OLIVER HOLT: Here's how Behdad and the suits cause the real damage at Chelsea

A few minutes after the final whistle of each game at Stamford Bridge, a familiar scene unfolds. From the far side of the pitch, a gaggle of sharp-dressed men march with expressions of injured and aggrieved entitlement towards the tunnel and, thence, to the home dressing room.

Behdad Eghbali, the Chelsea co-owner, is usually among them. So, too, two of the club’s growing army of sporting directors Paul Winstanley and Laurence Stewart. If Chelsea have not won, their gait says they want to know why. The dysfunction that is rife at the club could not possibly be anything to do with them.

There is something, frankly, faintly menacing about their approach. Perhaps that is why, in the last few weeks, the behaviour of Enzo Maresca had become increasingly erratic and Eghbali and his crew are now looking for a fifth head coach in less than four years.

Maybe, in the end, Maresca had simply had enough of it, having to justify himself to those who wield power without responsibility at Chelsea and whose recruitment policy often appears to carry little more sophistication than throwing very expensive dirt at a wall.

Some of it sticks. Much of it doesn’t. And what is left is a manager who has carried the can for men who have turned a fine football club into a revolving door of player arrivals and exits that spins so fast it is hard for the supporters to form any real attachment to many of the men who wear their team’s colours because, some of the time, they have little idea of who they are.

Look, I certainly do not hold a candle for Maresca. I was in the post-match press conference at the City Ground last May when he said that his message to anyone who had criticised his team last season was ‘f*** off to all of them’. It looks as if his critics have had the last laugh.

Maresca and Eghbali seemed to think it was a matter for celebration that a team that had cost more than £2bn to assemble had squeezed into the Champions League places by beating Nottingham Forest on the last day of the season.

Maresca is a man of little charm and even less charisma and his departure will not be mourned by a fan-base many of whom are smart enough to realise that winning the Club World Cup in America in the summer meant very little apart from the prize money it reaped. If it had been important, Maresca would not be out of a job today.

Instead, right until the end, Maresca was still battling to make sense of the misshapen squad that the geniuses at the top have furnished him with, a squad that has some jewels – Cole Palmer, Estevao Willian and Moises Caicedo - but which is damned with helpings of lavish ordinariness, too, and conspicuously lacking in experience.

Maresca was beginning to build an identity of sorts but it was also clear from the petulant reaction of Palmer to being substituted against Aston Villa recently that the coach’s authority was being undermined in the eyes of the players.

That Maresca is being linked with a return to Manchester City should Pep Guardiola leave in the summer suggests that the Italian has attracted plenty of admirers for the job he has done in West London.

Given his deficit in people skills, though, it would still represent a considerable gamble for City to opt for him.

What is clear beyond the briefings disseminated by Chelsea is that Maresca is far from being the main reason why their season is starting to run out of steam. It is not his fault that Chelsea were entered for the cheap bauble of the Club World Cup and stayed in it to the bitter end. The fatigue from that escapade is starting to bite.

Even more than that, the evident proliferation of strong voices at the top of the club and the hierarchy that existed above Maresca as head coach has led to confusion in both authority and direction. That confusion is not abating. If anything, it appears to be growing more damaging.

It may be that that also affects Chelsea’s chances of recruiting an established leading coach as Maresca’s replacement. It is hard to see a man of the strength and principle of Luis Enrique, for instance, tolerating Eghbali, Winstanley and Stewart marching over to quiz him about results straight after the final whistle.

There are suggestions that Liam Rosenior, coach at Chelsea’s sister club Strasbourg, in Ligue 1, is in contention for the job.

Rosenior is a fine coach and a man to be admired. Appointing him would be one of the smartest things the Chelsea regime could do.

Whether they would then give him the autonomy to be able to do the job properly is another matter altogether.