When you read about Sarri and his coming to England, and coming to Chelsea, and the ideal ways for him to try to train the roster on his system and method of playing, you often see references to comments from Pep Guardiola. And these comments almost always refer to taking your best 14 players, and training them first, in an A group, and putting the rest in a B group, and getting to them after your A group has everything sorted out. Here’s literally a quote from Sarri about it:
“Asked if Guardiola had given him any advice about coaching in England, Sarri replied: “He told me the first season in England is really very difficult. For him, it’s impossible to improve in the first season 20 players.
“He told me, in the first season, you have to work only on 14 players otherwise you are in trouble. You need too much time to improve all the squad. In England, it’s really very difficult.”
http://www.espn.com/soccer/chelsea/story/3720727/chelsea-boss-maurizio-sarri-cites-pep-guardiolasays-project-needs-time
Now that we are nearing the end of the season, I thought I would take a look at some of the minute distributions at Chelsea this season, and see not only how things have played out, but perhaps if Sarri followed up on his pal’s advice or not.
I first mapped out the minutes played progressively as the season went on, and broke this out for the three groups, Defenders, Mids, and Attackers. I didn’t worry about the keepers, because Kepa’s played like 90% of the minutes, and won’t even come out even when Sarri tells him to, so what’s the point of taking a look.
First, here is how the defenders look. Click on the image to see it in full size on a new tab, if you prefer.
Notice how obvious it is who the four starters are. There’s been a bit of rotation from December on, but this is also due to us being in four competitions at one point, and fixture congestion. EBGC flatlined around Thanksgiving, although I don’t think England celebrates that holiday from the colonies so at least he didn’t have to wonder what to give thanks for. Zappacosta flatlined right around the first of the year, but has since regained a minor pulse. While Emerson and AC are pretending to be relevant, when both should be far more than just this.
The Midfielders table is even more telling. Two midfielders who always play (Jorginho and Kante), two more midfielders who platoon the third spot equally (Kovacic and Barkley) and two more midfielders who never played, then played a little, then flatlined for different reasons (Cesc left, and Ruben’s back issues), with RLC finally seeing some light at the end of the tunnel recently.
The Attackers table is also quite interesting. You would think Eden would have by far the most minutes, but notice that Willian is right there with him. The reality is that no one matches Willian’s appearances total this year, currently at 45. Even Kepa is only at 42, along with Dave. Kante and Pedro are at 40, and Eden at 38.
For some reason, coaches try to get Willian in almost every match. I want to remember Willian appearing in all but one match last season as well, either as a starter or substitute. And the pattern continues. Beyond that, you can see where Morata dies, and Higuain is born, and how CHO has pretty much nothing until around Thanksgiving, at which point he’s started to eat breadcrumbs, although not nearly enough to get stuffed. And Higuain has already almost passed CHO for minutes played, which is beyond disappointing to most at this point.
I took a look at the players’ minute totals as a whole, as well:
And sure enough, it looks like Sarri took Pep’s advice after all. I took the liberty of coloring in the 14 (15 if you count Morata and Higuain separately) players that make up just past 80% of the total minutes played this season. AC may or may not have made the cut, it’s quite difficult to tell, perhaps it was Willy Caballero that was in fact the 14th, even though he didn’t play, as the dropoff from Barkley to AC is steep, and we can all see that AC’s minutes progression is nowhere close to the main four.
For those that want to see the minutes breakdown table I made to generate these (after a couple more hops), here it is below. Numbers were pulled from TransferMarkt.com :
In conclusion, yes, Sarri stuck to his 14 players for most of the season, and even when he’s tried to rotate beyond that, it’s minimal at best, and there hasn’t been much change or variance beyond match congestion necessity. We’ve definitely not seen much of anything in terms of adjustments with respect to quality or performances or results. And given that we are still struggling to make this system work consistently, one wonders what next season will look like, if Sarri is still in charge.
