Completing Sarri’s Front Three
Chelsea remain as the only unbeaten team in Europe’s top five leagues in all competitions. Mauricio Sarri has had a great start to his spell in England and was very quick to gain the heavy support of the Chelsea fanbase. A controversial member of the Chelsea squad is Willian. The 30 year old Brazilian international is in his sixth season with Chelsea. However, a large faction of Chelsea fans would like to see him replaced. In this article I want to examine Chelsea’s options on the right side of their front three. I won’t be looking at strikers, in this article at least.
I’ve made a shortlist of wingers who Chelsea could ‘realistically’ sign and done some simple stats work to rank them. I’m going to start with the article with this before looking beyond the rankings. Note that I’ve included Jadon Sancho, I don’t think that he is a realistic target but I wanted to include him as a comparison.
I also included Willian and Hazard, the current Chelsea wingers, to bring into question if they need another winger at all. As you can see Eden Hazard and Willian ranked first and third respectively. I was surprised to see Willian ranking so highly. It is also worth noting that Willian is the oldest player on the list at 30 years old and is leaving his peak years.
I am not taking this ranking as gospel, it is one aspect of many to consider in a recruitment process. It is not a complicated system to rank players. I gathered six stats for each player, ranked each player in that stat and averaged their rank to produce this list. Each stat is treated as being equally important and is not weighted, therefore potentially skewing the results. All data is from their respective leagues in the 2018/19 season and therefore in places sample size can be an issue.
Attacking Output
Key passes, shots and dribbles are important outputs that a winger can contribute to their team’s attack. These are the components used to create the original ranking of the shortlisted players. Here I want to look at both output per 90 minutes and per 100 possessions as both have pros and cons and in my opinion slightly different uses.
I ranked the seventeen players in terms of their key passes and open play key passes per 90 minutes. Three or four clusters are clearly visible with Bertrand Traore, Florian Thauvin and Leon Bailey ranking lowest in terms of creativity. These three have 0%, 25% and 50% set piece dependancy respectively.
This bar graph shows the percentage of possessions that the player turns into a key pass. Chiesa leads the pack by created a 6 chances for every 100 times he has the ball. Bailey, Traore and Thauvin, the lowest cluster from the preview graph, rank towards the bottom again with Isco joining them.
Isco has the most possessions per 90 with 81.9. He doesn’t rank well in the attacking outputs and finished 14th on the rankings I started the article with. The Spaniard passes the ball 96.4% of the time he has possession, the highest in this respect. When he has possession he doesn’t do much with it, with just 3% of his passes creating chances. He keeps possession well but is the least likely to shoot or dribble when he gets the ball. Overall, this season he hasn’t brought the attacking output in the final third Chelsea needs.
However, he has played just 455 minutes. But, looking at last season where he played 1781 minutes. He had similar use of the ball, passing 94% and shooting and dribbling 3% and 3.6% respectively.
Back to the graph, Chiesa, Depay, Sancho and Dembélé stand out. They each create a key pass from open play with over 5% of their possessions. They are efficient and effective playmakers when they are in possession and make good use of the ball suggesting a progressive mindset.
Federico Chiesa
Chiesa is 21 years old and currently plays for Fiorentina after coming through their youth ranks. He ranked 4th in the initial rankings. He is however an interesting player who I want to consider closer than just his initial rank.
Let’s start with possession. Chiesa has the least possessions per 90 of the shortlisted players, just 29.8. The young Italian has just 6.9% of Fiorentina’s possession. He isn’t that involved in play. I think that in a dynamic attacking trio with high output, I think that Sarri would look for a player who looks to contribute a lot. However, I don’t know how much this depends on the style of the team he plays for. Under Sarri, he could be used and instructed differently and have more impact on the game.
Chiesa is likely to:
- Dribble at an opponent 19.6% of the time
- Shoot 12.9% of the time
- Create a chance 6.1% of the time
- Pass 81.9% of the time
He is most likely to shoot and dribble in possession and least likely to pass. I wonder how this behaviour may change if he was given more possession and a differing role in a Chelsea side.
Chiesa’s shot map isn’t very impressive with 53.3% coming from outside the box, converting 2.6% of these shots. We have already seen he shoots with 12.9% of his possession. He also has a lot of his shots blocked. To me this suggests that he can be wasteful in possession by shooting too much and in poor positioning where better options would be available.
Overall, Chiesa is a bit of a risk. His decision making is questionable but I’m not sure how to treat him. He is talented and still only 21. Despite debatable decisions, he still has impressive stats with 3.8 shots (most out of shortlist) and 1.8 open play key passes (8th most) per 90. Sarri could change develop him into a tidy forward who is more effective in possession but I can’t predict that.
Trimming the Shortlist
Here I want to concentrate on reducing the shortlist from 15 and make progress towards a conclusion.
