“It’s like watching a masterpiece being torn apart.”
That is how a source close to Chelsea Women’s operations describes the exit of Paul Green, the club’s former head of women’s football, to The Athletic. The separation is the latest and most evident crack in the once-impenetrable Chelsea Women facade.
They are effectively out of the Women’s Super League (WSL) title race this season, sitting third and trailing leaders Manchester City by nine points, and suffered successive league defeats (2-0 by Arsenal and 5-1 by Manchester City) for the first time since 2015. The consecutive losses were also the first of head coach Sonia Bompastor’s 104-match managerial career.
On Monday evening, Chelsea announced Green’s exit, ending his 13-year tenure at the club. He was informed of the decision on Monday afternoon, according to sources with knowledge of the event who, like all those mentioned in the article, spoke to The Athletic on condition of anonymity to protect relationships.
Green called Bompastor, with whom he is said to have had a good working relationship, to let her know of the club’s decision. Chelsea Women announced last week a contract extension for Bompastor until 2030.
An internal email, seen by The Athletic, was sent at 7.54pm on Monday. At least one senior player considered it “disgraceful” that such “shock” news had been delivered to staff by email.
The contents explained that Green’s responsibilities will be absorbed by existing leadership and operational structures, overseen by co-sporting directors Paul Winstanley and Laurence Stewart and Chelsea Women’s chief executive officer Aki Mandhar.
As part of a review of the women’s setup, the club concluded that the balance of leadership within the building was no longer optimal — specifically that some areas were not operating at the level expected of an elite women’s football programme. It was decided that changes were needed to ensure future success.
The decision to let Green go stunned and upset many players in the squad, some of whom discovered the decision via media reports late on Monday.
“Absolutely devastated,” wrote captain Millie Bright on Instagram. Players such as Sam Kerr, Erin Cuthbert, Lauren James, Aggie Beever-Jones, Catarina Macario and Guro Reiten, along with former manager Emma Hayes, followed suit, sharing tributes to Green on their personal social media accounts..
Winstanley joined Chelsea from Brighton & Hove Albion in December 2023, while Stewart arrived from Monaco the following spring as part of changes under Chelsea’s new ownership group, BlueCo, which took over the club in 2022. Neither man has prior experience in women’s football. Mandhar was appointed as the club’s first dedicated CEO in September 2024, and was tasked with “growing dedicated resources independent of the men’s team”, according to the club’s website. Green was still responsible for recruitment, contract negotiations and day-to-day football operations of the women’s team.
In 2024, Chelsea sold their women’s team to their parent company, BlueCo, for approximately £200million ($273m). The move was designed to allow Chelsea Women to begin operating as a self-sustaining entity, albeit while helping the club meet Premier League profit and sustainability rules (PSR) on the men’s side
Green’s role in constructing Chelsea Women into the seven-time Women’s Super League (WSL) champions cannot be overstated.
From his arrival on Hayes’ staff as an assistant manager in 2013 to steering the team’s recruitment and squad planning as head of women’s football, he has been a key component of Chelsea’s success.
Yet, according to multiple sources, his exit is the culmination of months of difficulties behind the scenes this season, including attempts to have more sway on the women’s team’s operations from those who previously would have focused on the men’s side.
Sources familiar with the situation voiced concerns that the changes are negatively impacting the squad. Chelsea have looked a shadow of the team that last season claimed a domestic treble in Bompastor’s first year in charge.
Despite the unprecedented drop in form, The Athletic reported after the 5-1 loss to City that Chelsea were placing full backing in Bompastor. Days later, the club announced her contract extension, which came as a surprise to some.
That new deal seemed to be a vote of confidence from the hierarchy, which backed the manager and sent a message to players.
It was a show of faith that recent results were symptomatic of other factors — injury, squad availability, the competitive levelling of the WSL — as opposed to foreshadowing an intractable downward spiral.
However, Green’s exit reignites questions over the long-term vision of Chelsea Women.
