📅 Published on: 2024-12-14 07:23:00
⏱ Duration: 00:23:09 (1389 seconds)
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📝 Video Description:
Welcome to The Athletic FC’s YouTube channel, where best-in-class journalism meets video.
Chelsea are better than most people expected this season and are currently in second place in the Premier League, but how real is Chelsea’s title challenge?
Joe Devine is joined by JJ Bull and Jon Mackenzie to figure out if Enzo Maresca’s Blues have what it takes to take on Liverpool, Arsenal and Man City in his first season.
#chelsea #premierleague #liverpool
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Timestamps:
00:00 How Real Is Chelsea’s Title Challenge?
00:15 How Much Better Are Chelsea This Season?
01:22 How Much Improvement Is Down To Maresca?
05:05 Individual Advantages | Maresca’s Structure
07:27 In-Game Tactical Advantages | Maresca’s Structure
13:54 Nicolas Jover’s Mural | The Athletic FC Newsletter
14:30 Are Chelsea In A Title Race?
20:59 Chelsea’s Newfound Maturity | The Athletic FC Podcast
21:50 Chelsea’s Squad Age Profile
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🕵️♂️ Transcript:
Chelsea are better than most people expected this season and are currently second place in the Premier League so today I’m joined by John McKenzie and JJ Bull in order to ask the question how real is Chelsea’s title [Music] challenge okay how much better are Chelsea this season than last season JJ well let’s look at the numbers this season they are second in the league as you may have seen in the table and at the same stage last season after 15 games they were in 10th which is obviously lower but they ended up finishing really well which is important to remember cuz Chelsea quite good last season in fact expected points had them finishing in fourth so they might even have done better than they did last season this season their expected points has them around about the same fourth or fifth so they’re kind of the same the interesting thing is they have a really high XD the highest in the league and they’re kind of overshooting that now last season they underperformed it slightly especially at the start players like Nicholas Jackson were missing chances then they started scoring them so that’s part of what propelled them up the table this season however they have really poor defensive numbers underlying expected goals against numbers are the 11th in the league which is bad you don’t win unless you have a good defense okay also if you do it at points per game if you look at what Chelsea are on now they are on form to finish on 78 points which is not really enough to win the league only two teams have won the league with less than 80 which is man united both times but you need more than that Liverpool are on for 95 points which is obviously quite a lot more so Chelsea do appear to be better than last season okay well if they are better than last season John how much of that is down to to moresa do you think yeah I think a lot of it is to do with moresa actually um I think the thing that has surprised me most about him is that I expected him to come in and be you know he’s a pep acolyte you expect him to come in and have a really complex tactical system actually what we’ve seen from him is quite a simple tactical system in many respects but one which I think you get the benefit of Simplicity but also the ability to get other advantages out of it so let’s just go to the board and talk a little bit about what that looks like so this is how Chelsea set up out of possession roughly in in a 442 like a lot of teams do these days what they’re going to try and do when they get on the ball is they’re going to try and form a a box Midfield and they’ll they’ll do this by having Jackson push forward usually well on this on this lineup Enzo might jump forward kaed can move across and you can move malag Gusto alongside him and so what you’ve ended up with here is now a three box and then with you with your forwards here another three that’s why you like to call it a three box three John that’s right three box three because you got the box in Midfield um and the Box in Midfield is is is quite nice it gives you a really nice buildup structure you have these two wide eights who can move around try and open passing Lanes sometimes you’ll see Nicholas Jackson dropping in to receive if these two players pull their markers apart so you’ve got nice passing Lanes into the middle as well you’ve got the the eights can drop out they can push into the front line as well so it’s a nice structure a lot of teams use this um but actually what’s so interesting about Chelsea is that they use the same basic shape pretty much in all their games but they can arrive at it in lots of different ways so in this version we saw Malo Gusto dropping into the Midfield from this side other things that you could do so we’ve got kaiso and Enzo here Enzo usually likes to play in these more Advanced areas so if you wanted to you could play a more defensive Midfield you could play lavier alongside kaiso let’s get rid of Enzo now you’re not going to want your fullbacks now to invert into the Midfield but you’ve only got the 110 here so what you could do here is you could have kuar playing as as a as a 10 in possession if you wanted to as well so he can go into that space now you’ve got a more a more defensive Midfield but you’ve still got players in the same sort of slots same system different players in different positions you could do the same the other way around as well um so you could have Gusto coming in from this side as well you’ve got other options so got ronato Vega here as well he can he can come in he’s he likes to invert into the pivot spot in particular um and then the system itself just affords loads of other other advantages so we’ve talked about Cole Palmer probably the best player that Chelsea have right now you have the ability to play him on either side you can have him dropping in depending on