Are Chelsea actually any good this season? They might be hardest PL team to judge…

It’s usually incredibly obvious whether a Premier League team is having a good season.

Ange Postecoglou’s arrival at Forest triggering an incredible self-implosion that sees them one spot off relegation is very much a sign of a bad start to the season; Bournemouth winning four of the first seven and currently occupying a Champions League spot is a good start. We did say ‘obvious’.

Sunderland bucking the trend of the rapid demise of the promoted clubs in ninth fits nicely into the good column; Wolves going winless in their first seven into the bad. Everton are enjoying a feel-good start to life at their new stadium; West Ham are into the ninth year of hating theirs.

You can look up and down the table and it is pretty easy to assess whether that team is having a good season so far. Until you arrive at the club currently seventh in the table – Chelsea.

On the face of it, three points off the top four and five points away from league leaders Arsenal is not bad, but on the flip side, the permanently crisis-ridden catastrophe that is Manchester United are just one point behind. Every day there is a public inquiry into the Old Trafford club and yet Chelsea’s middling form has not been given anywhere near the same column inches.

Most recently, Ruben Amorim has been given a three-year probation period, which definitely won’t come back to bite Sir Jim in the arse, but it is hard to see Enzo Maresca afforded such a luxury, while Chelsea’s relative anonymity is currently working in his favour.

On a results basis, there are plenty that fit into the good column. Smashing West Ham 5-1 in your first away game of the season is positive, as is a Champions League victory against Benfica and avoiding the potential banana skin that was a Mourinho return to Stamford Bridge.

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A last-minute goal to beat the reigning champions Liverpool is a big plus. Winning the Club World Cup and taking every possible opportunity to call yourself the ‘World Champions’ is also bloody good.

But losing to Manchester United is very bad. Having your already questionable goalkeeper sent off in the opening minutes of that defeat for producing his best defensive lineman impression and kamikazeing into Bryan Mbeumo is also bad. Spending close to £300m in the summer and not replacing that goalkeeper is bad.

Getting humbled by Bayern Munich 3-1 is bad, as is losing by the same scoreline at home to Brighton. Three red cards in as many matches, four if you include the manager, is also really quite bad.

All of this means that seven games in and with close to 20% of the season gone, it is hard to tell whether Chelsea are actually any good or not.

Stats-wise, only Arsenal and Manchester City have scored more goals than the Blues, but they also let in a fair amount with eight teams having a better defensive record. Chelsea have an xG of 11.2 so far this season, which is the sixth best in the league, but they also have a conceded xG of 9.9, the fifth worst.

According to Opta’s expected points table, they should be ninth.

Their red cards make them the second most ill-disciplined team in the league behind only Brighton, who have picked up an impressive 22 yellow cards in seven games.

Away from the statistics, Chelsea have been a strange team to watch. After their summer exploits in the US, they looked understandably leggy in their opening goalless draw at home to Crystal Palace, but the following game they were at their free-flowing best, even if it was only against West Ham. Their victory over Liverpool was not a fluke but a manager capitalising on the weakness of a vulnerable side. But that tactical nous was non-existent against United.

Away from the pitch, Chelsea were the second biggest spenders in Europe in the summer, behind only Liverpool, but if this has been the season of forwards like Hugo Ekitike and Nick Woltemade hitting the ground running, Chelsea’s best performers this year have been players who were already there.

Joao Pedro did well in the Club World Cup but he did not score in the entire month of September. Against Benfica he played 29 minutes and still managed to get sent off.

Chelsea’s second biggest signing of the summer was Jamie Gittens, whose five league matches with zero goals and zero assists have made for a rather forgettable start to life in west London.

Alejandro Garnacho is there, reminding us all that neck tattoos never look good, but he too is on zero goal contributions for the season so far. Chelsea’s best signing appears to be Estevao but at 18, he is not expected to push the club to a title charge in the near future.

The club’s two top scorers this season are central midfielders Moises Caicedo (who has been excellent) and Enzo Fernandez; Joao Pedro has the same tally as centre-back Trevoh Chalobah.

And then there is the Cole Palmer conundrum. What looked like an innocuous injury in the warm-up to West Ham has become something more persistent. He managed 21 minutes of Chelsea’s defeat to United and has not been seen since, a diagnoses of a groin injury coming back with a November return date.

Chelsea will be hoping Palmer returns to the player he was 12 months ago rather than the one we have so far seen in 2025.

A good showing in the Club World Cup aside, 2025 has been a poor year for the former Young Player of the Season. A goal against Brentford represents his only Premier League strike from open play since mid-January and we are past the point where his drop in performance can be described as a blip.

There are lingering question marks surrounding the manager. He got the gig off the back of a promotion-winning campaign with Leicester City but that Leicester team should always have been promoted and they very nearly made a mess of it.

His teams also have a tendency to drop off in the second half of the season. While his first Chelsea campaign saw his points per game go from 1.52 in the first half of the year to 1.47 in the second, at Leicester the contrast was far more stark as they dropped from 2.52 to 1.70.

On the plus side, Maresca has done a good job of satisfying the unique demands of his employers, who are advocates of the Moneyball strategy of running a sports team. Last season, Maresca was effectively the manager of two different squads with the Premier League and Conference League teams largely kept apart, but this year there is no easy European competition for Chelsea to field their B team and his handling of players like Raheem Sterling has been questionable.

If fourth and a trophy was good enough for the first year, what are the expectations for the second? Moneyball has been the basis of many teams’ data-driven approach but the Oakland Athletics never did win the World Series. Brighton are seen as the best Premier League example of the strategy but there is a big difference between being one of the league’s 10 best teams and the league’s very best.

The Club World Cup win has given Maresca £85m worth of credit in the bank but the amount of money Chelsea spent in the summer, even if they did recoup a significant portion, demands more than seventh place in the league. Chelsea are also clearly a team at the start of a project but what is the expected timescale for this project? If this season delivers no trophies but Champions League football, is that enough? When are the owners anticipating they will be title contenders?

Chelsea have some favourable fixtures in October including a trip to Forest and a home tie against Sunderland, and it is not until the end of November before they face top-six competition. If there are still this many question marks around both the team and the manager at that point then the hierarchy may start asking whether Maresca is the Billy Beane they were looking for.

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