Soon after it began, Liam Rosenior’s final post-match interview as Chelsea manager started to sound like a victim impact statement. His team had been eviscerated 3-0 by Brighton & Hove Albion, and he began listing all the ways in which his players had dumped on him. “I can’t come out and lie,” he said, “I tell the truth.”
So, he used words such as “unacceptable” (five times) and “indefensible”. He said the Chelsea players lacked “spirit” and “determination” and “attitude”, eschewing the coaching technobabble that sometimes acts as the first line of defence. “I’m hurting,” he said, “I’m feeling numb” – which may be mutually exclusive states of distress. Either way, he was in a pickle.
Towards the end of the interview Rosenior said “he wasn’t throwing anyone under the bus”, which, strictly speaking, wasn’t true: he had thrown himself under the bus.
Whatever he said, Rosenior was doomed to being sacked. Chelsea had lost five top-flight games in a row without scoring a goal for the first time since 1912. They failed to register a shot on target against Brighton and, as Rosenior pointed out, they lost 80 per cent of their duels and didn’t win a header. They didn’t make their first tackle until the 32nd minute. From the Chelsea players it was a chilling portrait of quiet quitting.
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Rosenior’s interview, though, was an interesting specimen. When a team loses badly now the fans expect contrition and self-rebuke. They want their frustrations reflected in the answers delivered into microphones. The central characters understand their roles in this melodrama. Footballers routinely take to social media to issue carefully curated apologies, which may have been composed by one of their dutiful assistants.
For managers, though, this is a tightrope. At what point in these mea culpas are they talking themselves out of a job? Blame management must be handled deftly, so that not all of it sticks.
While having to account for Liverpool’s 17 defeats this season, for example, Arne Slot has somehow managed to strike a balance between accepting responsibility and deflecting it. He has a poker face for plausible patter. No matter how bad things have become, Slot hasn’t lost the reins on his emotions and Liverpool are probably not going to sack him for a while.
The interesting thing about Rosenior’s interview last Wednesday was his unexpected detour into authenticity. Up to that point, his media performances had been laced with corporate-speak, which had earned him the nickname “LinkedIn Liam” – a reference to the world’s largest networking platform.
In a terrific piece on the RTÉ website last week, Gary Sinclair, an associate professor of marketing in DCU, analysed Rosenior’s use of language since he took over as Chelsea manager just over three months ago.
“What fans are reacting to is part of a broader cultural shift sometimes described as ‘LinkedIn-ification’. This describes a style of communication shaped by the norms of LinkedIn. It is polished and professional, annoyingly positive, structured around life lessons and mindset and ultimately oriented toward self-presentation and reputation,” Sinclair wrote.
“Football is messy, emotional and tribal, but communications from players, managers and clubs that adopt ‘LinkedIn speak’ are ridiculed because they imply that something authentic has been lost. The case of Rosenior is such a lightning rod because he represented a club owned by Blue Co, a global investment firm at loggerheads with fans.”
In sport there is a massive premium now on managing the message, regardless of how unmanageable it might be. The roots of this practice are in the corporate world.
In the US over the last couple of weeks the biggest story in the NFL has had nothing to do with football, but has concerned the private lives of the New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel and Dianna Russini, a successful NFL beat reporter.
When the New York Post published photographs of them hugging and holding hands at a plush resort, Vrabel initially described the story as “laughable” and not worthy of a response. Russini, though, resigned from her job at The Athletic before an internal investigation about her impartiality and professionalism could be completed.
Both of them are married to other people, which multiplied the horrendous implications for people not in the picture.
Last week other photographs emerged of Vrabel and Russini kissing in a New York bar six years ago and together again in a casino four years later. When the picture was taken in New York, Vrabel was head coach of the Tennessee Titans and, coincidentally or not, Russini ran an insider story about a Titans trade a couple of days later.
Over the course of a couple of weeks Vrabel’s language changed. Their alleged relationship and the original photograph had become an internet sensation and had crossed over into the mainstream news programmes and late-night talkshows.
For the New England Patriots, this had become much more than a personal crisis for their head coach, it was a corporate issue for them. They were standing by their man. Before the first picture was published a “crisis strategist” reportedly contacted the New York Post, at the request of the New England Patriots, and tried to have the story buried. When that failed, their clunky, ill-judged message management kicked into overdrive.
In press conferences around the NFL draft last week, Vrabel started talking about being “the best version” of himself, about “accountability” and his plans for “counselling”. He spoke about the importance of his family and the football team and said, bizarrely, that he was “excited” about the “challenge around both of those things”. He also mentioned a “process”, naturally.
Without explicitly mentioning his relationship with Russini, Vrabel said “his previous actions don’t meet the standards that I hold myself to”. Never said sorry.
The language was plastered with the “LinkedIn-ification” of sport that Sinclair wrote about. Vrabel was fighting a fire, which, in much different circumstances, is an occupational hazard for every coach. Just as if he was explaining a run of bad results, Vrabel allowed himself to be tarred by some blame, but not enough to sink him. Committing adultery is not a sackable offence, but having an extramarital affair with a reporter in your field is complicated, to say the least.
The critical difference between Rosenior and Vrabel, though, is that one of them turned Chelsea into a losing team and the other turned the New England Patriots into a winning team.
One of those messages is easier to manage in any language.
