Does Anyone Want to Qualify for the Champions League?
Chelsea haven't won a game in ... [checks notes] ... six years, but they're still sitting in fourth
Ah, early November. Back then, Chelsea had won six straight. They were tied for second with Leicester City, a point ahead of Manchester City and eight points back of Liverpool. Having finally broken into the starting lineup, Christian Pulisic looked potentially like the league’s next superstar. Captain America was here to save us, and the €64-million signing from Borussia Dortmund represented a larger systemic strength for his new club. They were young as hell and they were rich as hell.
As I wrote for ESPN in late November, Chelsea were averaging the sixth-youngest starting XI in Europe’s Big Five leagues. However, the five teams ahead of them were feeder-clubs at some point below the top of the financial food chain. Chelsea, though, were and still are one of the 10 richest teams in the world. Perhaps because of the transfer ban last summer, they’d stumbled onto a talented, cohesive young team that could, in theory, all play together and, more importantly, all improve together for the next decade. It seemed like they were re-building, except that word suggests sacrificing short-term performance for some kind of longer-term goal, but that wasn’t really happening here. They were tied for second, and they were playing in a sustainable way. According to the website Understat, their non-penalty expected goal differential was actually better than Liverpool’s at that point in the season.
And what a point in the season that was. Since November 12, Chelsea have won four matches, lost six and drawn four. For the last three months, they’ve been playing at a 43-point pace, which is typically good enough for right around 16th place in the Premier League over a full campaign. They have, in other words, been terrible for more than a third of the season.
Despite all that, they’re not only still in the top four, but there’s still a four-point gap between them (41 points) and fifth place. And well, they’re still probably gonna finish in fourth, if not third. Per the Fanduel sportsbook, Chelsea are -220 to finish in the top four (implied odds of around 68 percent). And the Sporting Index market projects them to finish with 65 points, seven clear of fifth-place.
So, uh, what the hell is going on here?
For starters, Chelsea are simply just still pretty good. Here’s the league, ranked by Understat’s npxGD since November 12:
While those numbers aren’t what they were earlier this season, the drop-off in performance isn’t quite as drastic as the drop-off in results might suggest. Sporting Index projects Chelsea to win 24 points over the final 13 games -- more than every team other than City and Liverpool. Some of that is schedule-influenced, but mainly I think it suggests that the market considers Chelsea to be the third-strongest team in the league.
A couple other factors point Chelsea’s way, too: Tammy Abraham -- probably gonna start scoring goals again! Since the winning streak ended, Abraham has scored three goals in the league on 5.3 expected goals. Also, Christian Pulisic -- probably gonna start playing again! Pulisic hasn’t played since New Years Day, thanks to a leg injury that he recently re-aggravated in training. Among Chelsea players, only Abraham has been a more productive attacker so far this season, registering 0.65 npxG+A to CP’s 0.60. If Abraham starts converting his chances and if Pulisic returns to the field, then a lot of Chelsea’s issues should solve themselves.
One thing Abraham and Pulisic can’t fix: their keeper. Despite a $88-million pricetag, there wasn’t much evidence that Kepa was or even projected to be a Champions League-level shot-stopper. As Derrick Yam, an analyst who now works for the Baltimore Ravens, wrote for StatsBomb soon after Chelsea signed him:
Kepa Arrizabalaga is only 23 years old and has logged a lot of first team caps with Athletic Bilbao, clearly showing the confidence the club had in him. His performance has attracted one of the most prominent clubs in Europe to pay the highest fee on record to acquire his talents. But, over and over again, each metric that we uncover show Kepa simply looking average.
From our analysis, we have profiled Kepa as an okay shot stopper, average cross collector, and average distributor. To be fair, a lack of temporal trends, the small sample size, and the lack of a large reference group are just some of limitations of this analytical framework. And it also could very well be that Chelsea understands keeper development a whole lot better than we can through data.
But at the end of the day, in the most expensive goalkeeper transfer of all time, we would expect to see something that makes sense. Something that makes Kepa shine. Something that justifies £71M. At that price, I don’t see the value in Kepa Arrizabalaga. We wait for years from now, to find out how wrong I am.
Less than two years later, and it unfortunately doesn’t seem like Derrick, who has since gone on to help Lamar Jackson become the NFL’s second unanimous MVP, was wrong at all. According to StatsBomb’s post-shot expected goal model, which takes into account a shot’s location on the goal frame to determine how likely it was to go in, Kepa saved mins-0.05 goals per 90 minutes in his final season with Bilbao. In his first year with Chelsea, that number dropped to minus-0.15, and this year it’s down to minus-0.18. Among keepers who have played at least half of their team’s available minutes, Kepa’s been the worst in the league. A point that bears repeating: he was the most expensive goalkeeper in the history of the sport.
It’s a bummer to see someone as young as Kepa fail in such a high-profile way -- and I do hope the guy figures it out somewhere -- but it’s really not working at Chelsea. He was benched over the weekend for Willy Caballero, and well, remember this?
There are rumors that first-year manager Frank Lampard wants a new keeper this summer, but nothing’s gonna change over the final 13 games. It’s either Kepa or Caballero, and as Joe Girardi would say, that’s not what you want! Per FBref, Chelsea have only allowed the second-fewest xG this season, but suppressing the quality of your opponent’s shots doesn’t mean much if the guy in the goal can’t stop the ball. They’ve allowed the 10th-most actual goals.
Now, the injuries, under-performance, and poor goalkeeping should have given someone else an opportunity to leap into the top four, but there really isn’t a great candidate to take advantage. Tottenham are currently in fifth, but they were 12 points back of Chelsea when the Stamford Bridge swoon began. Funnily enough, Chelsea’s losing streak started right after Jose Mourinho became the Tottenham manager, and while Spurs have been better under him, they still haven’t been anything resembling the team we expected to see at the beginning of the season. Along with Leicester and Southampton, they’ve taken the third-most points since early November, but go back and look at that chart from earlier. Under Pochettino, Spurs played like a fringe-relegation team that won points at the level of a mid-table side. Under Mourinho, they’re playing like a just-above-mid-table team that’s won points at the level of a fringe Champions League side. They can certainly do it -- after all, they play Chelsea later this month; win that, and you’re 75 percent of the way there -- but all of the scenarios that see them leap-frogging Lampard and Co. seemingly involve lots of good fortune and/or sudden shifts in performance levels. And since I am not God, I do not feel comfortable predicting that more of the bounces will go Mourinho’s way or that his team will just suddenly … be better at soccer.
As for the other outside contenders, Sheffield United are currently one back of Spurs in sixth, but given that they were the biggest favorites for relegation before the season began, sixth really feels like the outer extreme of their capacity this season. If Labour wants to win a nationwide election, someone should run on a platform that makes it illegal for Manchester United v. Wolverhampton games to be shown on television. They’re the next two teams in the table, tied on 35 points, but they’re both very good defensive teams that sacrifice attacking oomph to be solid at the back. In other words, they both profile as teams that can hold onto a points lead in the table, but would struggle to chase someone down.
After they won their sixth game in a row, Chelsea were projected by bettors to finish on 74 points. Today, that number has dropped by nine points, two points below their preseason projection but also two spots in the table above it. And so, perhaps there’s no better summation for this bizarro race for fourth than that: Chelsea, somehow, are both better and worse than we thought they’d be.