Former Chelsea winger Pat Nevin has taken aim at club owner Todd Boehly and the board.
Nevin has taken issue with the club's transfer policy and recent publicity stunts for sponsors.
He told LuckyBlock.com: It's harder than people think. I've done that job in Scotland with Motherwell. After a year, we spent huge amounts of money compared to the previous regime. We went from flirting with relegation to coming third behind Celtic and Rangers but what we were doing still wasn't going down well with the fans. And I was thinking, 'what?' It's exactly what fans want, they want success and money to be spent.
Certain types of fans want to see the history behind their club. Everybody gets that it's a different club and it hurts the previous generation of fans. You might spend 1billion and the ownership will think what the hell do the fans want?
There's an obvious plan that's about buying young players but there's a feeling that if anything was done by the club to appease local fans, it will feel like it's done for effect. The fans aren't stupid, the club is looking at the global range and global reach that it has. That's hard for some people to take.
Go and have a look at Man United, it's hard to know what the club can do. If they want to have an effect, they have to listen. Someone said to me, if you're selling a season ticket, if you were selling it to a fan from overseas, how much could you get for that ticket? You're talking about a lot of money so you need to look at the whole picture. The worrying thing is that for some reason, the atmosphere around Chelsea is terrible at the moment, it can be very flat.
I've traveled around a lot of grounds across the UK recently including Sunderland, Newcastle and Middlesbrough, dare I say it Spurs and it's wild - the atmosphere is great! You then go to Man United and it's awful sometimes but it comes back to success. The reason why these clubs are fabulous is because of the atmosphere so the owners have to listen to the fans."
Discussing the Argylle publicity stunt, Nevin snapped: It's not the first time it's happened. We've seen it with Ted Lasso. It didn't feel right at the time because certain sections of the fanbase are feeling miffed at the moment. The way the club is so different to what it was previously. The 'legacy' fans wouldn't be attuned to the film's promotion especially when things aren't going well. When you're top of the league or in the top four, fans wouldn't care.
There's very little that's the same about Chelsea as a club. It's different to what it was like two years ago. The method of running the club, getting players in and the way you are looking at the whole sale of the product is very different. Roman came and threw money at it and it was great!
Businessmen have to be businessmen. If you've been seeing the brilliance of Chelsea under Roman Abramovich and then you see where they are now, it feels like it's about doing anything to make money. It feels painful but maybe that has to be the future.
Clearlake is an investment company. You have to remember what this is and with a small stadium, they have to make money. Personally, I thought the promotion looked horrible but I understood why they did it."