Chelsea's wretched away form has Blues needing Champions League miracle after latest debacle

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Evening Standard

·10 December 2025

Chelsea's wretched away form has Blues needing Champions League miracle after latest debacle

Blues are winless on their travels in Europe this term

Trevoh Chalobah only played the first half of Chelsea’s 2-1 defeat to Atalanta. That was the good bit.

By half-time, the Blues were 1-0 up and had barely been threatened. Chalobah was on a yellow card and has played a lot of football lately, so Enzo Maresca brought him off.

Come the end of a taxing game, it was Chalobah who was asked to front up and reflect on a defeat that could have serious consequences for Chelsea in their Champions League campaign.

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“That’s three points lost. I think we were in control in the first half as well,” he said with a half-furrowed brow, seemingly as baffled as many Chelsea fans will have been at how his team-mates let their goal advantage slip and fell out of the top eight as a direct result.

The Blues are now likely to need to beat both Pafos at home and produce a famous win away to Napoli in January to reclaim their place in the top eight. Should they do that, they would qualify automatically for the round of 16 by skipping the undesirable play-off round.

It is now very possible that the world champions will miss out on the top eight, which in turn could mean having only one free midweek without a fixture between now and the end of March; a sapping schedule that would test the limits of Maresca’s squad right up until the first international break of 2026.

Chalobah’s hands are clean, but Chelsea must accept they did this to themselves. Joao Pedro’s first Champions League goal had appeared the ideal springboard from which to claim a vital victory on the road in Europe and edge closer to cementing one of those all-important top-eight berths.

Yet now, questions must be asked of the west Londoners’ young and inexperienced group, most pertinently why they are having such trouble away from home in the Champions League.

They have allowed themselves to be cowed by hostile atmospheres. On their travels this term, they have lost to Bayern Munich and now Atalanta, claiming just a solitary point away to lowly Qarabag in Azerbaijan. They trailed in all three.

Tuesday’s defeat at the New Balance Arena will have felt an especially hard gut punch. Chelsea were unbeaten in 41 Champions League matches when leading at the interval, dating back to September 2013.

Yet they showed far too much respect to an Atalanta side inspired by the unpredictable Charles De Ketelaere in the second half and paid the price on the night.

An even heavier price could be paid on second instalment if, indeed, they do now miss out on automatic progression to the last 16.

Granted, the competition was weaker, but last season much of Chelsea’s best work in the Conference League came on their travels on the continent. This season, the challenging atmospheres have proven just that — which would make victory in Naples in the final league-phase match all the more impressive a feat. Right now, it seems unlikely.

Atalanta are now sitting pretty in third place in the Champions League. It is the sort of lofty position Maresca’s men might have occupied if they had not allowed themselves to be so easily muzzled by the Italians in the second half without putting up much of a fight.

Maresca himself must accept some culpability. He is making more changes to his starting line-up in all competitions this season than any other Premier League manager, but his rotation policy failed him in Bergamo.

Wesley Fofana’s unfortunate eye injury forced a substitute to be substituted — that can’t be helped — but Chelsea’s experimental XI backfired against their well-drilled hosts, and it was something of a surprise to see Malo Gusto arrive as second-half fresh legs when Estevao Willian remained uncalled from the bench.

Chelsea have failed to win any of their four matches since so convincingly putting Barcelona to the sword at Stamford Bridge a fortnight ago, and allowing Atalanta a comeback win not only further damages confidence but also undoes a lot of the Blues’ prior good work in the Champions League. They remain stuck in a rut.