Are Chelsea the second-best team in the Premier League?

Chelsea have emerged from their toughest week of the season in terms of quality of opposition with two good results. The trajectories of both matches were heavily skewed by first-half red cards, but on the whole, the Blues ought to have taken away quite a few positives from their performances.

Although the first half stats in the Champions League game against Barcelona look very even, the only real chance that the visitors had came off a high turnover very early on. Chelsea looked in control thereafter and consistently posed a decent attacking threat, deservedly taking the lead well before Ronald Araújo’s sending off effectively ended the contest.

The opening period of the weekend’s Premier League match against Arsenal was much more evenly-matched, but the Blues could claim to have had the slightest edge. They did an excellent job of nullifying the league leaders’ attack and created a couple of openings themselves, leading the 11v11 shot count 4-1. Of course, they should be just as satisfied with how they held up after the red card as they scored the opening goal and ultimately held on for a point with relative comfort.

Looking at the season so far as a whole, Chelsea appear almost unchanged from 2024/25. Their xGD per 90 has gone up slightly from +0.54 to +0.61, but the shapes of both their attacking and defending radars are pretty much the same.

Of course, there are some small differences. Most notable among them is the big drop-off in their counterattacking threat. There is some element of a tactical angle here, but the main explanation simply is the personnel change in the striker position.

Who could have possibly foreseen this? (Hint: us… and many others)

On the bright side, Chelsea have extracted some more output from everyone’s new favourite attacking avenue: set-pieces! The Blues are second in the league for set-piece goals scored with nine, only one short of the masters themselves, Arsenal.

Admittedly, a third of that tally was statpadded against Graham Potter’s West Ham and there is some significant xG overperformance behind it, but the Blues have undeniably gotten more threatening from corners in particular. Indeed, that’s how they scored the opening goals in each of the last two games.

The differences are even more marginal on the defensive end, but the stats suggest that Chelsea are pressing a bit higher and conceding fewer shots, though the average quality of the chances they are facing has gone up. This certainly lines up with what we’ve seen from them on the pitch, but the chronology of it is important to follow.

Enzo Maresca has tended to favour a more player-oriented defensive approach throughout his Chelsea tenure by often tasking his midfield trio to closely track their counterparts, but he kept them in more of a mid block for the most part last season. This term, they started off by trying to apply a similar approach to a higher press, and it did not go too well.

The 3-1 loss at Stamford Bridge against Bayern Munich in mid-September was the match in which the weaknesses of this strategy were made most apparent, but even sides like Brentford managed to find some holes in the early weeks of the Premier League season. Chelsea also went on to lose both subsequent league matches against Manchester United and Brighton, but then rebounded with a dramatic stoppage-time winner against Liverpool.

This pattern seemed to be mirroring the first half of 2024/25, when the Blues’ matches grew increasingly open. They mostly managed to come away with good results, finding themselves up in second place in mid-December. However, their Italian coach – like his former boss Pep Guardiola – remained spooked by transition-ball and tried to rein things in through the second half of the season. He did succeed from a defensive standpoint, but that came at the cost of the attack as well.

Chelsea are not heading down the same route this season, not least because they don’t have the attacking capabilities for it. While there might be signs of real promise among their wingers (certainly Estêvão), the aforementioned loss of Nicolas Jackson will keep their counterattacking threat pretty limited.

More importantly, though, this week’s matches showed that Maresca’s side can put together elite defensive displays in different ways. Against Barcelona, they stepped higher up the pitch and excellently contained their opponents, keeping them well away from goal. Such an approach would likely have fared much worse against an Arsenal side that can pose more of a direct threat, so the Blues dropped back into a very disciplined block instead. They weren’t so player-oriented and instead looked to cover the breadth of the pitch, successfully limiting their opponents’ ability to enter the final third in a threatening manner.

Indeed, Chelsea’s defensive numbers have been largely outstanding through November. Their 2-2 Champions League draw with Qarabağ was an outlier, but their other xGA numbers are quite impressive:

As long as Maresca’s maintain this level of defensive solidity, they have to give themselves a good chance of competing for the runners-up spot in the Premier League. Arsenal surely are untouchable at the top, but I believe Manchester City still need to answer some questions to sustain their level of performance. Liverpool have fallen some way down the table but are only three points away from the Champions League spots, so they could easily get back in the mix if they sort their issues out.

In a season where almost everything is going haywire in the Premier League, Chelsea appear to be benefiting from some of their rivals’ stumbles by keeping things largely consistent from last season. While that could send them a couple of places up the table, they still have clear room for improvement in terms of squad building before they can hope to seriously compete for the title.

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