A question that should be easier to answer than it is: Are Chelsea succeeding?
For most teams, it’s close to black and white. Wolves, whom Chelsea just beat 3-0? Massive failure: no wins yet, already fired their coach, probably getting relegated. Sunderland, who just tied Arsenal and came into the season with relegation as their most likely probability? Massive success: They’re in fourth place and barring a total meltdown, they’ve all but clinched another year in the top flight.
To render a reasonable judgment for 19 of the 20 teams in the Premier League, all you need to ask is: Are they better than last year? Is their performance sustainable? And how does it compare to the amount of money they’re able to spend on their squad?
With Chelsea, it’s not so simple. They’re currently in third place, behind only Arsenal and Manchester City — but that’s complicated, in both directions, by the players they’ve used, the players they’ve had available, the difficulty of their opponents, their UEFA Champions League performance, and the color of the card the referee decides to slip out of his pocket.
– Marcotti: Man City add to Liverpool’s woes, Lewandowski lifts Barça, Arsenal give up goals
– Brown: Chelsea ratings: Garnacho, Fernandez 8/10 in win vs. Wolves
– O’Hanlon: Predicting the rest of the Premier League season: How all 20 teams will finish
All of the above makes it really hard to know whether Chelsea’s performance should be considered a success, and that’s before we even get into the larger, complicating question.
We know what almost every other team is trying to do: win as many games as possible. But with Chelsea, it’s hard to know whether they’re succeeding because it’s still hard to know what they’re even aiming to do.
Let’s take a look at nine different numbers that help make some sense of Chelsea’s season, and what their future holds.
Through 11 games, Enzo Maresca’s team is playing at a higher level than last season. In the broadest sense, their adjusted goal differential (70% expected goals, 30% goals) has improved:
– 2024-25 adjusted goal differential: plus-0.56
– 2025-26 adjusted goal differential: plus-0.72
Strangely, Chelsea have been incredibly stable from last year to this year. The broader context of the league has changed — more fouls, more long balls, less final-third possession for the big clubs, less passing for everyone — but not Chelsea.
Their matches last season featured 79.8 possessions per team. This year, that number has eked up to 80.1 possessions per team. Last year’s number was the sixth-lowest possessions-per-game rate in the league; this year’s is the seventh-highest rate. The rate has barely changed. They’re moving the ball up the field at the same speed as last year, and their average pass length is almost the exact same — as are the number of through balls and pullbacks and their share of overall final-third possession.
They’re also pressing more effectively and aggressively this season, and they’re taking fewer shots but higher-quality shots — those two shifts are the main drivers behind how things have improved.
It’s reasonable to still have questions about Maresca’s true value as a manager — and he does love to throw his own players under the bus — but he has proven without a doubt he has the ability to impart tactical ideas to his players and get them to show it on the field.
That’s clear in how similar Chelsea’s overall approach has been from last year to this year. But it’s even clearer when you consider the following: He’s playing different players every game.
After last Wednesday’s Champions League match, Maresca had made 85 changes to Chelsea’s starting lineup across their 16 games in all competitions. No other Premier League club was above 69 (Liverpool). In the Premier League, Chelsea have 25 players with at least 45 minutes of game time. Only two other clubs have more than 22 — Nottingham Forest and West Ham (24) — and both clubs are in a relegation battle.
With so many different players making appearances, it’s remarkable that Chelsea’s style has remained so consistent.
Perhaps, then, we can attribute most of Chelsea’s improvement to this?
Last season, they were the youngest team in the league, as measured by FBref’s average age weighted by minutes played. This season: also the youngest team in the league.
However, last season’s number was 23.7, and this season, it’s up to 24.5. So, in Maresca’s first season, he was using players who, on average, still hadn’t hit those peak years between 24 and 28. In his second year, he’s using players who, on average, have just entered their peak years. And, well, we call them “peak years” because most players tend to get better right around the age of 24.
But if Chelsea have constructed a roster of players who could all improve at once, shouldn’t we see an improvement bigger than that 0.16 uptick in adjusted goal differential?
Based on Michael Imburgio’s expected goals added metric, which attempts to translate the value of everything a player does on the ball into the common currency of goals, Cole Palmer was the second-best player in the Premier League last season. He added 11.28 goals of value, while Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah led the competition with 13.04.
Palmer has only played 145 minutes so far this season, and he hasn’t featured in a Premier League match since Chelsea’s 2-1 loss to Manchester United on Sept. 20.
Not only do Chelsea lead the league with three red cards so far this season, but two of those red cards have come quite early in matches. In the loss to Man United, goalkeeper Robert Sánchez was sent off after four minutes. And center back Trevoh Chalobah was sent off with 40 minutes left in a match with Brighton; Chelsea were up 1-0 and lost 3-1.
Chelsea have played most of the season without their best player, and they’ve played a significant chunk of the season without as many players as their opponents. Given all of that, their modest-looking improvement looks even more impressive.
Put Palmer back out there, let Chelsea play the rest of the season with 11 men, and could this be a team that challenges for a title?
