Chelsea hit March like a team ready to announce themselves again. That 4-1 demolition of Aston Villa at Villa Park on March 4 felt significant: a statement win over top-five rivals, the kind that usually sets up a charge towards the Champions League places.
Then the floor gave way.
What followed was not a wobble but a collapse, a fortnight that stripped away momentum, belief and, increasingly, unity between dressing room and boardroom.
From Villa Park to freefall
The first warning sign came quietly dressed as progress. A fifth-round FA Cup tie at Wrexham, a Championship side Chelsea were expected to handle with minimal fuss, turned into a slog. Liam Rosenior’s team needed extra-time, a numerical advantage and four goals to edge it 4-2. They got through, but the performance felt heavy. Laboured. The kind of win that leaves more questions than answers.
Then Paris arrived.
For 70 minutes in the first leg of their Champions League last-16 tie, Chelsea looked like a match for the European champions. Organised, brave, purposeful. And then they unravelled. PSG ran through them late on, punishing every lapse to turn a promising display into a 5-2 humiliation. A fine performance on paper, shredded by a scoreline that exposed just how fragile this side really is.
The rot spread quickly. A 1-0 home defeat to Newcastle should have been the story; instead, Chelsea’s pre-match theatre stole the headlines. The squad huddled over the ball in the centre circle, a choreographed gesture Rosenior later framed as an attempt to “respect the ball”. It looked contrived. It sounded worse. At a time when fans wanted conviction, they got performance art.
The month closed in brutal symmetry: back-to-back 3-0 defeats. First PSG again in Europe, then Everton at the newly opened Hill Dickinson Stadium. Chelsea looked powerless, running on fumes and short of answers. The international break did not just arrive; it rescued them from a spiral that threatened to deepen with every game.
Dissent from afar
If the pause was meant to bring calm, Enzo Fernández made sure it did anything but.
Away with Argentina, the vice-captain gave two interviews that cut straight across the club’s narrative. The first was a blunt assessment of Enzo Maresca’s sacking on New Year’s Day, a decision the hierarchy have tried to move past without looking back.
“I don't understand it,” Fernández admitted. He spoke of a team with “a lot of identity”, of a coach who “gave us order”, and of a departure that “hurt a lot…especially in the middle of the season – it cuts everything short.”
Those are not the words of a player toeing the line. They are the words of a leader questioning the direction of the club.
Then came the second blow. Asked about his long-term future at Chelsea, Fernández refused to commit. “I don't know,” he said. “There are eight games left and the FA Cup. There's the World Cup and then we'll see.”
Pressed on where he might like to live one day, he did not dance around it. Spain. Madrid. A city he said reminds him of Buenos Aires, a place where he could speak his own language and feel at ease. With Real Madrid links already bubbling, the message was unmistakable.
Chelsea hold the power on paper. Fernández’s contract runs to 2032, a mammoth deal that gives the club leverage in any negotiation. But when your vice-captain is openly pining for another city and another league, leverage only goes so far.
Cucurella joins the chorus
Fernández is not alone. Marc Cucurella, one of the few senior figures in a dressing room increasingly built around youth, has been just as forthright.
“With Enzo Maresca in charge, we were more stable,” he told The Athletic. Eighteen months of work, a process that took time to bed in, and a team that eventually “played almost by heart”. Systems could change, but players knew their roles. There was a structure, a plan.
“When a manager gives you that confidence and offers you a platform to fight for titles, you'd die for him,” Cucurella added. “The moment Maresca left, it had a big impact on us…If you asked me, I would not have made this decision.”
He did not stop there. He described the “instability around the club” as a direct consequence of those choices: a caretaker in Calum McFarlane, then a new manager with new ideas and no time to implement them. His prescription was simple: if you are going to make a change of that magnitude, do it at the end of the season. Give everyone a pre-season. Give the project a chance.
He even pointed to Arsenal and Mikel Arteta, nearly seven years in, trophies limited but trust rewarded with a team now fighting on all fronts. The comparison was pointed. Arsenal stuck. Chelsea spun the wheel again.