where you’re going to have your inverting fullback coming from and it just gives you all of these different ways of of being able to create tactical tactical advantages it’s worth saying as well that we’ve got different profiles of players in the wide areas as well so you could play you know someone like Pedro Netto a very different kind of player to Sancho he’s a bit more of a a stretcher player so he’s going to go behind cause defenses problems pulling them deep where sanche is a little bit more of a an intricate buildup player so basically what you’ve got is a system which actually stays relatively the same all the way through um but you’ve got the ability to bring all of these great players that Chelsea have put them in different positions get different tactical Dynamics between those players and they’ve got a huge amount of advantages out of that so I think there’s two main areas where you get those advantages one of them is for individuals so when you’ve got talented individuals like Chelsea have you want your structure to bring out the best in those players so as we can see a simple structure here actually does allow you to do that but the second advantage that we’ve got here as well is that because you have the ability to switch your players around and change the Dynamics between them you actually have a really good way of developing iname tactical upsides as well so what we’ve seen from a lot of games from Mesa so far is at halim he’s been able to change the way that they’re arriving in this structure and it’s actually helped them to to do better in second halfes as well so yeah I think a lot of this is down to zesa in his simple structure but with tactical advantages John mentioned two types of advantages there uh let’s start with individual advantages well individual advantages are that players get to play to their strengths Kara is good playing in small spaces and likes to get forward so you can move them into these spaces that he likes going into and that obviously benefits him but also benefits the team because if you’re the left back a lot of teams will defend manto man at your possession so if everyone’s looking after different players and your back four is probably going to look something like like this when you’re you’re man marking across the pitch if Kar is one that goes forward does the right back track him all the way into this position here cuz then suddenly that leaves a master space here which I can’t draw but I will I’ve drawn it now you can go into that space there and obviously it starts having Domino effects because then other players can drop into those positions what you also get is players like cole pammer really benefit from having a bit of Freedom so you need structure around you to facilitate that because obviously managers and other players know that Cole pmer is amazing he’s one of my favorite players to watch in the world at the moment I think maybe one of the best I might go so far as to say that one of the best for you to watch in the world well he’s one of the best players in the world he I mean he is’s he does things that are amazing that we can go and on about him forever but like he’s meant to be in this space here but he drops out EES basuma has been manm marking him all during the Spurs game so he’s the one to get tight to him but if you switch off for even a second then or or you’re dragged into position you want to be it just causes little tensions and problems all over the place cuz here’s pammer they’re shooting from left to right here so the Spurs back line is over on the right hand side pammer drops in you can’t really go with him because it’ll disrupt the shape too much and leave a massive gap for someone else to go into he just plays a ball backwards something like what Messi would do back in the day probably still does now you just drop in and do things like that you know it’s obvious what you can do but you have to have other players in the structure to make sure that you have um decent shape but then what he does is as the play Slowly progresses he just drifts in behind everyone and suddenly he’s not looked after by basuma anymore he just found himself in space it’s Puma’s error it’s it’s almost like a Spurs tactical error as much as it’s pammer having the freedom to do this at the right time you don’t know whether this is coached or not whether Pam has worked out himself I suspect it’s a bit of both m but he moves into here and then two passes later what you suddenly get is the best player one of the best players in the world running straight at you with your attacking shape so exactly what John was saying before you’ve got two Wingers Striker through the middle and your two attacking eights in those attacking positions but all of that is what masas has done is very simple tactics I think we’ll see it different in the next few years as he adapts things over time but the moment is very much to get you put the best players that you have in the places that they can be best in and create structure around them that means they can play well fantastic and what about uh tactical advantages John so I think the Spurs game was a really good example of how you can get these in-game tactical advantages through just moving the system around so this is just a screenshot from the first half of the game we’ got Chelsea playing this way down the field um from left to right got that right didn’t I I don’t know which way am I yeah I don’t know this may look quite messy so let’s just draw some shapes on here so there’s your three box three that we’ve been talking about in this instance we’ve got kaiso in the middle here he’s inverted from right back um and what Spurs are going to try and do to cause problems to this because this is quite an aggressive way of playing because they’re they’re starting with their deep build up with just a back three so Spurs can actually go manto man on the back three they can have Dom sanki on the on the center back he’s obviously pressed