The reigning league champions have been heralded in their years of domestic dominance for shrewd succession planning and squad evolution. Much of that success has been down to the efficacy of Green, who, despite his nominal title as head of women’s football, is described as serving as an all-encompassing director of football. Speaking to The Guardian in October, Hayes reflected: “The marker for me wasn’t the trophies; it was that I could leave a team that could keep on winning. Sonia (Bompastor) is doing an amazing job, and Paul Green, who deserves so much credit for what he’s done. (It is) why Chelsea are still at the top.”
However, since Hayes’ departure in 2024, Green has had less autonomy over recruitment and squad planning due to an influx of individuals from the men’s side of the club becoming more involved, most notably sporting director Winstanley. Multiple sources — inside and outside the club — raised this in conversations with The Athletic.
The involvement stems from a desire to centralise control of the sporting director department, sources say, as well as differences in opinions over how Chelsea should be run.
Winstanley has been an influential figure in key decisions at the club, including leading the recruitment of Bompastor.
According to two sources, Winstanley has expressed a desire to increase the number of player sales from Chelsea Women’s ranks. In January, Chelsea sold midfielder Oriane Jean-Francois to Aston Villa for a club-record fee of approximately £450,000 ($536,00). Another area of focus for Winstanley, according to sources familiar with the club, is women’s football’s culture of issuing short-term contracts, voicing concerns over the financial benefit of doing so.
While some of Winstanley’s suggestions have been welcomed, other sources claim a lack of experience and knowledge in women’s football is muddling operations and leading to poor decision-making.
Multiple senior figures at English and European clubs, as well as agents, have expressed frustration at the increased bureaucracy of Chelsea Women’s operations. While Green was still the port of call for clubs willing to do business with Chelsea, sources say any formal sign-off on transfer decisions must now go through “multiple layers” above Green. But those people are also focusing on men’s transfers.
One source bemoaned Chelsea’s desire to “fix what is not broken”. The sentiment is echoed by multiple people spoken to for this article.
Meanwhile, players who perhaps should have been moved on over the past two seasons have not left yet, despite an apparent need for a squad refresh. According to one source, internally Chelsea became conscious that they had overspent in the market — they broke the global women’s transfer record for Colombia forward Mayra Ramirez in January 2024 (£384,000 up front), before doing so again the following January for United States centre-back Naomi Girma ($1.1m, £1m). But instead of reinvigorating the squad to raise standards on and off the pitch — as they have done in the past — Chelsea stagnated while their competitors have closed the gap.
“They’re afraid of the beast they created,” said one source.
In the past three transfer windows, The Athletic has been told that Chelsea have attempted to sign players in the hours before the deadline. While they managed to get deals for USWNT players Girma and Alyssa Thompson over the line in January and September 2025, respectively, their attempt to sign Nigeria international Jennifer Echegini from Paris Saint-Germain this winter failed.
Despite several players being out of contract in the summer and an ongoing injury crisis in the front line, with Ramirez, Beever-Jones and Macario all suffering physical problems, no reinforcements were signed to strengthen for the final months of the campaign.
“Without making too many comments on that, probably I would have liked to be in a better place in terms of the last transfer window,” Bompastor said when asked about Chelsea’s transfer business after the loss to City, days before the winter window closed.
Later in the week, when asked in her press conference before facing Tottenham Hotspur about the frustrations she had voiced, Bompastor said: “Did I really say these words? I’m not sure. I’m having a lot of conversations with everyone in the club. We are working together.
“We know where we want to be, we know where we want to go and a lot of conversations are happening on a day-to-day basis every week. We are aligned and on the same page.”
Chelsea advertised for a sporting director on the women’s side as early as the autumn, according to two senior figures in the women’s game and another inside Chelsea. President of soccer operations at Washington Spirit, Haley Carter, then with Orlando Pride, was considered for the role.
The position was intended to sit alongside Green. However, it was noticeable that the press release announcing Bompastor’s contract extension included quotes from Winstanley and Stewart, not Green.
By contrast, when Bompastor’s appointment as head coach was confirmed in 2024, Green was the first person quoted in the club’s statement, followed by Winstanley and Stewart.