On his own future, Cucurella was more cautious than Fernández. Barcelona, his boyhood club, still tugs at him – “It would be difficult to refuse,” he admitted – but he framed any decision as one for “a few years from now”, stressing how happy he and his family are in England. His contract, believed to run until 2028 and recently improved, makes an exit more manageable than Fernández’s, but his tone was far less urgent.
His critique of the club’s recruitment strategy, however, cut just as deep.
Youth project under fire
Cucurella is the third-oldest player at the club. He has lived the transition from a more balanced squad to one dominated by long-term bets. He understands the logic. He does not fully buy the execution.
“I understand this is part of the club's policy,” he said, acknowledging the focus on signing young players and building for the future. But he admitted that for those who want to “win big things”, moments like the 8-2 aggregate defeat to PSG are “discouraging”.
He argued that Chelsea have “a good core of players” and that the “foundations are there”. The issue, in his eyes, is that to fight for the Premier League and Champions League, you need more than potential. You need experience. You need players who have lived through those nights and know how to navigate them.
“Signing young players only might complicate achieving those goals,” he warned. Against PSG, he felt they lacked players who had been through that level of pressure. Time will give this squad experience, but his message was clear: balance matters. Youth alone is not a strategy; it is a gamble.
Palmer running on empty
On the pitch, the face of the project has been Cole Palmer. This season, though, the numbers tell a quieter story. Four goals from open play and one assist in the Premier League is a modest return for a player expected to carry so much creative weight.
Context matters. Palmer has been running on a near-continuous schedule, without a proper summer break since 2022, racking up 97 games across his first two seasons at Chelsea. His body has creaked under the strain, with fitness and injury issues blunting his sharpness.
Rosenior’s constantly shifting system has not helped. Palmer has struggled to fully sync with the tactical churn, while Premier League defenders have adjusted. He now faces double and even triple teams, crowded out without the explosive pace to simply burst past pressure. In those moments, he needs quick, coordinated movement around him. Too often, he has been left isolated.
An England call-up and the chance to impress Thomas Tuchel ahead of the World Cup could have reignited his season. Instead, his form for club and country has nudged him towards the fringes of that conversation. A summer off might yet do him good, but the fact that rest is even being framed as a positive underlines how far his influence has dipped.
The noise around him has grown louder too. Manchester United links refuse to disappear, despite the obvious lack of need at Old Trafford unless Bruno Fernandes is moved on. Palmer is locked into Chelsea’s longest deal, running until 2033, and any move feels improbable. Still, the rumours linger, a reminder of the uncertainty that now shadows almost every key figure at Stamford Bridge.
Season on the brink
When Chelsea emerge from the international break, they will walk straight into a defining stretch.
First up is Port Vale in the FA Cup quarter-finals, a League One side fighting at the other end of the pyramid. On paper, it is the ideal tie: a home draw against weaker opposition, a clear path to Wembley, and a chance to end an eight-year drought in a competition that once felt like theirs by right.
For Rosenior, it is more than that. It is an opportunity to reset the mood, to put silverware back on the horizon and to buy himself breathing space.
Then comes the real test. Manchester City at Stamford Bridge. Then Manchester United a week later, again in west London. Two fixtures that will not only shape Chelsea’s league position but also expose exactly where this team stands against the elite and the merely functional.
That United game is expected to be played under a backdrop of protest, with Chelsea supporters joining forces with fans of BlueCo’s other club, Strasbourg. The anger is not just about results. It is about identity, direction, and a sense that decisions made above the dugout are undermining everything below it.
Lose both league games, and the table could turn ugly. Chelsea risk tumbling out of the European places and potentially out of the top half altogether, depending on other results. For a club that talked openly about competing at the very top again, that would be a brutal reality check.
Publicly, the hierarchy remain behind Rosenior. Privately, that conviction will be stretched if this run of form hardens into something more permanent. And if the axe were to swing again, the spotlight would not just fall on the head coach. It would turn on the sporting directors, on the architects of a campaign that, at best, was tracking as par for a transitional season before being blown apart midstream.
So the questions linger over Stamford Bridge. Can an inexperienced manager, backed by a squad long on talent but short on discipline and scars, drag this season back from the brink? Or has Chelsea’s grand project already drifted too far off course to be salvaged in time?
