Chelsea are planning a comprehensive clear-out of their coaching staff with Henk ten Cate and Steve Clarke, the assistant coaches, likely to leave the club along with Avram Grant. The first-team coach was at Stamford Bridge yesterday for talks with Peter Kenyon, the chief executive, and an announcement over his future is expected once a compensation package has been agreed.

Such is the confusion at Chelsea that senior board members confirmed yesterday that they had yet to be told either way about the Israeli's future, although they consider his departure to be inevitable. The talks are understood to have focused on a possible future role for Grant at the club and the terms of his payoff, which if not quite in the region of the £12.5million collected by José Mourinho will still cost Chelsea several million pounds.

Grant will not be offered the position of director of football, as the club are aware that it could be difficult to recruit a top-class replacement with the previous incumbent still involved. Grant would almost certainly have rejected such a position in any case, as he is confident of being offered another managerial job on the back of his achievements in taking Chelsea so close to winning the Barclays Premier League and Champions League this season and is reluctant to return to his old salary, £920,000, having been upgraded to a £2.8million-a-year contract when he replaced Mourinho last September.

Ten Cate is also facing the sack after upsetting many at the club since he joined from Ajax last autumn. The Dutchman has failed to develop a close working relationship with either Grant or Clarke and, more importantly, has alienated several senior players with what is perceived to be his brash and arrogant attitude.

Ten Cate was recruited as the bad cop to complement the work of Clarke, who is close to many of the players having spent the best part of 20 years at the club, but appears to have taken his bullying routine too far. The former Ajax coach, assistant to Frank Rijkaard at Barcelona when they won the Champions League two years ago, is known as “Mad Dog” by the players and clashed with John Terry on the eve of the Carling Cup final defeat by Tottenham Hotspur in February, with the captain leaping to the defence of John Obi Mikel, whom Ten Cate had repeatedly picked on during a training session at Stamford Bridge. That incident, which became an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation, was particularly embarrassing to the club as it was witnessed by fans taking a tour of the stadium.

Clarke's position is more complex, as the board is aware that he remains very popular with the fans as the one surviving member of Chelsea before Roman Abramovich, the owner, bought the club. The Scot would like to leave after four years as assistant and is willing to take a pay cut to secure a management job at a Coca-Cola Championship club,but has yet to be inundated with offers.

Paradoxically, Clarke is more likely to stay if Grant leaves because the pair have never been close, although many at the club believe it would be better for him to move to achieve a clean break and sever all links with the Mourinho era.