across to the goalkeeper here with the that player in in the passing shadow um there but also we’ve got the wide players onto the the wide um center backs here as well and then everyone else can match up in the middle a really aggressive way of pressing and POA kogu obviously wants to try and destabilize Chelsea’s buildup cause some problems and then generate chances actually he’s looking for players to slip over John isn’t he that’s right that’s that’s the big tactical plan but um this man-to-man system in the Press which is aggressive like you can do things as a buildup team to change that right you don’t need to build up in your three you could you could keep kaiso out and and have a four here gives you those tactical advantages but the reason why I think Moresco is happy to take on this Gamble and say you know sometimes we’re going to lose the ball in buildup is because you get obviously advantages other in other areas of the field so if you’re going 5v5 in this part of the field it means you are in fact five5 um on on the other side of the field and if you count the goalkeeper that’s 6 V5 isn’t it that’s right so part of the advantage that you have here is that it’s not just 5v5 you have the goalkeeper as well so technically in this scenario what you’ve got is Chelsea playing with a back four with the goalkeeper being one of the of the center backs in buildup and this means that against five other players there is going to be a free play as we’ve already said this is Levi cwell in space here you can see he’s got his arms wide open saying pass the ball to me but Dom slanky has done a really good job of pressing the goalkeeper Robert Sanchez in such a way that he can’t find that so it does become effectively a man-to-man system but as we can see down the other end of the field there are these the these other advantages um it’s going to be 5v5 and generally speaking I think Chelsea would be happy of those sorts of odds because they’ve got really good players right so you’ve got one V one matchups across the attacking part of the field you think well you know Nicholas Jackson Jackson really dangerous runner in behind so if you have him in a one V1 duel against a center back who isn’t as quick as him you might be able to you know play the ball over the top and find him or a recently returning from injury Romero for example yeah exactly and in fact both vanen and Romero coming back from injury but as you can see like Spurs are clearly worried about that right so they want to double Mark Nicholas Jackson which means there is going to be a free player somewhere else in this instance it’s Enzo Fernandez dropping into this into this space here so the reason why I think Moresco is happy to have fairly risky buildup is because he thinks that the the the downsides of risky buildup are outweighed by the upside of having the ability to find uh the the free player in the other part of the pitch and and obviously Chelsea did manage to do that on on a few occasions in the game at least four but there are some disadvantages is here in terms of what they’re trying to do in the buildup and and that is because benoir badia Shi who we got here is actually a left footed Center back so usually you would expect him to be across here now if he’s playing as the wide player on the right hand side here because kais is going inside that means that it is going to affect the way that Chelsea build up because he has a left footed player it’s going to be harder for him to receive the ball and play it down the line for example and it’s going to be easier I think for for son to press him in such a way that he can’t find the the pass into the Midfield area as well and so you know there are different ways that you can you can address and and we saw that happening in the second half then when Chelsea came out so here’s a screenshot from the second half now the reminder for you Joe for me yeah that that now the teams are playing the other way I did need that reminder in the rehearsal it’s true um but what we’ve got is the the same system right we’ve got here’s your three at the back here’s your box Midfield there’s your front three as well but interestingly enough players are in different positions Romeo Lavia has gone off injured and so what Moresco has decided to do is to actually drop Enzo Fernandez who was you know playing in this position in the Box in the first half he’s going to drop him a little bit deeper give him a little bit more ability to control the ball with his passing um they brought on Mal austo for Lavia and he’s playing in the right back slot which is where kais was playing before he’s just going to stay pretty much as a as a right back for most of this game and um as we’ve said now the the inversion for the fullback can come from the other side so now we’ve got karea in that in that e slot which may seem a little bit weird for a fullback to be playing almost as as an 810 in in this system interestingly enough though Ben badia Shi is now on the on the left hand side of the pitch he’s now in a in a position that will make his ability to build up better so again you’re finding that little tactical Solutions the structure is still the same but because badil is in a in a better position for him uh it’s going to give them some kind of advantages here and also we’ve talked about this already but Enzo and kukara in different places so Enzo Fern Fernandez can control the game more through his passing in this situation kukara who’s a bit more of a I’d say a small space player maybe than than Fernandez can get into into the front line and we actually saw early on in the second half interplay between him and Sancho that resulted in a really good chance for Chelsea as well so really nice examples of of some of the the Tactical advantages that you can get just by keeping the structure the same but putting the players in in different positions as well and just a bit of bonus content for you because I know you love bonus content I do