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Thiago Silva has left his soon-to-be former Chelsea team-mates a brutal parting message as he prepares to play his final match at Stamford Bridge on Sunday.
The Brazil international announced that he would be leaving the club at the end of the season last month in a tearful video message which demonstrated exactly how much the club has come to mean to Silva since his 2021 move.
The defender has had a far-from-ideal final season in west London, with Chelsea not competing in Europe for the first campaign since 2016-17, and failing to secure silverware.
While Mauricio Pochettino‘s players are hoping to end 2023-24 on a high note with a tilt at fifth place in the Premier League table, Silva feels that the team has fallen short of club expectations.
The 39-year-old therefore used his final interview to hand out curt advice to the side he is leaving behind.
‘Thiago knows what it means to wear a Chelsea shirt, you know,’ Silva told Sky Sports. ‘And if I have a message to send to the boys that are here today, I hope they understand that everything they did to get to Chelsea has to be worth it.
‘Because the season we’re having is not worthy of Chelsea. It’s not.
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‘And I think they have to do more next year, they need to do more.
‘If you look at the games, the fans never left the team, never. We were in ninth place, eighth, right? And the fans were always there.
‘They booed us off a little at the end of the match, but they’re always there in the stands, always with 40,000, 45,000.
‘If we were somewhere else, they could throw rocks at us – we know that happens in our country,’ Silva added to his Portuguese-speaking interview, likely referencing Brazil.
‘So these boys need to be aware that Chelsea has to fight for the top positions.
‘If we take a little of our ego and put it in favour of the team, I think it will work. If we don’t do that, the situation will hardly change unfortunately.’
Chelsea have toiled for much of the season in the middle of the table, but are experiencing an uptick as their campaign draws to a close, and will welcome Bournemouth to Stamford Bridge on Sunday on the heels of a four-match unbeaten Premier League run.
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But Pochettino himself acknowledged how strained relations between the team and the fans became at low points during the season on Friday.
The Argentine manager cited his side’s 4-2 home defeat to Wolves in February as representing the apex of the crisis, when fans booed the players at half and full-time, and Silva’s wife Belle publicly called for ‘change’ on social media.
The former Tottenham head coach said that he had considered that he might be fired for the first and only time all season.
Backtracking a little after the initial response, Pochettino said: ‘I didn’t think, “We are going to be sacked”, but it was a tough moment. At this moment, as a coach and a staff, you feel loneliness.
‘It was a long time after the game we were there, watching each other, the five coaching staff, in a very small room. We were more sad. It was an unfair situation that we didn’t deserve, but the result put us in a very difficult situation. The problem was the circumstances.’
There remains a well-spring of support behind the manager – with Cole Palmer, on Friday named Premier League Young Player of the Season, paying tribute to his coach after victory at Brighton on Wednesday night.
But it remains to be seen whether the Argentine will continue into the club’s next campaign, despite being on course for a strong finish.
During his time at Chelsea, Silva won the Champions League, Club World Cup, and Super Cup, and appeared in three domestic cup finals.
The legendary centre-back will likely round out his career with a return to his boyhood side Fluminense, and signed a two-year contract with the Brazilian outfit last week.