It’s painfully obvious that if only Chelsea would score more goals, they would likely be doing far better in the table than they currently are. I mean, that’s about as simplistic as the sport gets, right? Score more than the other team, win. But for some reason it’s not that simple when it comes to Chelsea this year.
If we look at the league overall, we are 6th in goals scored, and not coincidentally, 6th overall in terms of points. The bigger issue, though, is that we are as close to 7th and 8th with respect to goals scored now as we are to the 5th highest scoring club, Tottenham. And 20 goals off of Liverpool’s tally, and a fully 29 goals behind Manchester City. Given we brought in a manager who had Napoli just killing it the last three seasons with goals coming from all over, this isn’t exactly what we expected this year.
So is it the coach? Has Sarri simply not been successful in getting our merry band of men to implement his system? Or is it the players, who seem to down tools whenever they get called out or get their nails dirty. Or is it simply that we lack the talent on this roster to actually accomplish anything? These are good questions, that I may or may not have answers to, but either way, I want to dive in to try to at least identify some of the issues.
Shooting
When we think about goals, the first thing that should come to mind is shooting. After all, unless the opponent does you a favor, you can’t score without shooting the ball. And Chelsea happen to be second in the league in shots attempted. Yay! Something we don’t suck at! One gold star in Sarri’s direction, he’s got us shooting a lot. But are we accurate?
Normally shooting accuracy would be determined by taking your shots on target and dividing that by your total shots after removing blocked shots, as they never got to the keeper. In this case, we are 5th in the league at 49.84%. Not very good, really, but you’d think with all the shots we take that’s still okay, right? I mean, we must still have a LOT of on target shots. And we do, 4th most. But that’s still 32 shots behind Manchester United in third. And part of the reason for this is we are ignoring all of those blocked shots.
Blocked Shots
This is where Chelsea are truly frightening. We lead the league in the number of shots blocked, at 163, and in percentage at 34.2%. Manchester City is the next closest good team, at only 27.6% of their shots being blocked. In fact, we are the only team in the Top Five leagues of Europe that are over 30%. Only three other clubs, Guingamp, Caen, and Villareal are even over 29%. We are simply bad. And it starts from the top.
I took the top 50 shooters in terms of volume in the Premier League, and guess who has the highest percentage of blocked shots? Yup. Eden Hazard. 42.1% of his shots attempted have been blocked this year. Only four other players in the top 50 were over 40%, Bernardo Silva, Ruben Neves, and Philip Billing, all essentially midfielders, where this is more expected.
So I took it a step further. I grabbed the top 100 shooters in terms of volume over the Top Five leagues. What’s amusing here, and I’ll get to Eden in a moment, but even though we scraped off some of those bad offenders from the first PL list, we gained MORE PL players. 8 of the Top 10 in terms of Blocked Shot Percentage are from the PL. And yes, Eden Hazard is still on top of that list. This quite clearly is not a good thing.
So I took a look at our squad individually, to see if he’s simply an outlier, an anomaly due to his constant double teams, etc. Surprisingly, he’s actually not the worst on our squad. He just shoots more than everyone.
As you can see, this is some disturbing stuff. I’ll ignore Emerson and all of his two shots, but look at Kovacic, and Kante, and Barkley and RLC, our four main CMs. All over 40% blocked. Willian at almost 35%. Higuain is fitting right in already at nearly 43%. You see Pedro at 13% and madly wish he was a few years younger, because obviously he’s not caught whatever malaise the rest of the squad has. He’s also in my opinion the outlier that is trying to prove this isn’t derived from the system. When we visually watch these Chelsea players shoot, what do they do? Well, after passing it around slowly a lot, allowing defenses plenty of time to get in position, they often receive the ball, hesitate, think, maybe dribble a bit, and THEN shoot.
There’s a reason that Pedro has 8 goals already in league play from only 46 shots, and that’s because he doesn’t get his shot blocked, and he’s accurate.
22 of his 46 shots have been on target, and that’s including the blocks in the total. In fact, his ratio of on target shots to blocked shots is fantastic at 3.67. In fact, of those Top 50 volume shooters list for the PL, Pedro’s actually third on that list, behind only Jamie Vardy and Romelu Lukaku.
Now what about shooting accuracy, you say? After factoring out all of those blocks. Yeah, that still matters, you need your shots on target, although minimizing those blocks goes a massive way towards helping the numbers. When we look at Eden Hazard, for example, of those Top 50 volume shooters, he leads the league in shooting accuracy at 77.3%. Again, because we took away 32 of his blocked shots out of 76. This makes him look slightly better than Raheem Sterling, who is only at 76.2%. But he’s only had 15 blocked shots, and 19 less total shots than Eden, while having only 2 less on target.
Our ridiculous number of blocked shots has been a MASSIVE impact on our ability to score goals this year. People love to blame all the shots we’ve had that hit the post, because in league play we’ve had 14. Although Palace have had 12, and Man City and Liverpool have each had 10. We aren’t special because of that, it’s simply an easy excuse to lean on. Lionel Messi has hit the post 8 times himself this year in league play.
So are there any other problems?
So glad you asked! I’ve covered this before I believe, but our chance creation is utter crap, too. But we are second in the league in Key Passes, you shout. Sure. And we are also 11th in terms of Key Pass per Assist. But we just got done talking about how bad we are at shooting, didn’t we? We did. But our actual chance creation quality is dreadful, beyond a few players. Thanks to the folks at understat.com, I have access to not only expected goals data but also expected assists. And if we compare THAT to Key Passes, we get a better story. We can actually determine the expected assist value for each key pass, thus being able to compare numerically the quality of chances created.
As can be seen in the chart, and feel free to pop it out into a new tab, our volume creators aren’t very high on the xA chart per KP. They create a lot of chances, sure, just not great ones. And Eden’s actually been sliding as the season’s gone on, he was up around 13-14% at the start of the calendar year, if I remember correctly. From a slightly different perspective, here’s how our squad looks:
This is showing just how many Key Passes need to be made to add up to just 1 xA point. Now, to be fair, some of these players haven’t had a lot of league minutes, but we know who they are and should be able to manually account for that (Cesc, RLC, CHO, Emerson, etc.) But why are Kovacic and Willian so high? Why are our fullbacks so high?
Before we wonder how everyone else is doing to compare, let’s select a few top players for comparison.
As can be seen, every single one of these is under 10 KP/xA. In the chart above, Eden, Pedro, some defenders and Giroud are in that company. Our entire midfield is not, nor is Willian. Some folks that used to regularly comment with me might recognize a few of those names as players I was often interested in, such as Haller and Sarabia, and Angel Di Maria, and this sort of thing is exactly why. They create good chances.
In Summary
So, to summarize a bit, not only are we bad shooters, that tend to wait too long and get our shots blocked, but we are also piss poor chance creators, so when we do create shots, they are often at least sub-par, if not poor. Is this systemic, yes. Is this system-related? I don’t think so, beyond the fact that we are facing more teams defending compactly against us, which makes everything just a bit more difficult. But to marry this data with the obvious visual that we don’t move the ball quickly nor do we move ourselves quickly off the ball, which contributes a bit to the former as well.
Might we see better results with a different manager? Perhaps. it’s strange, after his BAD year, Eden’s been improving with his chance creation in each of the last four seasons, but still isn’t great this year, and Willian’s really just been either bad or really bad.
I honestly don’t see a lot of light at the end of this tunnel for this season, and if we suffer the transfer ban that’s coming, next year might not look much better, depending on who stays and goes.
