Chelsea influencer correct about Blues’ promising “advanced metrics” | OneFootball

We noticed Chelsea influencer Alex Goldberg saying yesterday afternoon that Chelsea’s “advanced metrics” are very promising from this season, so we decided to look into that.

He’s right: Chelsea may be 5th in the table, but the stats show they could well be even higher.

The difference between their expected goals for and their expected goals against is 0.56, which is the third highest in the league. That “expected goals difference per 90” is the most “advanced metric” we know of, although perhaps Alex is looking at something else too.

Liverpool are just so far in this table clear it boggles the mind – they’re on 1.3. Arsenal are much closer in second on 0.72, while Bournemouth are behind us on 0.47.

This shows just how much catching up we have to do on Arne Slot’s Red winning machine over the summer.

It’s always frustrating to underperform your xG metrics in terms of points – but then again it does hint that things should improve if we keep playing as we are.

Two big issues in Chelsea team made clear by xG difference

Chelsea rank third in xG Difference per 90 minutes, but are only fifth in the actual table.

The fact they’ve underperformed compared to what you’d expect points to two things we already know – one, they’re not good at taking their chances. They’re creating enough xG to be doing far better – in fact, they’re second in the league on that metric. But they’re not putting those chances away.

It also tells us that they’re underperforming in xG against too – that is to say, they’re concede more than you’d expect from the chances against them. We hate to say it, but a lot of that comes down to goalkeepers.

So solve the striker problem and solve the goalkeeper problem and we might have a serious team on our hands. Hold on, wasn’t that exactly what we were saying a year ago?