Just about the opposite of what he was supposed to bring to the club, in fact.
Some of the points in the interview seem like they’re tailored for Brazilian TV. Scolari has said for years that he wanted to sign Robinho, though I wonder if he’d still admit it to, say, the Guardian. But if he really pushed to replace Drogba with Adriano in order to improve team chemistry, eight months on the job may have been nine too many. (Over at Dirty Tackle, Brooks comes gently to the point about the wisdom of some of these tactical ideas.) I mean, read that again. The dude wanted to sign Adriano because he’d be “easier to control.” And this was a coach who, when he was hired, set off a genuine debate in the English media about whether he was more accomplished than Alex Ferguson! Having fists doesn’t make you a psychologist.
This is why Avram Grant is the key to the whole era: he was the dead zone where personality disappeared.
N.B. Drogba was.
Read More: Chelsea, Didier Drogba
by Brian Phillips · March 30, 2011
I think this may have been (the arrival of a new manager, reputation etc) been echoed, to a lesser and opposite extent when Woy went to Liverpool.
Even with the dodgy signings.
Which Hodgson managed to achieve but sadly for us, Big Phil was denied.
The revelation that the team wasn’t really a team, isn’t really a surprise. They are all mercenari… ah you’know that.
But Adriano is easier to control than Drogba!
@Elliott For the opposition
Hindsight is 20/20 but you could kind of see it coming. At club level he just didn’t have the experience of dealing with such a group of players; he seems to favour workhorses and waterboys. I’m sure he just subjugated any Kuwaiti prima donnas with those big ham hocks of his.
PS. I would’ve liked to see him take a swing at Drogba.
You’re the new blood brought in to win the treble. Your strategy? First offload your only Ballon D’Or winner, then dump the only player in your squad who has already won the Champions League twice. What happens? Your team immediately wins the treble. Take a bow, Pep Guardiola.
There is surely an argument that with star players now earning tens of millions a year more than their on-paper supervisors, unless players’ egos are kept firmly under the manager’s control – however good those players may be individually – hierarchies and cliques will quickly take root and undermine any idea of team spirit. I’m not excusing Scolari’s miserable spell at Chelsea, but I do think I recognise what he describes from the many leaks that have emerged from Real Madrid’s dressing room over the last few years. Such non-optimal dressing-room vibes are surely the logical consequence of the Abramovich-Pérez approach to team-building: indiscriminately stuff your shopping basket with the best ingredients money can buy, and then hope someone will come up with a recipe to make the resulting meal palatable. But just because you’ve got beluga in the fridge doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll make your food taste better than a stock cube would. Wasn’t Madrid’s best performance this season, against Racing Santander, the one with Granero on the pitch, not Cristiano Ronaldo?
(Collapses of acute culinary analogy.)
@Elliott If you are the demon rum, then yes.
@Brian Phillips Exactly.
@Archie_V Ronaldo had four goals in that performance.
@Archie_V Real Madrid’s best performance this season is 7-0 against Malaga and Ronaldo had a hat trick.
@Jo Er… he didn’t play (Madrid won 3-1.) And I said their best performance, not their highest score.
@Archie_V The game was always going to be won convincing by Real Madrid. They were up two goals at the half. I would say their best performance was against Espanyol. Casillas was red-carded in the second minute.
Ferguson’s authority comes partly from his record but mostly from the amount of time that he has spent at Utd. I suspect that to drop into a “big” club and gain full control takes a monstrous ego and a lot of work. That’s why Mourinho can do it and why he never lasts more than a short time anywhere.
@Elliott Sure, One of them leaves each time there is a problem and the other stays despite the depart of his Coach
@Elliott I have just seen the way you were presenting the opposition during game and not outside
A most enjoyable article. My reading experience could only have been improved by the presence of a header banner ad, or a popup, or even a pop under
@Russell: Let’s not forget that Chelsea weren’t a big club until Mourinho took over. Sure, the ego helped, but how many Chelsea players in that 04-05 team had any medals to their name? Chelsea pre-Mourinho were, at best, more like a Spurs today
I thought Zola’s then presence is worthy of consideration, my friend