It is exactly a year since Chelsea visited the Bernabeu. It is 365 days since one of the great displays of doomed heroics in their history. Same place, another time. Real Madrid ultimately illustrated why they are Europe’s comeback kings but only after a stunning fightback from Chelsea. They went 3-0 up in the Bernabeu. Now the architect of it, Thomas Tuchel, is gone, along with two of the scorers, Antonio Rudiger and Timo Werner. The other one, Mason Mount, could be gone this summer.
But the differences extend beyond the names and faces. After three goals in the Bernabeu, Chelsea have now gone three games under three different managers without scoring. It is a strange sort of hat-trick, but one to sum up Chelsea’s season. The club who have spent more than anyone else in football had over two transfer windows now have 14 goals in their last 22 games. Karim Benzema has six goals in April to Chelsea’s none, 19 since 30 December to their 12. A reunion 12 months on may not feel a fair contest.
At least, after spending some £600m in a remarkable recruitment drive, Chelsea can call upon the services of a prolific scorer in the Spanish capital. Not Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, whose Clasico brace in Madrid last year is as irrelevant as his Premier League and Bundesliga Golden Boots and career total of 304 goals after being omitted from their European squad, but a scorer in a Champions League final. Admittedly, Frank Lampard is a 44-year-old caretaker manager now, rather than the most prolific midfielder of his generation. But after bringing in a host of players with a marked aversion to putting the ball in the net, Todd Boehly has finally hired someone who did so on a record 211 occasions for Chelsea.
That pedigree did not rub off straight away: Chelsea had a lone shot on target in Lampard’s return, Saturday’s defeat to Wolves. Which, actually, is not that rare. There are two types of game this season when Chelsea don’t score: the matches where profligacy is a problem, where the lack of a finisher looks like a case of negligence when compiling the supersized squad and where they evoke comparisons with Graham Potter’s Brighton, who were very good at generating expected goals and less good at delivering actual goals, and the matches where they don’t even create much.
They also had a solitary attempt on target against Arsenal, Manchester United and, in the FA Cup, against Manchester City. They had two against Liverpool (both home and away), City (in the Premier League), Tottenham, Fulham (at home), Nottingham Forest and Newcastle. In 11 of those 22 matches, Chelsea had two or fewer efforts on target and if it is still freakish that they only produced one goal, at Forest, the reality that most of their opponents were elite sides scarcely bodes well for their chances of fashioning opportunities against Real.
There are also the exercises in wastefulness that would be inexplicable but for the inconvenient realities Potter’s teams scored too few goals and that chances often came to erratic finishers: the curious fitting end to his reign when they had 27 shots to Aston Villa and lost 2-0, the 21 in a 1-0 defeat to Borussia Dortmund, the 17 in losing to Southampton and 20 when beaten by Fulham.
The faces of a failure to finish are Kai Havertz and Joao Felix: undeniably very talented, both very expensive (albeit only one owned by Chelsea), neither an out-and-out centre forward, each versatile enough to fill various attacking roles but probably needing to be accompanied by someone more clinical, instead of each other. If they are incompatible, they always feature together. The German has played in all of the last 22 games, starting 19. The Portuguese has begun all 11 for which he has been available. A host of players have been the third member of attacking tridents: Mykhailo Mudryk, with an £88m fee and no goals, has compounded the problem, not solved it.
It explains Lampard’s attempt to rehabilitate Raheem Sterling: scorer of a lone league goal for Potter, who sometimes played him at wing-back, Sterling nevertheless outscored Chelsea’s respective leading marksmen in each of the last three seasons. Lampard claimed he told his Derby and Everton wingers to watch the Englishman and how he scored 20 goals a season.
Yet now Chelsea are so impotent that the various midfielders and forwards at Stamford Bridge only have 21 in the Premier League between them this season: Lampard got 22 on his own in 2009-10; tellingly for Carlo Ancelotti, now Real manager. That was the most productive season in Chelsea’s history, with 103; this is shaping up to be the first since 1923-24 when they have averaged under a goal a league game.
They have 11 fewer goals than 19th-place Leicester, the greatest expected goals underachievers in the Premier League. And if it rarely felt Potter had a strategy to score, if the revolving-door selection policy scarcely helped some players, the numbers still feel ridiculous. Felix has two goals from 43 shots in all competitions for Chelsea, Mason Mount three from 47 this season, Conor Gallagher one from 26, Christian Pulisic one from 21, Hakim Ziyech none from 27, the £107m man Enzo Fernandez none from 16. Even Aubameyang only has three from 27. The best conversion rates in the squad belong to the departed penalty taker Jorginho, defender Wesley Fofana, on-loan midfielder Denis Zakaria, centre-back Benoit Badiashile and then Sterling and another defender, Kalidou Koulibaly.
Some, of course, are small sample sizes – certainly smaller than the misfiring attackers and midfielders – but, by way of comparison, Chelsea used to have a player who scored 177 goals from 832 shots in the Premier League, with a healthy 21.2 percent conversion rate. But if Chelsea go to Madrid with a multitude of problems, one may be that the best finisher at Stamford Bridge now is a middle-aged manager.
