5 Potential Replacements for Liam Rosenior as Chelsea Manager

For the second time in under four months, Chelsea are looking for a new manager after firing Liam Rosenior.

The 41-year-old, who was effectively promoted to the job in January after a successful spell with sister club RC Strasbourg in France, became deeply unpopular with supporters over a run of seven defeats in his final eight games. 

While several of the criticisms of his personality — including his inability to project "aura" while drinking a pint — were unfair, Tuesday night's 3-0 defeat to Brighton & Hove Albion made it hard to argue against criticisms of his management.

The challenge for Chelsea, however, is much greater than finding a new head coach. Since owners BlueCo bought the club in 2022, the club has won two trophies: the UEFA Conference League and the FIFA Club World Cup. While these victories provided brief moments of joy for fans, there remains deep unrest because of the club's inability to compete for the sport's biggest honors.

Rosenior has paid the price for some abysmal performances, with the limp defeat at Brighton the final straw, but it falls squarely on the owners that opponents can consistently call on more experience and arguably quality than Chelsea are able to in key areas.

While any ownership group that spends close to $2.7 billion on transfers over four years can count some wins, it's telling that the squad is still littered with question marks, and any new manager will have a big challenge ahead.

So, here are five potential options that could be up to the task.

Andoni Iraola

Robin Jones - AFC Bournemouth/AFC Bournemouth via Getty Images

According to the BBC's Sami Mokbel, Bournemouth manager Andoni Iraola is among the early candidates for the job, although he reportedly "needs convincing" it's the right move after announcing he won't be renewing his contract on the south coast at the end of the season. 

Those questions will likely come down to whether Chelsea can formulate and clearly communicate a plan to improve the team and get fans back onside, so this could all be moot. However, purely from a football perspective, it's easy to see how the 43-year-old would be tempting.

The Spaniard has guided Bournemouth to 12th- and ninth-placed finishes in the past two seasons, and has them set to secure another top-10 finish this year. As The Athletic's Thom Harris explained, Iraola has become one of the most coveted coaches in Europe because of "a commitment to a high-intensity system that suits a carefully crafted squad to the ground."

Therein may lie the problem, however. "Carefully crafted" is not an adjective that describes this Chelsea squad. 

Iraola, though, has shown he can work with younger players rather than require a full-scale overhaul. Antoine Semenyo, Dominic Solanke, Dean Huijsen, and Ilya Zabarnyi are among several players who have shown drastic improvement under his coaching and secured big-money moves elsewhere.

Despite the question marks over whether he can be persuaded to join, a coach who can make sense of Chelsea's collection of talented youngsters while exciting fans with a modern, energetic approach could be ideal.

Marco Silva

Sebastian Frej/MB Media/Getty Images

Mokbel also reported Fulham manager Marco Silva — also out of contract at the end of the season — is a candidate. 

Silva doesn't often get the credit that some of his contemporaries do, but his performances with Fulham have been encouraging. Fulham would not be considered big spenders, but Silva has consistently guided them to midtable safety, never finishing lower than 13th.

BBC Sport's Umir Irfan also credits the Portuguese's ability to get more out of players who have underperformed elsewhere, with Alex Iwobi and Harry Wilson the two standouts in this category. 

Perhaps the biggest concern for both Silva and Iraola is how they will adapt to a team that operates in a different context. While turning Fulham and Bournemouth respectively into stable Premier League clubs is impressive, it's an entirely different challenge to what Chelsea's next manager will face.

There will be more scrutiny from the media and fans, and from players who can say they've achieved more tangible success in their careers than their new manager. 

We've seen Thomas Frank struggle to transition from Brentford — where he achieved top-13 finishes in three out of four seasons — to Tottenham Hotspur recently. While that case study shouldn't be a death knell for the career aspirations of midtable managers, it should serve as a warning to clubs thinking that those who overperform with smaller clubs can repeat that trick higher up the table.

Cesc Fabregas

Emmanuele Ciancaglini/Ciancaphoto Studio/Getty Images

GiveMeSport's Ben Jacobs also listed several names that could come under consideration, with former Chelsea midfielder Cesc Fabregas likely the most interesting to fans.

Fabregas won two Premier League titles, a League Cup, an FA Cup and a UEFA Europa League with the club. That history would go some way toward repairing the team's relationship with its supporters. 

And while the nostalgia alone would provide a temporary boost, Fabregas has shown enough as a manager with Como to suggest he could be part of a longer-term turnaround. 

After gaining automatic promotion to Italy's Serie A in his first year, Fabregas secured a 10th-place finish in 2024/25 and now has his team in fifth place this season. He's achieved this with the fourth-youngest team in the league and with an aggressive in-possession approach that prioritizes positional rotation combined with a sturdy defense that allows the second-fewest goals in the league.

It's not a total underdog story, either. The Athletic's James Horncastle noted that Como have recorded the highest net spend in the league since their promotion, and Fabregas' ability to find success within that model despite their focus on young players could be a good fit in west London.

Filipe Luis

Mauro PIMENTEL / AFP via Getty Images

Another former Chelsea player mentioned by Jacobs was Filipe Luis. While Luis only spent one year at the club, he did win a Premier League title and League Cup in that time.

And like Silva and Iraola, Luis is a free agent after somewhat bizarrely being fired by Flamengo despite winning four trophies a season prior and having just recorded an 8-0 win in a semifinal. 

As Brazilian football expert Tim Vickery noted for ESPN, contract negotiations and losses in the finals of two super cup competitions played a role in the breakdown of Luis' relationship with the club.

Jacobs reported Luis has "admirers" at Chelsea, though. Vickery noted that he achieved much of his success in Brazil with a high-intensity style that focused on pinning opponents into their half, and such an approach could play well with fans after concern that the approaches of both Rosenior and predecessor Enzo Maresca had been too timid.

The question for Luis would be whether he could adapt this strategy to a league in which Chelsea are part of a wider collection of challengers rather than "a kind of Brazilian Real Madrid," as Vickery wrote of Flamengo. Chelsea are of course, one of the biggest clubs in England, but they no longer possess a clear talent advantage over much of the league thanks to their squad mismanagement.

Diego Simeone

Fran Santiago/Getty Images

Diego Simeone hasn't been mentioned in the most recent lists of rumoured candidates following Rosenior's sacking, but hiring him would signal Chelsea's ambition and mark a significant and needed change in their overall strategy.

Simeone has consistently made Atletico Madrid one of the toughest teams to play against in Europe, but he's largely done so with experienced players. What better way to signal to fans and players alike that the club is committed to establishing a new identity?

Three of the most successful managers in Chelsea's history — Carlo Ancelotti, Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte — all shared a remarkable weight of personality in different ways, whether through the bluntness of Mourinho and Conte or the unshakeable calm of Ancelotti. 

It would, of course, be a challenge to convince the Argentinian to leave Madrid, where he is beloved. But money talks and Chelsea should also be willing to allow Simeone the authority to build a new team as he pleases.

Simeone would represent a return to the era of Chelsea managers that the fans hold most dear: a leader and a winner capable of building teams that can compete at the highest level.

Attracting him may require a significant squad overhaul. It would even likely require the men responsible for building this deeply flawed squad to depart, but winning has to come before preserving the egos of decision-makers, and Simeone might be Chelsea's best chance to become winners once again.