we’ve talked about how mesco was happy to accept the the riskiness of his buildup because of the advantages he was getting further down the pitch actually after Chelsea went 22 he drisk the buildup a little bit by dropping Kara from that 8/10 spot into the fullback slot again in these deeper buildup moments uh in order to make it mean that they now have basically two extra players in buildup so youve got the goalkeeper and Kara that means that spurs’ press is going to be less dangerous I think Mesa probably realized that um this the Press was Spur’s most dangerous attack attacking threat um and that does mean that you’ve got a few players in ATT tapack but it means that you’re going to be more consistently moving um the ball from your buildup into the forward area as well so these are the sorts of tactical um the battles that that coaches have to face in game and clearly moresa is is well placed to give Chelsea all of those advantages well one area in which Chelsea probably could improve I’ve heard is from dead bull situations from which they’ve only created 18 shots JJ I don’t know if you knew that I I did know that and I told you just before you said it that’s true you have and now you’re going to hear something from another man it’s Phil do you remember the days when setpiece coaches were nobody’s do you remember the days when they didn’t even exist well times have changed so much so the Arsenal’s king of Corners NC J has got his own mural in North London that’s right a painting in order of a set peace coach admittedly Arsenal are very good at corners but this got me thinking will The Loon manager get a painting in his honor will the head of HR have a chant with their name in it we wrote about this in the athletic FC newsletter if you’d like to sign up click on the link below there seems to be quite a lot of upsides JJ a lot of positives so let’s return to the the question of the title are they in a title race how how real is it well I prepared some facts using impact font so you’ll pay attention also I think aial font fact is it is harder to win the league now than it was eight years ago specifically eight do you know why uh no bet John does it’s cuz that’s the season that Pep Guardiola entered the league that is correct 10 points to John McKenzie fact number two in the 10 years before Guardiola turned up the average points for Premier League winner was 86.4 fact three after Guardiola won it the first time in 20178 that average jumped up to 94.2 points is there an opportunity for me to win any more points or was that it uh we’ll see how it goes but you’ve been deducted three for that interjection fact number four it has dropped since the 19 last two seasons cuz it’s just come down a little bit and then a final fact your last chance to win points 89 points has been enough to win the title in 11 of the last 21 Seasons but this season is weird because everything’s kind of different Man City have dropped off they’re still there but they’re not really there Arsenal have had a bit of a weird start with getting odd red cards and just relying on set pieces it’s very odd and so this is a one of those rare Seasons you get where there’s a chance for a random to take over and jump to top like leester something like that except not like leester this season uh not this season like when they did it before yeah I think in 15 16 when they which is when I think they won the league but the thing is there’s already a team who are uh winning the random league and that is Liverpool they are well on top CU as we’ve said when points per game livero pool are on 95. form Chelsea are on 78 Point form so I say that there maybe I don’t know they’re not really in a title race you think no oh well maybe they sort of are not really like predicted points uh op’s model says that Liverpool should finish on 87.7 so fewer than their points per game says I think even Chelsea’s are at 73.6 4 so that’s where opt to think they’ll finish the terms of their model but then their expected points as we know has Chelsea sitting about fifth just now it’s a whole long season but one of the benefits they’ve got is well we’ll speak about in a second is that they have two sets of players they’ve got a big sad which allows them to rest and rotate which could give them huge advantages come the end of the season yeah plus I think they have an interesting run over uh Christmas don’t they Chelsea I feel like it might get closer before it gets further away again football was weird isn’t it that’s true it always gets very bundled over Christmas uh John what do I mean what do you think are they in the title race how real is it well I think if we compare it to last season and think the role that Liverpool had in the title race last season there’s some interesting similarities with with what Chelsea are doing this season so this is a really nice VI prepared for me by Cannon stats and what this shows basically is expected goals for and expected goals against um this is an inverted axis okay so the higher you are here the better you are defensively so lower lower um expected goals against good defense good attack good attack yeah and what we’ve got then is three interesting sort of good teams here right um we’ve got Arsenal who as as we know very good from a defensive point of view slightly less good on the attacking axis here um and then you’ve got Liverpool at the other other on the other side and they’ve got like really good attacking numbers but um their defensive numbers aren’t quite as good and then City sort of sitting in between the two of them good attack good defense not to the same level of both of those teams but good enough that in the end they they they did win the league I don’t want to derail this conversation too much John but I’m just looking at how bad this chart makes man united look yes well let’s move to the next chance see how bad that makes them look slightly better Al it’s worth saying that everything has slightly shifted down so the