Here are a few of the headlines from pieces I’ve written about Chelsea over the past 12 months:

– Chelsea have spent nearly a billion euros in one year. How?
– Analyzing all 28 Chelsea signings since Boehly took over
– Chelsea still don’t know how to build a Premier League team

That’s just a sampling, and it doesn’t include the various potshots I’ve taken at the new ownership group in other pieces that weren’t specifically about Chelsea. It would seem, then, that I owe Todd Boehly, Behdad Eghbali, and everyone else at the club an apology.

Twelve matches into this season, Chelsea have scored more goals and conceded fewer goals than Manchester City, and they’re tied on points with Arsenal. There was supposed to be a Big Three in the Premier League this season, and Chelsea were supposed to be the big-spending laughingstock that couldn’t come close to that level. Instead, they’ve been just as good, if not better, than the top two from each of the past two seasons.

Chelsea are, undeniably, playing at a high level once again. Does this mean Boehly and Clearlake’s tension-filled team-building strategy has worked? I’m still not so sure.

Why Chelsea have improved

To start, let’s just compare the three seasons where the current ownership group was in place at the start of the season: 2022-23 through today.

At the highest level, Chelsea are performing at a much higher level. My preferred catch-all metric for team strength is a blend of 70% expected goals (xG) and 30% goals. If we strip out penalties, here’s Chelsea’s adjusted adjusted goal rating, per game:

2022-23: minus-0.18
2023-24: plus-0.24
2024-25: plus-0.79

We’ll throw out 2022-23 for the rest of this analysis, since there’s not much else to be learned by looking at anything that happened that year. It was an utter disaster; things got so bad that they willingly re-hired Frank Lampard for a couple months. There was no coherent style; no one in charge was building toward anything.

Looking at just last year and this year, though, there’s been a minor uptick in attacking performance — from 1.73 to 1.82. But although Cole Palmer and Nicolas Jackson have been the most talked-about Chelsea players this season, the main reason this team have improved so much is the defense.

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Can Chelsea challenge for the title?

Luis Miguel Echegaray questions whether this Chelsea side is ready to disrupt the title race this early in Maresca’s tenure.

Last season, their adjusted rating on the defensive end was 1.49, which was actually worse than in that wretched 2022-23 campaign. This year, it has dropped all the way down to 1.04. They’re conceding 11.8 shots per game — down from last year’s mark of 14.5. OK, fine, I lied about forgetting about 2022-23. Funnily enough, Chelsea allowed the fewest shots of the Clearlake era (11.5) during their first season in charge, but those shots had an average xG value of 0.12. That number dropped to 0.10 last season and then down to 0.09 this year. Concede fewer shots and concede tougher shots; it’s the simplest recipe for defensive improvement.

Under Enzo Maresca, Chelsea are chasing the same dream as most other top clubs: absolute control. The overall aggressiveness of their press has dialed back a good bit — an unsurprising outcome when the coach you’re replacing is Mauricio Pochettino — and their matches now feature an average of 82.5 possessions for both sides, down from 86.6 last season. In a not-uncommon shift, Chelsea aren’t breaking up possession as often high up the field, but they’re also much harder to play against when you have the ball in the midfield or their defensive third.

While the lightly experienced Maresca has done better than I expected, I put more of Chelsea’s improvement down to the club’s overall approach to the transfer market: they’ve signed a ton of talented young players, and they’re all improving at the same time.

Interestingly, none of the players the club landed this past summer have started more than five Premier League matches. Instead, we can look to the club’s five-most-used outfielders to see why this team is playing at such a high level.

Levi Colwill is still only 21, and he’s already into his fourth season as a full-time pro. He’s played nearly every minute of every game after only starting 20 matches last year. He’s been excellent.

So, too, has Moisés Caicedo. And with the injuries to Rodri and Declan Rice, he’s probably been the best defensive midfielder in the Premier League. The 23-year-old Ecuador international still covers a ton of ground and does a ton of ball winning, but he’s also added some more on-ball value this season. He’s already created two breakaway goals for Jackson with through balls.

Speaking of Jackson: the striker is taking a very similar number of shots and a very similar quality of shot to last season. The big difference? He’s putting more of those shots into the net. Last year, he scored 4.6 goals fewer than expected, while this season he’s slightly ahead (0.4) of expectation.

In this image, the shots are sized by the xG value of the attempt. And as you can see, he almost never wastes a Chelsea possession with a low-probability attempt from outside of the box:

Palmer is already so good that it almost feels like a waste of time for me to tell you why; you already know. He’s first in the league in expected goals assisted, top 10 in non-penalty xG, and fifth in progressive passes completed. Also, he won’t be in his prime until after the next World Cup.

Then, lastly, there’s Wesley Fofana. Per Transfermarkt, the 23-year-old defender has already missed 109 games with knee-related injuries, including an ACL tear that kept him out all of last season. He also missed most of the 2021-22 season for Leicester with a broken leg. While Chelsea paid a massive £75m to acquire Fofana the season after the leg injury — a terrible decision, given all of the available information — they are finally getting high-level play from the Frenchman. It’s his true run of playing time since 2020-21, when he was one of the better center-backs in the Premier League as a 19 year old.

All in all, that’s five players at probably the five most important positions in the sport — two center-backs, one defensive midfielder, a do-everything playmaker-winger hybrid, and a center-forward — and they’re all 23 or under. You can’t ask for a much better core than that.

