The bottom line is that Carlo Ancelotti now has nine games left to save his job as manager of Chelsea. The Champions League campaign is over, so he wins the league, or is sacked in the summer. That is the fate of every Chelsea manager since Roman Abramovich took over, bar one.
If Ancelotti collects the FA Cup in May it might earn him the briefest of reprieves, as it did Jose Mourinho in 2007. He lasted until six games into the next season, mid-September, before leaving.
Abramovich's demands are very simple. Win the title or sling your hook. It happened to Claudio Ranieri and Avram Grant, and Luis Felipe Scolari did not even complete the season once Chelsea's challenge had faltered. Ancelotti now has 810 minutes to respond, almost half of which will be spent playing away at Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur, Liverpool and Aston Villa.
It will not be easy, particularly with Wayne Rooney of Manchester United enjoying one of the greatest individual seasons of modern times. He has needed to, though, to keep up with Didier Drogba.
The argument runs that anyone who accepts the job at Chelsea knows the spec before he starts. Ancelotti will have been aware of the unforgiving nature of his employer. Abramovich, it is said, just wants to have fun, but working for him does not sound like it.
Grant thought they were friends until he got the bullet for finishing second in the league and losing the Champions League on a penalty shoot-out. Guus Hiddink is a close ally as well, but would only take the Chelsea job on a temporary basis. He hasn't hung around for it to become available this time, either. His new job managing Turkey rules him out of any short-list to be Ancelotti's successor if the season goes downhill from here.
There is one man big enough to live with and thrive on this pressure and, the problem is, Abramovich already dumped him. His error in losing Mourinho was plain on Tuesday night, when Inter Milan arrived at Stamford Bridge and outplayed Chelsea for the second time in two weeks.
It has taken a while but Mourinho now has Inter where he wants them: Chelsea Mark II. He beat them at their own game, or rather the game they used to play until Abramovich started giving his manager clumsy presents such as a fading Andriy Shevchenko, upsetting the dynamic of the team.
Left to his own devices, Mourinho might have stopped these years of Manchester United domination. He had one ordinary season, in which he still won the first FA Cup at the rebuilt Wembley, but by then his relationship with the owner had soured. He was brilliant on the touchline this week, though, a constant source of inspiration and direction.
He remains the man for the pressure game – and the way Abramovich runs Chelsea, every game is a pressure game.
Sooner or later Abramovich must allow a manager to fail in the belief the team will come right next year. Rumours about the fall-out at the club after the defeat to Manchester City last month suggest that epiphany is not fast approaching, and the mood is unlikely to have improved after the Inter Milan defeat; particularly as Mourinho also reminded Abramovich exactly where the buck stops.