Maurizio Sarri pursuit brings Chelsea's managerial model under scrutiny

In a world where it is £58m for a striker who sits on the bench for 89 minutes of an FA Cup final, £17m can seem like pocket change.

That's the latest reckoning on the cost of managerial change at Chelsea, as the Blues move out Antonio Conte, and look to move in someone yet to be identified – that estimate based on reported target Maurizio Sarri.

Down the years the fortunes lavished on shuffling the managerial pack at Stamford Bridge have not been small for Roman Abramovich's Chelsea.

Estimates vary, and even the official accounts can be reasonably opaque. But we're talking an estimated £6m to Claudio Ranieri, £23m to Jose Mourinho (part one), £5.5m to Avram Grant, £12.6m to Luiz Felipe Scolari, and £6m to Carlo Ancelotti. Then there's £12m to Andre Villas Boas (plus another £13m to his old club Porto to bring him in), £10.7m to Roberto Di Matteo, and then another £8m to Mourinho (part two).

Chelsea are far from the only ones paying out to sacked bosses. And there is plenty of evidence of them getting cuter about how they do these things as the years have progressed: the difference in the two Mourinho payments shows how they no longer pay the value of a contract up-front on asking a boss to clear his desk.

Meanwhile the main defence for the policy of churn is the trophy haul. Over the 14 years those payments cover, the club has brought in five Premier League titles, five FA Cups, three League Cups, and two European trophies. That's an average of a trophy a year, for a decade and a half, for around the same outlay as a club from the north lavished on an underperforming midfielder with a stripe in his hair.

The pros and cons of that perennial churn are well documented: the difficulties brought by a constant change in style, the lack of breathing space to play younger players, the waste of senior talent as players favoured by one boss or another flow in and out of the club. But that chopping and changing is not unusual among even top clubs these days and any one out of Manchesters United and City, Liverpool, Arsenal or Tottenham would be delighted with that trophy haul over that time. Only United get close in that same period, and almost all of that success came before Sir Alex Ferguson retired.

Chelsea's success has been built on an unwritten policy of appointing winners: each of the men Roman Abramovich has employed as his full -ime boss has had an impressive record of achievement on his CV. And that is one of the reasons why Sarri's name, and the £8m being demanded by Napoli for their out-of-work / in-contract ex-boss (plus a £9m pay-off for Conte), seems unusual business.

Nobody is questioning that the 59-year-old got his Napoli side to play a exciting and invigorating brand of football. The issue is that, in this results business, continuing that record of a trophy a season seems a tough ask for a boss who has secured none in 18.

Sexy football aside, one of the things that makes Sarri attractive is his price: not the 'transfer fee' to pay off Napoli, but his expectations in the wage department. Serie A salaries are nowhere near those of the Premier League, which is how Chelsea ended up with Conte in the first place. Napoli paid Sarri £1.2m last year, and he is supposed to be willing to take up the Stamford Bridge reins for £5m: that's £1m less than Everton were paying Ronald Koeman before they fired him.

Compare that with other main candidate Luis Enrique: supposedly demanding £15m a season (the same as Mourinho at United, and £5m less than Pep Guardiola at City). But that does come with a record including two La Ligas, three Copas del Rey, and a lone Champions League. Plus, being out of contract, Enrique is available on a 'free transfer'.

Chelsea have been nailing down their spending for some years now, and they are reluctant to needlessly waste cash in the way they once did. We will soon find out how much they are willing to pay for success and, in the slightly longer term, how good their record remains at balancing gold with silverware.