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Michallik: Chelsea’s key players had ‘horrible’ games vs. Man United

Janusz Michallik criticises the performances of Chelsea’s biggest names after they fail to fire in the 1-1 draw with Manchester United.

Isn’t Todd Boehly and Clearlake’s plan working?

What if, though, we look back to the years prior to Boehly and Clearlake? Stats Perform has data that goes back to the 2008-09 season, or five years after Roman Abramovich bought the club. Here’s how it looks, from season to season, based on that blend of xG and G:

I love how easily this shows the club’s cycle of creation, destruction, and re-generation. During Abramovich’s ownership, managers rarely lasted for two full seasons and the club frequently signed older, big-name players. This led to brief periods of extreme success followed by massive letdowns, followed by even more success, followed by even more letdowns, and on and on and on.

That first run of success included Carlo Ancellotti’s Chelsea sides, who remain some of the most underrated teams in the history of the Premier League. The club then scuffled through the Andre Villas Boas, Roberto Di Matteo, and Rafa Bentiez years — but still won the Champions League along the way. And then came Jose Mourinho’s second stint, which established The Special One’s special pattern: one good season, one great season, and one absolutely toxic, disastrous, and are-we-sure-that-was-really-worth-it third season.

Next: Antonio Conte, who won the league in his first season and then quit after his second. And then, after the Maurizio Sarri and Frank Lampard seasons, in came Thomas Tuchel, who won the Champions League in year one, saw the team get even better in year two, and then was fired by the new ownership group just a month into his third.

So, in a sense, the new guys fit right in. Despite taking over one of the best club teams in the world in 2021-22, they decided to totally revamp and, ultimately, tear down the team. And in the two years since, they’ve built it back up. Since 2022, they’ve spent over $1 billion to sign 40 new players.

The big difference, of course, is that this roster looks like it’s built for the long-haul. Weighted by minutes played, the average age of Chelsea’s players this season is 23.8 — that’s a full two years younger than the second-youngest team in the league! Add in Manchester City’s decline, the fact that Liverpool’s three-best players don’t have contracts for next season, and Arsenal’s potential stagnation, and Chelsea look reasonably well positioned to challenge for the next few Premier League titles.

And they look that way with a squad made up almost entirely of players acquired under the new ownership group. Outside of Chelsea academy products Colwill and Reece James, not a single league minute has been played by a player who hasn’t been acquired since the summer of 2022.

I still don’t really think there was much of a plan here, beyond “let’s sign a lot of young players,” but compared to the random, emotional way most other European clubs operate, that might actually be a pretty decent plan.

Yes, they’ve probably squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on all of the players who didn’t work out. But they hit grand slams with Palmer and Jackson, while Caicedo might actually be a genuine superstar, too. A billion-plus dollars is a truly absurd amount of money to spend on a soccer team — especially with most of that money not even going to the players themselves — but if you hit on those three guys and find an in-house stud like Colwill, you really don’t have to be all that targeted or efficient with the rest of the billion dollars.

Let’s say the average team gets $500,000 of on-field performance from every $1m spent on players. With that aforementioned core in place, Chelsea don’t even have to be anywhere near average in player identification to still build a competitive team around them. Given that they haven’t really been severely penalized or hamstrung by all of the money they’ve spent on transfer fees thus far, the ownership deserves some credit for finding ways to get around or break apart the various spending laws that were in place before they arrived. If you can sell your own hotel to yourself and it somehow lets you spend more money on building a competitive soccer team, then, well, you should sell your own hotel to yourself.

However, with so much of the roster locked down for the next five to seven years, there are still plenty of other challenges awaiting. So, we shouldn’t look at Chelsea as a traditional young team with lots of money. We normally expect these sides — already very good, with super-low average ages — to challenge for titles because there is usually exponential internal improvement from multiple players improving at the same time, but also because we expect these teams to reinforce the obvious weaknesses in the squad with new players.

It’s unclear how much of this Chelsea will be able to do. The underperforming players who they gave long contracts to probably won’t want to leave until their contracts expire, while the overperforming players who they gave long contracts to probably will want raises. Palmer, in fact, has been given one already.

At the very least, they’re pushing up against the limits of what they can spend, which means any increase in spending will likely have to be met with an increase in revenue. Champions League qualification would provide some relief, but they’re running out of homegrown players they can move on for profits, so what happens when Caicedo wants more money or Real Madrid come calling? And these aren’t just short-term questions. With these billions of dollars of fees spread out over the length of each player’s contract, Chelsea are still going to have to deal with these problems summer after summer.

That’s why I’m still not sold on this approach. It has worked out way better than I thought it would this season; this team is genuinely very good and incredibly young. But even that’s not a guarantee of success. For as well as they’ve played this season, they’re still only in a three-way tie for third. They’re nine points off first place, but only four up on 10th.

There are plenty of worlds where it continues to work: Jackson and Palmer continue to flourish, the young squad improves around them, and this team wins a title or two over the next couple seasons. Normally, I might even say that is likely to happen. But with a massive squad and with so much money locked up for such a long time, there are still so many potential downsides baked into the approach that got Chelsea here.

And after all, here is only where they already were: in third place, the same position they finished the season before this whole billion-dollar rebuild began.