Will Pochettino be a good Chelsea manager? Former Spurs boss officially announced

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Chelsea have finally settled on their ideal managerial candidate to lead the club from the start of the 2023/24 Premier League season. On Monday, the Stamford Bridge side announced the appointment of former Tottenham Hotspur and Paris Saint-Germain manager Mauricio Pochettino. Pochettino has signed a two-year contract with an option for one additional year. "Pochettino is a coach renowned for his sides’ high-energy and eye-catching style, and he has built a reputation for helping young players realize their full potential within a strong squad ethos," club owners Todd Boehly, Behdad Eghbali, José E. Feliciano, Mark Walter and Hansjörg Wyss said in a club statement.

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M. Pochettino Age: 52

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The London club have had one of the most turbulent seasons of their history, with Frank Lampard currently running first-team operations as interim manager, following the sacking of Graham Potter. Who, himself, only stepped into the role to replace Thomas Tuchel last year. As such, new owner Todd Boehlly likely knows that his next manager simply has to hit the ground running and get Chelsea back towards the top of the Premier League table for fear of fans turning on him before his tenure at the club has even properly begun. So is Pochettino the right man for the job?

How good is Pochettino’s Premier League record? 

Pochettino began his coaching career and subsequently made a name for himself at Espanyol in Spain’s top-flight, but there’s little doubt that it was his success at Southampton and then Tottenham that the Argentine coach proved himself as a manager capable of success in one of Europe’s top leagues. And it will be that period of the coach’s career that most Chelsea fans will be most interested in, should he be appointed as the next manager. 

As the graph above shows, Pochettino picked up an impressive 1.19 and 1.47 points per game during his time at Southampton, before reaching even greater heights with Spurs where he took the club to second place and two third-place finishes in the Premier League. At the height of his powers, Pochettino bagged an impressive 2.26 points per game in the 2016/17 campaign, which no Tottenham manager has been able to match or even surpass ever since. 

Is it good enough for Chelsea?

So how does Pochettino’s record at Spurs compare to the kind of standards Chelsea managers are usually held to? Over the course of his time at the London club, the Argentine coach bagged an impressive 1.89 points per game in the Premier League. And when we compare that to the records Chelsea’s last five managers have had, it makes for some interesting reading. 

As we can see, not only does Pochettino comfortably surpass the likes of Lampard and Potter, but his points-per-game average actually puts him level with Maurizio Sarri - who took Chelsea to a respectable third-place finish during his time at the club. And while Pochettino’s record isn’t quite as impressive as Tuchel or Antonio Conte’s time at the club, we can certainly take into account that both managers had squads that far surpasses what Pochettino had to work with at Tottenham.