It’s finally happened. No more questions, no more speculation. Chelsea have sacked the greatest manager in the history of their club for the second, and surely final, time.

Shortly after the champions enjoyed their Christmas lunch on Thursday, Jose Mourinho met with owner Roman Abramovich and his second spell as Chelsea manager was brought to a close after a historically bad season so far.

The most disastrous title defence since Manchester City were relegated as reigning champions in 1937 has seen them gain just 15 points from 16 games, leaving them just a single point above the relegation zone. This side, which so ruthlessly ran away with it last year, has spent this season listing aimlessly, and utterly deserves its current position in the table.

All the same, it was a difficult decision for the board to arrive at. Mourinho delivered three league titles in five full seasons, more than every other Chelsea manager combined has managed to produce in all the 105 other years the club has existed. Further to that, the fans seem almost unanimously to remain in support of him and apportion more blame to the players than the manager.

Throughout this difficult season, Mourinho’s name continued to be sung from the stands and there have never been grumbles about his methods. He remains the cult hero and very possibly the best they will ever have. The fans seem to agree with Mourinho’s now-infamous assertion following defeat at Leicester on Monday night, that he had been ‘betrayed’ by his players.

Those same players, who were so devastating for much of last season, look unfit, unwilling and uninterested this time around. Most seem to have given up on their boss weeks ago. For months rumours have been passed around which suggest Mourinho ‘lost the dressing room’ and that a number of senior players were no longer willing to play for him. Cesc Fabregas is even said to have declared that he would rather lose than win for Mourinho.

For any team, such a situation is difficult, but for one of his teams it is fatal. Mourinho thrives on having his players give everything for his cause. Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who played under him at Internazionale, once described him as ‘a guy I was basically willing to die for,’ and therein lies both his great strength and perennial undoing as a manager.

By whipping his team up with such intensity, he brings about great bursts of success which burn out after only a few seasons when his players can no longer sustain the hyper-frenzied demands he makes of them.

Much has therefore been made of the ‘third season syndrome’, which has seen relative failure follow him from club to club throughout his career after two glorious initial years. As well as the metal pressures he creates among his staff, he is also a physically demanding manager who rarely rotates his team. I wrote last season about how injuries had smiled kindly on Chelsea and allowed their best XI to feature almost continuously, but now the lack of respite seems to have caught up with them.

Even Mourinho himself appeared to be cracking under the strain as his second spell in England wore on, his rants becoming more and more paranoid and nonsensical. From his insistence that Premier League referees were waging a targeted campaign against Chelsea to this season’s bizarre sexist comments about Rafa Benitez’s wife — not to mention his spinning the wheel of blame after each defeat — he has been a long way from the composed ‘mind-games’ expert he was heralded as first time around.

The Eva Carneiro issue also caused unrest in his camp. It became publicly known that many of the players were not happy with the way Chelsea’s former doctor was treated, and her ongoing legal proceedings against the club and Mourinho personally only added poison to the brew.

It was a scenario which neatly symbolised his changed persona in recent times. He has always been spiky, but where the younger Mourinho had some wit and grace, the years have ground him down into a cynic who has lost the verve to just become increasingly unpleasant. The truth is that very few people will miss him outside Stamford Bridge. Indeed, such is the lack of sympathy his plight has received in wider circles that one newspaper columnist went so far this week as to wonder, ‘is he really just an irredeemable prick’?

It might not have been what the fans, or even Abramovich himself, really wanted, but a parting of ways became inevitable. Players and manager could no longer work together and it is easier to replace him than the entire playing squad. Some of us will miss him, most probably won’t, but you can be pretty sure this isn’t the last time we will ever see Jose Mourinho lift a trophy one year before an ugly break up the next. It’s just how he works.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Hugo Saye is an English journalist who spent nine months in Jamaica shadowing 2012-2013 National Premier League champions Harbour View FC, where he spoke openly with stars of both sport and politics and discovered the importance of football in the Caribbean island, which formed the background of his book, Of Garrisons and Goalscorers.