There’s not much evidence that past red cards predict future red cards at a team level. Often, when a team gets a cluster of red cards in a short period of time, we blame it on a lack of discipline, the manager, the culture, whatever. This is not to say that those things can’t cause red cards to happen, but rather: If they do, something almost always changes and those red cards almost always stop happening.
Chelsea might get more red cards this season, but I don’t think they’re more likely to get more red cards than any other team in the league. And if we remove the time played down a player from the data, then it looks like there’s a Big Three in the Premier League — only instead of Liverpool, it’s Chelsea joining Arsenal and Manchester City.
Except, that lets Chelsea off the hook. They’ve been horrible when they’ve played down a man. They’ve scored zero goals and conceded five. Teams that play down a man in the Premier League have produced an adjusted goal differential of minus-0.56 per game since 2009; Chelsea, this season, are at minus-1.28. That’s worse than Burnley’s worst-in-the-league, all-games-included mark.
Through four Champions League matches, Chelsea have created 6.33 expected goals and conceded 5.95, for an xG differential of 0.38. That ranks 16th out of 36 Champions League teams. (The chart below shows the top 32.) They’ve eked 12 points out of those performances — just about the maximum you could expect from creating nearly the same quality of chances that you’ve conceded.
Chelsea have played arguably the toughest fixture in the competition — away to Bayern Munich — and their match at lowly Qarabag was made much tougher by it being an away trip to Azerbaijan. But aside from Tottenham Hotspur, who finished 17th in the Premier League last season, the other English teams in the competition have all been fantastic so far.
Based on the power ratings at Pitch Rank, which cross-references betting odds for every match across a number of top leagues, there are currently four Premier League teams inside the top 10 in Europe.
Chelsea have only played one of them, Liverpool, and that match was at home. Over the next 27 matches, they still have to play Arsenal, Manchester City, and Newcastle United twice. And they also have two more matches against AFC Bournemouth, whom the betting markets currently see as the 18th-best team in the world.
Under the new ownership group, Chelsea really have built up an impressive roster of talent. In limited minutes, 18-year-old Estêvão looks like a potential superstar. Midfielder Moisés Caicedo is already a superstar; he’s playing at the level they needed him to in order to justify the massive transfer fee.
While Chelsea’s defense isn’t what I’d call a “strength”, the backline seems like the part of the lineup that would most benefit from continuity. Those players are more interconnected — in how they position themselves without the ball, how they move around the field — than any other grouping. And despite pretty much every defender on the roster getting injured at some point this season, which meant the backline changes nearly every game, their massive roster has allowed them to stay above water defensively.
More broadly, Maresca has been able to use so many different players because Chelsea have acquired so many different players who are capable of contributing minutes to a team that’s currently in third place in the toughest league in the world.
Oh, and then they essentially have their own farm team in Strasbourg, who are owned by the same consortium (BlueCo) and are currently in third place in Ligue 1 despite fielding a team with an average age of 21.6 — more than two years younger than any other side in Europe’s Big Five leagues. At least a couple players over there will surely be good enough to play for Chelsea at some point in the future.
As always, the question remains: Is the goal to win trophies? Or to build up a portfolio of players that might also happen to win trophies?
The decision to replace Nicolas Jackson at striker with some combination of João Pedro and Liam Delap doesn’t look much better than it did during the summer. The former is attempting fewer than two shots per 90 minutes, while the latter’s No. 1 statistical player comp according to FBref’s algorithm is Jamie Vardy, who is 38 years old. Same goes for sending winger Noni Madueke to a direct rival; his main replacement, Jamie Gittens from Borussia Dortmund, just doesn’t seem anywhere close to contributing to a title-contending team. Before his injury, Madueke was contributing plenty for Arsenal, who are currently the favorites to win the Premier League and the Champions League.
Other decisions, too, don’t speak to a club concerned with maximizing their performance on the field. While Chelsea allowed the third-fewest goals and only scored the seventh-most goals last season, that might’ve masked the underlying reality, which was almost the exact reverse: Chelsea created the third-most expected goals and allowed the sixth fewest. Over the past two seasons, though, they haven’t paid a transfer fee for a defender who wasn’t a teenager or for any player who can protect the defense. For all of the money Chelsea have spent on transfers, they still seem incredibly vulnerable to an injury to Caicedo, who has played 4,296 of a possible 4,410 minutes since the start of last season.
Outside of maybe Liverpool, Chelsea will emerge from the second-to-last international break of the season with more uncertainty than any other team in the Premier League. Palmer should return from injury soon, they could stop getting red cards, and they could be even better than they’ve been over the 11 games that pushed them into third place, just six points back of Arsenal. At the same time, the tougher schedule could start to expose some of the frailties we’ve seen when they’ve gone down a player or played midweek in the Champions League.
Yet, for all of the ongoing upheaval and all the different possibilities waiting to be revealed over the next couple months, maybe the most important thing hasn’t changed at all. Through 11 matches, Chelsea have won 1.8 points per game. Keep that up, and they’ll finish the season with 69 points — exactly where they ended up last year.