After Liam Rosenior’s Chelsea honeymoon ended with four defeats on the bounce which saw the Blues unceremoniously dumped out of the Champions League and plopped down to sixth place in the Premier League in the battle to qualify for UEFA’s showcase tournament next season, the club could really have done with a sedate international break. No such luck.

Roseniorstarted his Chelsea tenure with four Premier League wins on the bounce but has won just one of his last six to beg inevitable questions as to how the Blues may have fared had BlueCo not flexed their muscles in a power struggle with predecessor Enzo Maresca and sent him packing.

READ MORE: Ranking 24 BlueCo mistakes at Chelsea as Rosenior appointment joins three sackings

Two of Chelsea’s most important players, Enzo Fernandez and Marc Cucurella, have made their feelings on the Italian’s sacking very clear having been given the freedom to so in the last couple of weeks away from the prying eyes and pricked-up ears of BlueCo.

“I don’t understand it,” Fernandez admitted. “Sometimes as a player, there’s things we don’t understand and the way they try to manage things. I don’t have an answer for you because I don’t know.

“Obviously, it was a departure that hurt a lot because we had a lot of identity, he gave us order but it’s the way that football is, sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad.

“But we always had a clear identity when it came to training, playing and obviously his departure hurt us especially in the middle of the season – it cuts everything short.”

Real Madrid are reportedly interested in the Chelsea vice-captain, who has left the door open to an exit from Stamford Bridge after being asked about his long-term future at the club.

“I don’t know, there are eight games left and the FA Cup. There’s the World Cup and then we’ll see,” he said, before essentially issuing a Los Blancos come-and-get-me pleaby insisting “I’d live in Madrid. I really like Madrid; it reminds me of Buenos Aires.”

Cucurella was slightly less blatant in his flirting with Barcelona – complimenting a blouse rather than sweeping hair behind ears – as he said that while he was “happy” at Chelsea an offer from Barcelona would be “difficult to refuse”.

The left-back then tore into the Chelsea owners, the club’s transfer strategy and the manager switch after Maresca led them to the Conference League and Club World Cup titles, and back into the Champions League.

After declaring he’d have “died for” Maresca as he and his teammates were “playing almost by heart” in the last few months of his tenure, Cucurella praised Rosenior as though the full-back was the sexiest girl in school sympathetically condemning a wannabe boyfriend to the friend zone.

“Liam is a very good person and has been great at handling the group, the characters,” Cucurella said. “He likes to stay close to us and his football ideas are good, but we don’t have the time to train them.”

It’s an international break-induced player rebellion ahead of what could well be a summer exodus on the basis of a) the inertia these star players find themselves in at Chelsea under owners who have shown no indication of faltering in their perpetual rebuild project, and b) a possible need to sell after the club announced the biggest pre-tax loss in Premier League history.

The ￡262m deficit for 2024-25 comfortably eclipses the ￡197.5m lost by Manchester City in 2011 and although football finance expert Kieran Maguire said we need to wait for a more detailed picture when the full accounts are published to Companies House, he did highlight how important qualifying for the Champions League will be for Chelsea.

“People ask whether Chelsea are a football club or a hedge?fund experiment. I don’t think these accounts offer any clearer answer. We are still waiting to see the full picture on Companies House,” he told BBC Sport.

“For every one pound you receive from broadcasting [in the Champions League], you only get 11p in the Conference League, and it is much harder for the marketing department to sell a hospitality box for a match against the second?best team in Denmark than when Barcelona come to town.”

It’s also much harder to sell FC Midtjylland to Fernandez, Cucurella or indeed Manchester United-linked Cole Palmer, all of whom will fetch a pretty penny and appear more than open to being used as tools to balance absurdly lopsided books in their bid to move to semi-serious football clubs under semi-serious football managers.