Chelsea are a fire of vanity, justifying the elimination of Mauricio Pochettino with his amorphous nonsense. Todd Boehly’s yes-men are back to square one, writes OLIVER HOLT

It’s starting to look like Chelsea’s new owners are addicted to chaos. They must like it. They must feel comfortable there. Maybe they have some sort of predilection for looking stupid. Perhaps they take perverse pride in adopting a point of view opposed to that of others.

After all, that’s been their strategy since Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali took over the club two years ago. They know this better than the traditional owners of English football who have not made enough profit from the bloated cash cow that is the Premier League and they are going to show us how it is all done.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that just as Mauricio Pochettino was finally starting to make sense of the anarchy of the £1 billion in supermarket player purchases that Boehly and Eghbali had inflicted on the club, we had to decide that it was the right time to let him go.

Congratulations guys. You have just lost a manager who had the courage, stature and strength of character to get through the hardest part. You’ve just lost the manager who did what no one thought possible and started to tame the chaos. You have just lost your progress. You’ve just come back to square one.

The decision to allow Pochettino to leave leaves beggars to believe, even though many expected it. Chelsea won their last five games in a row to end the season with a real sense of progress and that the problems that had dogged them at the start of the season were behind them.

Chelsea co-owners Behdad Eghbali (left) and Todd Boehly (right) seem addicted to chaos

Pochettino (centre) led a resurgence at Chelsea towards the end of the season, after a turbulent start to the campaign

Now they’ve sacrificed all of that because of amorphous nonsense about how Pochettino doesn’t fit into the structure of the club. Basically, this seems to mean that the owners want more power for themselves and for the strategists who keep telling them that their modeling suggests Chelsea should have won the league by 25 points.

The corollary of this is that they want less power in the hands of the manager. Even if the manager has started to prove, as Pochettino did, that he can turn the mix of recruits handed to him by people who have proven ignorant of the game, into an effective unit.

It was Pochettino who built the platform for Cole Palmer to thrive and become one of the players of the season. It was Pochettino who finally began to make sense of the army of players at his disposal; so many players that they had to expand the locker room to accommodate them all.

After all this chaos, Pochettino managed to conjure up a sixth place finish for Chelsea, which was a minor miracle in the circumstances. This was one place above state-owned Newcastle United and two places above Manchester United. This qualified Chelsea for European football next season.

It appears their owners Boehly (left) and Egbhali (right) have sacrificed all the progress they made by parting ways with Pochettino.

Pochettion is the third permanent manager to leave the club under Chelsea’s new ownership.

It might not be what Chelsea are used to, but it’s the absolute maximum they could have expected after such chaotic recruitment madness. It is said that the owners were disappointed not to qualify for the Champions League. If they want to know who is really responsible for this, they just need to look in the mirror.

Pochettino is said to have left after being subjected to an internal review, led by sporting directors Paul Winstanley and Laurence Stewart as well as Eghbali. It’s also a lot of fun. The last time I read something about Winstanley and Stewart, they were in gleefully self-congratulatory mode for their insight. It is extremely rare for athletic directors to pay the price for their incompetence. They often make the manager pay for them.

And so Pochettino left, sacrificing on a bonfire the vanities of the people who run the club. Pochettino is the third permanent manager to leave the club under new ownership.

Losing a manager can be considered a misfortune. Losing two looks like negligence. Losing three has all the hallmarks of dieting blindfolded, trying to tie a tail to a donkey.