the yeah the numbers maybe just as bad yeah around around the same sort of area but what we can see at the top end of the table is is is actually a few of those teams have flipped places because we’ve still got Arsenal very good from a defensive point of view not quite so good from an attacking point of view but now we’ve got Chelsea in the Liverpool slot so very good in terms of the the attacking numbers but not quite so good from a defensive point of view and Liverpool actually the replacing man city is the team who are probably the balance right between attack and defense um so yeah what I think then is interesting is if we view Chelsea from the point of view of of Liverpool last season where I don’t think I think people sort of don’t think of Liverpool being in the title race last season because they did drop away right at the end of the season uh but I think that Chelsea are in that same kind of position which is if they can maintain their attacking numbers they might just have enough to to be there at the end of the season and then as as you said if Liverpool maybe drop off and Chelsea can maintain that that record then it might work for them but I think the thing that differentiates Chelsea this season from Liverpool last season is that Chelsea actually have this interesting phenomenon whereby they can play in two different competitions of different levels which actually means they can effectively run two different squads so this V shows it really nicely this is the Premier League minutes that um sorted by the players with the most on the on the left hand side and on the right we’ve got the same for the conference league and as we can see the players in the Premier League list none of them actually overlap with the the players in the conference league list which means essentially that Chelsea can play their tactics with two sets of players if there’s any of those Chelsea players in the first team who drop out they’ve probably got a readymade replacement coming through um in the conference League Squad um and I think in that sense Chelsea almost benefit from having been quote unquote bad last season falling into the conference League because it actually allows them to keep their broad Squad fit and and hopefully get the advantages from them that’s a that’s a fun difference though isn’t it because it makes me think that uh if they’re successful this season in either winning the conference League or finishing in the top four that they’ll be in a more significant European competition next year maybe the Champions League they won’t be able to continue this absolutely you wouldn’t wouldn’t expect them to have come out of the the Champions League U this season if they were in it with these players having this amount of minutes you then have the the difficulty of being of having to fit all of your star players into all of your competition so in a weird stroke of Fate if Chelsea do do well enough to finish in the Champions League spots this season which seems pretty obvious that is going to happen this this sort of two-tier approach probably won’t work as well that’s where you’ll see what I think what Guardiola does a lot of the time where you’d have your first team players will play but 28 29 League games and he’ll rotate them so they’ll just be the whole bigger Squad and by then he might have made changes to how they play so it’s more specific so there’ll be less variance when they take players in and out well it’s interesting to think about Chelsea’s Evolution as a team JJ and someone else that’s been thinking about that is Liam Tumi on the athletic FC’s fine podcast here’s a fun clip about their evolution right here here we haven’t seen players fighting over who takes a penalty we haven’t seen quite as many really stupid bookings yeah to the point where Nicholas Jackson actually pulled Enzo Fernandez’s shirt back onto his body as he was trying to take it off to celebrate the goal against Spurs when Nicholas Jackson is doing that all people you you really know that the The Arc of maturation is is coming along nicely and you know some of that might be just individual players getting a bit older getting bit wiser and and learning how to deal with these things better but I think you again also have to credit the environment that moresa created and the culture that he’s created they all respect him uh tactically but also I think in terms of his authority and as a result you’re seeing a more serious team oh lovely what a nice clip that was did you know that the oldest player oldest Outfield player in Chelsea Squad is 27 years old just the season I didn’t know that who is that um TOs rabo is that say his name badly but yeah that’s what they’ve got in fact they’re experiencing in the last couple of weeks on this show we’ talked about the ideal Squad construction and you want to experience Youth and Peak Chelsea are all Youth and uh coming into their Peak so it’ll be really good soon but their most experienced player is I think Marcus banelli the reserve Reserve goalkeeper who’s 32 wow if they were Pokemon they’d all be like maximum in their second evolution phase I think it’s worth saying we we’ve talked about mesa’s approach is being simple but like I think what he’s done so well is get the Simplicity right from the beginning in order to then be able to evolve and I think things are really nicely set up for them to make a few big steps in the next few seasons well very exciting are Chelsea in a title race you say yes you say no maybe he says maybe I don’t I don’t know if you like this video please consider subscribing to the channel the athletic is home to some of the world’s best sports journalists including David orstein Amy Lawrence and James Horn castle with the latest transfer news and insights on every Premier League story that matters the athletic.com puts you inside football and you can try it for free now for 30 days see the link in the description
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