The Athletic.

Hello and welcome to this very special episode of The Athletic Football podcast as we react to

Chelsea's shock sacking of Thomas Tuchel and with us for the show. The Athletics, David

Ornstein and our Chelsea correspondent,

Liam Toomey. David, let's start with you. You broke it. How quickly has all this moved?

Well, I think it's been moving, Mark, behind the scenes quicker than any of us knew,

because this was not a decision that was taken on the basis of last night's results against

Dino-Mozagreb, the decision had already

been made and it feels like it sounds like it was a little while in the making.

You could even trace the warning signs and alarm bells back to Chelsea's preseason when

senior people there seemed to have felt that Tuchel was acting

in a detached way that the focus wasn't there in the way that they expected it to be.

They've crunched the numbers and looked at the trends of goals scored, goals conceded.

In their first 50 days of ownership compared to their

second 50 days of ownership, for example. They've looked at his demeanour, his behavior,

his connection with the players. They appear to have taken soundings and feedback from the dressing

room. And this feels like it was broken from the ownership's perspective.

And once they felt that, they didn't see the reason to hang around.

It would be better to make the call sooner rather than later.

They didn't feel he was developing senior players,

let alone younger players that you would more commonly hear about development around,

but players who were on the fringes were not feeling connected and integrated. Take Christian

...