Liam Rosenior is actually doing fine with Chelsea

Hello and welcome to the Friday grab bag. It’s great to have the Premier League back, and with a marquee fixture between Chelsea and Manchester City.

Chelsea have suffered some poor results since they fired Enzo Maresca and replaced him with Liam Rosenior. Between Rosenior earning a promotion from another BlueCo club and the fact that his public persona is that of an AI trained entirely on LinkedIn posts, he’s getting bantered off quite heavily for those results.

Speculation is rampant that Chelsea are going to have to pay him a ton of money to go away, and that they might spend next season paying 3 managers at once. But despite the rocky results, I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence that Rosenior is doing a poor job.

The Blues didn’t exactly look like a well-coached outfit in their 3-0 loss to Everton, but on the whole, Chelsea look marginally improved under Rosenior. He’s actually got xG conceded back to respectable levels after the defense started falling apart in Maresca’s final games.

Everything else about the team looks similar but marginally better. They haven’t been creating much from set pieces, but total xG and xG per shot are both up quite a bit over the last 10 games.

And their defensive profile looks marginally better too.

A loss to Manchester City this weekend is going to put Chelsea way behind in the race for Champions League places, and probably lead to a lot of speculation that Rosenior is going to be fired at the end of the season. But if, by the end of the campaign, Chelsea’s numbers look the same as they have over Rosenior’s first 10 matches, I think that would be good enough to win him more time.

The fundamentals of Chelsea’s shape and style of play under Rosenior look fine. They’re just badly in need of some central defenders and a goalkeeper who don’t make horrendous individual errors every other game.

On the podcast, Patrick and Hayden review the UEFA Champions League quarterfinals, with some focus on Liverpool’s poor tactical decisions against PSG.

This week’s Patreon-exclusive episode covers some big signings from the summer that have come good late in the season after rocky starts. Joao Pedro and Benjamin Sesko, in particular, get some love from the boys.

MLS has returned to Variance Betting this week, now that we have enough games for a decent data set. The next couple months will be super busy over there, with England and the Champions League still being the main focus. This week, Ted has 4 bets on the Premier League, 3 on the Championship, and 3 on MLS. I was a bit surprised by the Chelsea-Man City one.

If you’re interested in football betting and you’d like to learn how to learn how to do it smarter, you can subscribe to Variance Betting here.

The FPL corner

On FPL Mate’s 100 Experts poll, the most popular transfer in this week was Jarrod Bowen, and he’s in the top 10 for the overall player base as well. Given that he’s playing Wolves this week, this is a solid move if you’re using your free hit. But if you’re using your wildcard or no chip, I don’t like Bowen as a permanent signing that it’ll cost you a transfer to get rid of.

While Bowen has scored some absolute bangers, he does not get many quality shots at all, and he’s actually trending downwards since the new year.

West Ham’s run-in is tough too. After this week, the fixtures are not favorable to them.

If you’re looking for a budget forward option who is not Igor Thiago — who is solidly meta and in almost everyone’s team by now — may I once again suggest Dominic Calvert-Lewin? He has an unfavorable fixture this week (away to Man United) but it gets very favorable after that, with Leeds hitting a double gameweek 33, and with them projected to be in the top half for goals between now and the end of the season.

This is a shot profile I like to see from a forward, fantasy or real football:

If you are using your free hit this week, so avoiding Calvert-Lewin away to United, betting against Tottenham is always a decent backup plan. You might look really smart by going way off the radar with Brian Brobbey.

If you got the LazyFPL newsletter, you’d already know that the most popular strategy among the pros is to wildcard this week, then use your bench boost for next week’s double gameweek. Subscribing to them is the easiest way to keep up with stuff like that, as well as all the team news from pressers.

Games we’re watching

Sunderland vs. Tottenham — Are there “better” games? Sure. Are those games more likely to be funny? Absolutely not.

Dortmund vs. Leverkusen — It’s been kind of a disaster season for Bayer, and yet, they’re in 6th and still battling for a CL place.

Barcelona vs. Espanyol — When there’s no obvious marquee La Liga game, just watch Barca. Bonus when it’s a local derby.

Como vs. Inter — A huge one for Como as they try to hold off the more traditionally successful teams behind them for the final CL spot.

PSG vs. Lyon — Hey, remember when we wrote about Lyon’s insane winning streak and revival? They haven’t won a game since and they’re down to 6th. And yet, they’re still only 2 points out of a CL place.

Apologies for a lack of the stuff we’re reading section. I moved house this week and didn’t get a chance to read anything my colleagues at other publications wrote. Back next week!

If you enjoyed this newsletter, we’d appreciate it if you would forward it to a friend. If you’re that friend, welcome! You can subscribe to The Transfer Flow here. We also have a podcast where we go in depth on transfer news and rumours every week. We’re on YouTube here, and you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify by searching for “The Transfer Flow Podcast.” If you’re interested in football betting, check out this post on why we started Variance Betting.