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Are Chelsea too good to go down? It is a question generally reserved for West Ham United but given the travails that Stamford Bridge has witnessed in the last few weeks, including losing to Brentford on Wednesday, it is suddenly not an entirely unreasonable question to ask, so long as you do it with your tongue firmly planted in your cheek.
Because the answer of course is yes, they are much too good to be relegated. They are, or at least were under Graham Potter, a better team than their results suggested even if a points tally that reflected their underlying numbers would not be good enough for a club where expectations are never less than stratospheric. Since the World Cup, Chelsea have 26.6 expected goals (xG) to their name and have allowed shots worth a combined 19.2. Rank the Premier League by xG difference and Chelsea are sixth, between Newcastle and Brentford.
Rank the division by actual points won and the Blues sit 13th averaging exactly a point per game over their last 18, no wonder when this team has scored 13 goals and conceded 18. Over the course of a whole season that would give Chelsea just about enough points to scrape by but probably only with a few squeaky bum moments in the spring months.
Having said that, Chelsea have quite a few very good players (and an awful lot of others over whom hang dozens of question marks). Teams with the underlying metrics that this one has tend to eventually find a run of games where the point tally picks up and anyway, they have 39 of them already. That is already more than the average number needed to avoid relegation. Only three teams in Premier League history — Sunderland in 1996-97, Bolton Wanderers the following year and the famed West Ham side of 2002-03 who couldn’t survive with 42 — have hit the 40-point mark and gone down.
The more intriguing question is could Chelsea go down? Mathematically, they certainly could even if…
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