Chelsea’s rationale for the changes that have taken place is that Hayes’ departure led to a move from a broader, more centralised manager-led model to a head-coach-led model under Bompastor. Hayes combined coaching with wider authority and leadership, whereas Bompastor has a clear technical and performance remit.
In any high-performance competitive environment, friction can be common. At Chelsea, players have been able to feel the changes from above, sources close to the team say, and it has been the same for members of staff.
Two sources close to the team have said that since BlueCo’s arrival, the culture has changed for the worse. Specifically, tension has risen among staff who feel pitched in competition against each other to prove their worth to members of the hierarchy, with mistakes and defeats resulting in finger-pointing, rather than collaboration.
Staff members were sent a survey to complete and had to rate how they thought each department — coaching, analysts, recruitment, scouting, performance, medical, operations and academy — were performing.
Other questions were split into sections such as ‘clarity’ or ‘development’, with statements such as “the long-term and short-term ambitions of Chelsea Women are clear” or “we maintain our culture and morale regardless of recent results”.
While the Hayes era was not immune from problems, winning consistently kept potential discord at bay.
A similar rationale is offered when considering Bompastor’s first and very successful season at Chelsea. Sources describe a sense of layover from the Hayes tenure — the culture she had established was still intact — as well as players benefiting from a new-manager bounce and changes at the top of the club having yet to be felt. In her second season, Bompastor has tried to stamp her own mark on the team.
This season, the influence of Winstanley, Stewart and others on Chelsea’s operations and recruitment has been felt more clearly.
Hannah Hampton, Rebecca Spencer, Lucy Bronze, Macario, Reiten, Kerr, Beever-Jones and Bright all have contracts expiring this summer. While conversations remain ongoing with the players, sources say some of Chelsea’s older squad members, who were placed on short-term deals, have felt less valued by the club. Macario rejected the offer of a contract extension, The Athletic has been told.
There is also a question of whether enough emphasis is being placed on tactical intelligence in recruitment.
According to multiple team and club sources, many training sessions during Hayes’ time in charge were spent learning football and tactical theory. Doing so was a means of balancing hectic playing schedules and recovery timelines, as well as helping players develop into tactical thinkers capable of executing instructions in-game or making those decisions themselves. The upshot was a team able to self-coach and self-analyse in real time on the pitch.
This season, team meetings and training sessions do not emphasise technical and tactical theory on the same scale, sources say. Instead, Bompastor has assumed many of the players can self-coach, leading to gaps in intelligence that are manifesting on the pitch. Younger players need to be fed instructions, which can be challenging in the middle of a match and often relies on players with a longer track record at the club having to step in.
“Sometimes we forget how to play football. With the quality we’ve got and the quality I see in training, it’s not transcending into the game,” Chelsea midfielder Erin Cuthbert told BBC Sport after the 2-0 win against Tottenham Hotspur on Sunday.
Sources also believe a gap has formed in players’ cognisance of what it means to play for Chelsea. Hayes was fierce in her competitive drive and while she did famously concede the league title after a chaotic 4-3 league defeat by Liverpool in May 2024 (Chelsea ended up winning the title on goal difference), it is challenging to name another time Hayes so publicly accepted defeat.
Bompastor, who is the only person to win the Women’s Champions League as a player and a coach, is known for being a hyper-competitor. However, the Frenchwoman’s management style is different and she is not as efficient in communicating clear expectations and instructions to players as Hayes was.
Indeed, there is a growing sense of imbalance at Chelsea, from mentality to communication to tactics.
Bompastor spoke about this after Sunday’s victory against Spurs. “When you want to perform at your best, you need to have the four aspects of the performance aligned at the highest level: tactical, mental, physical and technical. If one of them or some of them are not as high as possible, it affects the performance.”
Those elements have aligned to devastating effect for Chelsea over the past decade — and that was in no small part down to Green. But one of the foundational blocks of Chelsea’s fortress is now gone.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Chelsea, Premier League, Soccer, Sports Business, Women's Soccer
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