According to the Mirror, in his new autobiography, Commitment, Didier Drogba has revealed why Villas-Boas failed as manager after just 7 months in charge of Chelsea.
Drogba wrote:
You have to be able to listen [to experienced individuals] and communicate with them. Otherwise, if you manage a team like Chelsea, you’re heading for a fall.
According to the book, Drogba first noticed that the Portuguese manager had plans to remove several senior players from the squad, including players like Frank Lampard, Ashley Cole, and himself. The plans of his “revolution” became public, yet he still kept the players at the club.
That’s his right, because the club needed to keep moving forwards, but he shouldn’t have kept those players at the club while he was trying to make his revolution.
Furthermore, the Ivorian mentioned that the manager had crisis talks with his senior players following a 2-1 loss to Liverpool. Apparently, there was perceived progress with the tactics and relationship between the players and managers. However, the next day Villas-Boas told the squad that they would have results playing his way.
It was as if the conversation (the day before) had never happened.
According to Drogba, the inability to create a strong relationship with several senior players like Michael Essien, Drogba, Lampard, Cole, and others, provided his demise as Chelsea manager.
I also believe another reason for his lack of success stems from his arrogance coupled with his age. While managing Chelsea, Villas-Boas was only in his mid-thirties. This is the age of a man who could still easily be playing. How can someone come into a club the size of Chelsea, and have the audacity to not work with his senior players?
To me, that’s where he lost the dressing room and where he made his mistake. It wasn’t that he didn’t know how to manage, or that his tactics were that poor. He just needed to form a strong partnership with senior players and instead, he alienated them. That’s just unacceptable and Abramovich was right to let him go.