First of all, Isco is out. As I discussed above, the extremely technical Spanish international doesn’t contribute enough in the final third for me. Sancho is also out as I don’t see him as realistic.
Until now I haven’t looked at expected goals and assists and relied on more traditional statistics.
Here is the expected output from the remaining 15 from this season. I’m going to eliminate Bailey, Traore, Brandt and Thauvin for their low expected assists. Leaving 11.
Thorgan Hazard looks really impressive with 0.8 scoring output per 90. However, these expected goals numbers include penalties. Thorgan has scored 10 goals last season in the Bundesliga. However, this isn’t so impressive considering 5 were penalties. He’s scored 7 so far this season, 3 of which have been penalties. He also missed one this season, adding up to 3.04 xG from penalties. So his NPxG per 90 is actually 0.16. His expected assist from open play also drops considerably as 50 of his key passes are from set pieces. Therefore, his output is much lower than the list above and is out.
I’ll also remove Eden Hazard and Willian here too. Kalu is gone as well as he is reliant on set pieces and has the lowest creativity from open play as well as not being involved much in matches.
Here is Suso’s shot map from the past six seasons. His shooting behaviour is very consistent, and bad. I even took out the few free kicks he’s taken. He clearly likes to cut in from his right wing and shoot, which is something I’m looking for. He shoots 7% of the time he is in possession. However, it’s not well executed. His xG per shot is an appalling 0.05. He likes to shoot from range with 67.5% of his shots coming outside of the box. Although, he is clearly decent from range and is overperforming his expected goals from distance, scoring 11 from 5 expected goals from outside the box. But, I have to remove him from the list for this poor shot selection.
De Paul is an interesting player to make the final six. I’d imagine he is relatively unknown to most people, including me. My guess is that he’d be less welcomed by the fans due to his lower reputation. The 24 year old Udinese winger makes the third most open play key passes and fourth most shots out of these remaining six. However, he shoots 65% from outside the box. His expected goals output is also inflated by two penalties from this season, which he scored one of. Meaning that his xG per 90 is actually just 0.07 and he is overperforming xG with 4 goals from 1.4 xG. So he’s out of contention.
Final Five
- Christian Pulisic
- Nicolas Pepe
- Ousmane Dembélé
- Federico Chiesa
- Memphis Depay
Christian Pulisic is just 20 but has to lowest rate of shots and key passes from the remaining candidates and therefore the lowest scoring output. Despite being a great dribbler and getting into good positions to create chances. But, I’m struggling to find reason to exclude him. He’s been linked strongly with Chelsea for about £60m. He also has the added bonus of an increased following and media from the US as Pulisic is currently the American golden boy and fan favourite.
Nicolas Pepe has scored 8 goals so far in Ligue 1, but 5 have been penalties. Reducing his expected goals per 90 to 0.37. This puts him third in scoring output of the remaining five.
Depay also isn’t naturally a right winger and if he went to Chelsea it is more likely that he’d be a striker for them. He is quite reliant on set pieces but still has the second highest highest open play key passes after Dembélé. He’s had a very impressive time since leaving Manchester United. He does shoot a lot from range and has overperformed in expected goals and assists since the start of last season. I have to far condemned large set pieces dependancy. 38.1% of his key passes are from set pieces but he still has a lot of open play creativity.
Therefore, here Depay offers a great option by bringing playmaking, scoring and a set piece taker to replace Willian. However, he has always played on the left or up front. This makes me sceptical of recommending him to be signed on the right as it could be a risk. Although, it’s arguable that players aren’t positions and if they have the skillset then they can be employed in different positions. However, I’m going to exclude him from the concluding ranking on this basis, although otherwise I would put him second.
I haven’t mentioned Ousmane Dembélé much yet. He’s had some issues at Barcelona reportedly, and apparently the Catalan club have concerns that he has a ‘gaming problem’ after missing training. I don’t know how realistic a target he is for Chelsea. He has the highest scoring output, is two footed, a great dribbler and shoots from good positions, with 68% coming from within the penalty area and is seen as a future Ballon D’Or contestant.
Overall, the final four would all be suitable signings to add to Sarri’s front line in their push for the Premier League and their Europa League campaign. They are all young talents still developing. Ousmane Dembélé and Memphis Depay seem the strongest candidates but Dembélé is possibly unattainable. Chiesa’s shot selection worries me, as does Pepe’s to a lesser extent. Pulisic is still only 20 and has a very high ceiling.
It is also worth mentioning that there is still the question of whether Chelsea actually need to replace Willian. However, the general consensus among Chelsea fans seems to be yes.
At this point to make the final decision I’d want to consult video and look at how they might fight into Sarri’s pressing side stylistically but I think this article is long enough.
My overall ranking of who I’d want to sign would be:
- Ousmane Dembélé
- Christian Pulisic
- Nicolas Pepe
- Frederico Chiesa
