So I broke down the Chelsea seasons of the Roman era, to see how they stacked up versus each other. I’m not looking at differentials, but merely wins, draws, and losses. And of course points. Goals for and against have so many outlying situations, that I’ll stick to the results.
I stacked up the 16 seasons from current-at-top vertically, and then the 38 matches horizontally, indicating simply a W, D, or L, and color coding for easy visualization and review.
Additionally, I’ve broken out the seasons into four parts, which while 38 doesn’t go four ways, I decided to go 10, 9, 9, and 10. The start and the end always have the least amount of congestion, so that felt fair enough. I tracked the points for each ‘quarter’ and percent of total points, as well as the rank for each among the 16 seasons, and did the same for the full season. I’ll show these in a separate table, as well, because if you aren’t used to looking at tables and the like on a regular basis it gets a bit busy.
I also included a black box when we changed managers mid-season, just to make that easy to see when exactly it happened. There’s a TON of interesting information from this, but first, I’ll cover the obvious stuff.
- That 12th for this season is currently tied with of all things, Uncle Carlo’s 2010/11 season, but if we at least draw to Leicester, then this season will be alone in 12th, pushing Carlo’s second season to 13th. Funny, we see the 2nd place and don’t realize how dismal that points total really was big picture.
- We finished stronger than last season’s end, but still not great, again, 12th.
- We did have a great start, which when all is said and done is what truly saved this season. Again, keep in mind these rankings are against historical Chelsea performances, so the bar is obviously set ridiculously high.
- We got really spoiled from 2004/05 to 2009/10, didn’t we. Ever since we turned to the new decade, with Carlo’s second season, it’s 12th, 15th, 11th, 8th, 4th, 16th, 2nd, 14th, 12th. Barring the two good seasons, that’s a lot of rubbish. And a bad trend.
- How’s this for interesting? Five titles: only one good season followed a title winning season, and that was 05/06. That is definitely something worth looking at.
- ‘1’ was followed by ‘3’
- ‘3’ was followed by ‘7’
- ‘5’ was followed by ’12’
- ‘4’ was followed by ’16’
- ‘2’ was followed by ’14’
- 2004/05 had our longest unbeaten run by far, with 29 matches unbeaten, followed by 11 more in 2005/06, totaling 40.
- 2005/06 had 13 unbeaten. 2006/07 had 14. 2007/08 ended with 21 straight. 2008/09 started and ended on 8 match unbeaten runs. As great as 2009/10 was, 10 matches was the longest we went unbeaten. I’ll ignore 2011/12. But 2013 also started and ended on 8 match unbeaten runs. 2013/14 had a string of 14, and 2014/15 started with 14 and later had a run of 16.
- Hilariously, in 2015/16, Guus started with a 15 match unbeaten run, for those that forget Draws Football Club.
- Conte obviously had his notable 13 match win streak in 2016/17, but the best we could do in 2017/18 is an 8 match unbeaten run.
- We started this season 12 straight, but have been almost literally up and down since.
- It’s quite interesting that the second ‘quarter’ period for 2010/11 matches the 2015/16 season in terms of points, with only 9, and in both cases, is the worst of any period. One could argue that the 11 point 1st and 4th periods of 2015/16 are worse, as it’s 10 matches to 9, but the percentages don’t lie, 33.3% of the points.
- The stark reality is we haven’t had a great four quarter-seasons of football since, well, forever? 2004/05 – 7th best start. 2005/06 10th best Q3. 2007/08 – 15th best start. 2009/10 – 10th best Q2. 2014/15 – 9th best Q3. 2016/17 – 11th best start. My takeaway? This is why the PL is so difficult. We’ve had record setting seasons, and yet we’ve never had one defining “better than all of the others over the whole season” type of season.
- If we were to average the ranks (based on averages), which is normally a horrible thing to do, but I think it’s safe here to do so, just in trying to sum the performance of the individual parts, 2004/05 and 2005/06 are the two best, followed by 2014/15 and 2016/17, and then 2006/07, 2007/08, and 2009/10. Obviously there’s so much that goes into evaluating a season beyond this, so I’m not saying the seasons as a whole are ranked this way, but in terms of wins and points, this is how it stacks.
