LONDON — Chelsea parted company with manager Jose Mourinho on Thursday, taking a drastic step amid the worst title defense in English Premier League history. Just seven months ago, Mourinho led the club to the championship, but a collapse in form has already ruled the club out of contention this season.  The tension had been building for weeks through Chelsea’s miserable start to the campaign. The club has 15 points after 16 games and sits in 16th place. With nine losses already in 2015-16, Mourinho matched the total number of league defeats he suffered in the past two seasons.  The club, which said Mourinho’s exit was “by mutual consent,” didn’t immediately announce a replacement or who would be in the dugout for Saturday’s home game against Sunderland. But several media reports in England have mentioned Dutch manager Guus Hiddink as a possible successor. Hiddink held the job on an interim basis in 2009, filling in for the fired Luiz Felipe Scolari.  “Both Jose and the board agreed results have not been good enough this season and believe it is in the best interests of both parties to go our separate ways,” Chelsea said in a statement posted on its website.  The last straw was a 2-1 defeat at Leicester City on Monday night, when Chelsea looked uninspired going forward and defended disastrously. In a tense post-game news conference, Mourinho took the rare step of blaming his players.  “Sometimes I find myself thinking that last season I did an amazing job and I brought players to a level that is not their level,” he said.  Mourinho has always been one of the most unpredictable managers in the game. Capable of turning on wry charm or sulking deeply, he turned his Premier League news conferences into headline mills.  His comments after the Leicester defeat were not the first time that Mourinho called out his team. At Manchester City this season, he yanked his captain John Terry off the field at halftime — Terry hadn’t missed a minute of the 2014-15 title-winning campaign. Mourinho had also taken to accusing his team of not following instructions. And he publicly questioned the toughness of his best player, Eden Hazard.  “Whilst there is huge sentiment for the individual, who has done so much for the club, the fact of the matter remains that Chelsea Football Club is in trouble,” the Blues’ technical director Michael Emenalo told the team’s in-house channel, Chelsea TV. “The results are not good. There obviously seems to be palpable discord between manager and players.”  With a mid-season ouster, Chelsea ended Mourinho’s second stint in charge at the club after two-and-a-half years, much in the same way it ended his first in 2007. The trigger-happy outfit has now burned through 10 managers since it was purchased by Russian billion Roman Abramovich in 2003.  Mourinho, meanwhile, has never managed a single club for longer than four years. Yet, when he was hired back by Chelsea in June 2013 after a stormy tenure at Real Madrid, there was hope that he would bring some stability. The man who had referred to himself as a “special one” returned to London calling himself “the happy one.”  The calm didn’t last. Mourinho renewed old grudges and stirred up controversy. In his first season back, he famously called Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger a “specialist in failure,” picked fights with referees and cost Liverpool a shot at the title. He became such a regular before the disciplinary panel of English soccer’s governing body that his fines reached astronomical totals.  Since the beginning of 2014, Mourinho has been hit with at least 133,000 GBP ($198,000) in penalties for various tirades and invective directed at referees.  But in his second year, he left no doubt that his Chelsea squad was the best in the country. The Blues ran away with the championship, winning Mourinho a third league title by eight points. Which is why Chelsea’s start to the season was such a mystery.  Mourinho suggested that after the first four games, which saw his side take just four points, the team lost its drive. The players were too talented for their flirtation with the relegation zone to last forever, but they weren’t close enough to the top to be competitive.  “They don’t have the motivation of the team that is fighting to be champion,” he said.  For all of his sideline and news conference antics, Mourinho remains one of the most successful managers ever to coach in England. His Chelsea teams earned an average of 2.19 points per game, the highest in the Premier League era, which dates back to 1992. He also won 63.6% of all his matches in charge, according to Opta Sports.  But now even exceeding those numbers might not be enough for Mourinho’s successor to haul the Blues back into the race for a top-four finish. In order to qualify for next season’s Champions League, it seems, the club will have to win this year’s edition once it resumes in February.  “The club’s focus is now on ensuring our talented squad reaches its potential,” Chelsea said.  Write to Joshua Robinson at joshua.robinson@wsj.com
Chelsea fires coach Jose Mourinho. The reigning English Premier League champions are in 16th place with just four wins.