Liam Rosenior clearly fits the current obsession with the ‘bright young thing’ but here's why his reign in the white heat of Chelsea is doomed

It really is hard to recall a newly recruited manager being so grateful. So incredibly grateful that a big British football club has been willing to anoint him.

Liam Rosenior went back to Strasbourg, the club he was leaving, on Tuesday morning and staged an unusual press conference to expound on the honour of managing Chelsea . ‘I believe deeply in teamwork, unity, togetherness and working for one another, and those values will be at the heart of everything we do,’ he said in the press room, as if he were on to something.

He apparently wants to use his Chelsea press conferences to explain the reasoning behind certain tactics and help fans’ understanding of the game. Don’t bother asking men like Ferguson, Guardiola, Wenger or Klopp what they think of a concept like that. They would not have given their competitors the slightest hint, or the remotest satisfaction.

If there were a direct link between niceness and football trophies, then there would be an elementary logic to Chelsea handing a six-year contract to their 41-year-old new head coach.

There is not one, of course. The one-time serial winner who turned Chelsea into a trophy machine turned out to be one of the most deeply unpleasant individuals to have crossed the threshold of English football, but the fans who remember those Premier League titles in 2005, 2006 and 2015 really could not have cared less about Jose Mourinho ’s conduct.

The winners in football are never the nice guys, and that’s why it is hard not to fear for Rosenior, a thoroughly decent individual who has exhibited some signs of coaching promise and apparently has a 450-page PowerPoint document detailing all his ‘learnings’ about management.

Liam Rosenior says his farewell at a Strasbourg press conference on Tuesday - before being announced as the new Chelsea head coach

Rosenior took Strasbourg to a seventh-place finish in Ligue 1 last season with one of the biggest net spends in the division

Some who have seen him at close quarters attest to his work as a broad-minded, inventive coach who makes it fun. Wayne Rooney’s success at Derby County came off the back of Rosenior doing the day-to-day coaching there.

Rooney says he’s among the best coaches he has seen. That work got him the manager’s job at Hull. Some of the players who have bloomed under his tutelage at Strasbourg have caught the eye of Premier League sides. Crystal Palace scouted the Argentine striker Joaquin Panichelli. Everton have looked at right back Guela Doue.

But succeeding below the radar at Strasbourg is an entirely different proposition to the glare of Chelsea when things start to veer off course.

The cult of the ‘bright young thing’ is a pattern of society, these days. It explains Manchester United’s catastrophic decision to hire Ruben Amorim and throw good money after bad with him. What’s so often missing are the older hands; the ones who on the challenging days can say, ‘Listen, son, think about it this way.’

Will players like Enzo Fernandez, a World Cup winner, Moises Caicedo and Cole Palmer, who has attitude, really listen when Rosenior, winner of nothing more than the 2003 Football League Trophy with Bristol City, wants to start instructing them?

The youthful Chelsea dressing room will provide Rosenior with protection for a while but in time there will be characters and egos to tame. For that, you need pedigree, not potential. All the more so at hire-and-fire Chelsea, where there is never much patience and barely any time before the next managerial unfortunate is back in the Stamford Bridge revolving door.

Such considerations were missing as the on-trend managerial vocabulary, straight from the Amorim guide book, was being applied to Rosenior on Tuesday. ‘One of Europe's brightest young managers’ who is going ‘straight to the top’, the BBC said of him, quoting someone anonymous.

Some perspective would help. Rosenior took Hull City to a seventh-place finish in the Championship in 2024 with a win ratio of 34.6 per cent across 18 months, a lower mid-table benchmark. He took Strasbourg to a seventh-place finish in Ligue 1 last season with the third-biggest net spend in the division.

Rosenior, pictured with Chelsea striker Liam Delap at Hull City, had a win ratio of 34.6 per cent across 18 months with the Tigers

Wayne Rooney’s success at Derby came off the back of Rosenior doing the day-to-day coaching there but is that enough to prepare the new Chelsea boss for the white heat of Stamford Bridge?

Will players like Enzo Fernandez, a World Cup winner, Moises Caicedo and Cole Palmer (pictured), who certainly has attitude, really listen when Rosenior starts instructing them?

Chelsea sporting directors Paul Winstanley (right) and Laurence Stewart seem intent on recruiting coaches with potential

Winning – and the recruitment of serial winners – is no longer part of the calculation for Chelsea’s majority owners Clearlake Capital. The days of Roman Abramovich demanding success and recruiting the biggest guns in football management to deliver it are long gone.

These days, the coaches are expected to heed executive orders and be a cog in the over-populated wheel. Chelsea have two owners, two sporting directors - Paul Winstanley and Laurence Stewart - and a coterie of other execs in the so-called ‘integrated football leadership structure’.

Graham Potter, the last Chelsea coach of Rosenior’s generation, believed he could survive in this structure by niceness and politely manage upwards. He lasted just under seven months.

In one of the many thoughtful football columns he has written, Rosenior reflected a few years back on the abuse and ridicule he had witnessed Slaven Bilic being subjected to one night, as he and his Brighton team-mates travelled to West Ham. He was struck by Bilic’s humility and courtesy but also imagined himself facing the same kind of furnace. ‘For the first time in my life, I questioned my own ambition to be a manager,’ he wrote.

Bilic's experience that night was a cakewalk compared with the white heat of Chelsea. We can only hope Rosenior is equipped and steeled to cope with the punishing challenges up ahead.