Sometimes there is a real mystery as to what causes a champion team to break apart and drift back into the pack. And sometimes it’s because the greatest manager of all time leaves the club but insists that his replacement be David Moyes.
You might not have noticed, but Liverpool – a football team who have been really excellent for quite a long time now – are currently rubbish. Like, really properly rubbish. Two places behind Bournemouth rubbish.
Conte wanted established, experienced names to kick his squad on yet further. The board, with Marina Granovskaia as de facto director of football, wanted younger or cheaper talent that they might be able to flip for a profit. It was an impasse. When the decision was finally announced that the club and manager would go their separate ways at the end of the season it all felt like an unnecessarily unsavoury end to what had been a really very successful if never entirely amicable partnership.
Andre Villas-Boas was the new manager and, when it quickly became apparent he was a nerd, the tabloid knives were being sharpened. It didn’t matter that Chelsea started the season with six wins in their first eight games, everyone was just waiting for the nerd to get his comeuppance. And he did. A humiliating 5-3 home defeat to Arsenal came in a run of three defeats in four games and it was soon clear AVB’s Chelsea would not be bothering the title contenders.
Failing to qualify for the Champions League in 2002 was ruinous for Leeds, leaving them unable to service a debt that had mounted year on year in the pursuit of more and more players to keep them in the Champions League. A business model built on permanent residence in Europe’s elite competition was always doomed to fail at some point, and so it proved.
Whatever Leeds’ stature, in a feature about teams collapsing and falling apart, it would be remiss not to include the one who so perfected a specific style of implosion that the phrase ‘Doing a Leeds’ entered the football lexicon and still requires no further explanation to this day.
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