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10th   Feb

Scolari sacked as Chelsea manager…

Another day, another Premier League manager loses his job - but will Luiz Felipe Scolari go down in history as the first manager of a 'big four' club to fall victim to the credit crunch?

Appointed in the summer to replace Avram Grant, who committed the cardinal sin of only leading an aging team to second in the league and within an inch of glory in Europe, Scolari was hailed as the man to deliver silverware missing since the departure of Jose Mourinho.

But even as the ink was drying on his £6.25 million a year contract surely the cracks were there for anyone except the most blinkered Chelsea fan to see.

Scolari sacked as Chelsea manager.

Only one summer signing - Deco's arrival from Barcelona for a cut-price £8million (how many big name stars have gone onto better things after leaving the Camp Nou) - was, if nothing else, a sign of what lay ahead.

Then came the Robinho fiasco when Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich decided he was not prepared to meet Real Madrid's asking price for the player - and all of a sudden there was a grey cloud hanging over Stamford Bridge.

All this at a time when the rest of the country was trying to scrape enough money together to fill their car up with petrol which cost £1.20 a litre - and with daily news headlines of redundancies and bank bail-outs.

So, come on, did Blues supporters seriously believe their club would not fall victim to the global economic crisis?

As one of the shrewdest businessmen in the world, with and with a reported personal fortune of upwards of £15 billion Roman Abramovich will have had his finger of the world's financial pulse as its life - and a sizeable chunk of his wealth - ebbed away to all but a virtual flat-line.

Some estimates claim the Russian oligarch may have lost as much as 80 per cent of his fortune, that's a staggering £12billion, over the last 12 months. Oh, and there is the small matter of the near £600million Chelsea owe their owner in an interest-free loan.

Fast forward to January, and the transfer window, and edgy Roman battoned down the hatches and did the unthinkable - he kept his hands firmly wedged into his pockets like a meek schoolboy trying to keep his last few Ready Salted crisps out of the clutches of the classroom bully.

Add to that equation the emergence of Aston Villa, who under one of the most intelligent men in football, seem hell-bent on giving the so-called Big Four a 'wedgie' while whipping the Champions League rug from under their feet - and all of a sudden Roman's expensive toy looks to have run out of batteries on Christmas Eve.

So where did that leave Scolari, you may ask? Answer: About as high and dry as the Hollywood stars who ploughed their cash into Bernard Madoff's Ponzi investment scheme.

The only question remaining is; Who will be next?

Written by Doug