ANYONE who has watched Chelsea recently hardly needs to be told that Jose Mourinho had lost the dressing-room at Stamford Bridge.

How else can you possibly explain players of the proven quality of Diego Costa, Cesc Fabregas, Nemanja Matic, Branislav Ivanovic and Eden Hazard, for example, all performing so poorly?

Quite simply, too much had gone on behind-the-scenes this season for the club to remain anywhere near functional. The same thing happened with Mourinho in his third and final season at Real Madrid when even his Portuguese countrymen, Pepe and Cristiano Ronaldo, lost faith in his confrontational and often controversial methods in the aftermath of his infamous collisions with influential figures such as Iker Casillas and Sergio Ramos.

The Special One was allowed to limp on until the end of that awful campaign at the Santiago Bernabeu before upping sticks to leave for Chelsea. Roman Abramovich has decided the same thing cannot be permitted to happen at a club in the midst of such a dramatic slide that it currently rests just one point off the relegation zone in the Barclays Premier League just seven short months after winning it.

Mourinho found it difficult to exercise the control he likes at Real Madrid, a club where leading players have always had a direct line to the president, Florentino Perez.

Graeme Souness, the former Rangers manager, is employed by Sky Sports as an analyst for their English football coverage and believes Abramovich, too, was persuaded to cut the 52-year-old loose by dissenting voices from the locker-room.

“I think he has fallen out with major players, senior players, there and it has come back and bit him big-style,” said Souness. “They don’t have quality in every position. They have quality twice over in every position.

“If those players were only 75 per cent at it, they should still be sitting in a healthy position.

“Something has fundamentally gone wrong to be one position above relegation. For that group of players to be performing consistently badly and find themselves in that position in the league is not a small problem. It is a major problem.

“You can bet, the way a football club works, that people at the club would have been blowing in the owner’s ear saying: ‘This is wrong and that is wrong’.

“He has obviously listened to that and made his moves on the strength of that.”

Problems with Hazard, last term’s Player of the Year, have played a significant role in Mourinho’s demise. Club doctor Eva Carneiro was treated badly by the head coach after going onto the field during stoppage-time in a 2-2 home draw with Swansea on the opening day to administer treatment to the Belgian internationalist.

Hazard had asked for Carneiro and physiotherapist, Joe Fearn, to come onto the field. Mourinho claimed there was nothing wrong with him. Carneiro would later leave the club and lodge a claim of constructive dismissal against them.

In Mourinho’s final match, that 2-1 loss to Leicester City on Monday, the tension between him and Hazard surfaced again. Hazard went down shortly after a challenge from Jamie Vardy in the first half and ended up leaving the field following a touchline confrontation with his manager.

The friction between them was played out in front of a global audience with Mourinho insisting in an explosive post-match television interview that he had been betrayed by his players.

Chris Sutton, who spent a year at Stamford Bridge before joining Celtic, believes that petulant outburst had to be the final straw and also sees the decision to replace Nemanja Matic just 27 minutes after bringing him off the bench in a 3-1 home loss to Southampton in October as another sign that all was not right between manager and staff.

"The writing was on the wall after his interview on Monday night,” said Sutton. “He certainly hasn’t covered himself in glory this season with his behaviour.

"Previously, he was perceived as intelligent, charming and witty, but, with some of his antics this season, he has really let himself down.

"There were cracks appearing when he subbed Matic and had a dressing down with Hazard.

“He clearly had lost the players earlier in the season. Performance wise, he must have seen things weren’t getting any better.

“You can’t doubt Mourinho’s coaching credentials, but he has clearly lost the dressing room."

Sam Allardyce, the Sunderland manager, reacted to the news in typically down-to-earth fashion. Whether you are regarded as the best coach of your generation or not, there is no escaping results and four wins in 16 matches is nowhere near good enough.

"I'm sad to see Jose go,” said Allardyce. “He's a great manager with great character and he is a loss to the Barclays Premier League.

“I don't know whether they can find anyone better in the world than Jose, personally, but, at the end of the day, if he doesn't start getting results, like us all, we all know what comes at the end of the day - the tin tack."