Chelsea Are Xabi Alonso's Beautiful, Unhinged Premier League Outlier

Welcome to the Xabi Alonso Chaos Experiment

If Chelsea keep this up, they are heading for a successful season. Through Xabi Alonso's first three matches, they have the fourth-most points in the Premier League, only behind Arsenal, Manchester City, and, uh, Hull City. They are tied for the league lead in goals. Two wins from three have them on pace for a 76-point haul. And they have done it against one of the trickier schedules in the league: away to Fulham, home to Brighton, then a loss away to Arsenal, the toughest fixture they will face all year. Per Opta's power rankings, only Coventry City have faced a harder slate.

Chelsea spent big on Morgan Rogers, and he looks fantastic. Cole Palmer seems back to his best. João Pedro looks like he has officially become one of the best strikers in the world. That front three has been electric. After finishing 10th last season and cycling through three managers, Chelsea now look like one of the few Premier League clubs on an upward trajectory. That is all true, unless you actually watched the games. Because Chelsea's first three matches have been absolutely out of control.

Why This Chelsea Team Is Unlike Anything We Have Seen

Through three matches, Chelsea have been one of the best attacking teams in the Premier League. They have scored eight goals, tied for first. They have created 5.56 non-penalty expected goals, fifth. They have attempted 48 shots, sixth. They have generated 93 touches inside the penalty area, seventh. And the numbers are even better than they look, because one-third of their match time came on the road against one of the best defensive teams we have ever seen. Arsenal have conceded a total of 0.93 expected goals through three matches; only Manchester City have conceded fewer xG per game. Put another way: Liverpool have played one of the easiest schedules in the league, built a team out of players whose best skill is attacking, and still generated fewer xG and penalty area touches than Chelsea.

So what is the big deal? It is that we have never seen a team do it like this. Quite literally. Through three games, Chelsea have 36.3% of the possession in their matches, second-fewest in the league. Even if we adjust for more meaningful possession by looking only at possession in the attacking third, what we will call field tilt, Alonso's team only rises to 17th out of 20. That is a massive outlier in all sorts of ways.

Since the 2009-10 season, there have been 58 Premier League teams who generated a field tilt of less than 40% over their first three games of the season. Chelsea rank first in xG, shots, and penalty area touches. In fact, only five teams have generated even 4.0 xG from a sub-40% field tilt over the opening trio of matches: Brentford in 2024-25, who finished 10th; Brentford in 2023-24, 16th; West Ham in 2023-24, ninth; Tottenham in 2022-23, eighth; and Leicester City in 2017-18, ninth. Over a full season, no Premier League team since 2009-10 has finished with a field tilt below 40% and a positive goal differential. The best is Newcastle's minus-1 mark in 2018-19. The most points from a team below that control threshold is Swansea City's 56 in 2014-15, which finished eighth. Expand across Europe's Big Five top leagues, and Espanyol in 2016-17 match Swansea as the high points total, while Koln recorded the best goal differential of a sub-40 field-tilt team with plus-10 in 2015-16.

Teams that play like Chelsea have played over their first three games have always banged up against a ceiling since the start of the previous decade. Ceding or failing to control the field has never resulted in anything better than an upper-midtable finish.

Can Chelsea Keep Winning Without Controlling the Ball?

There are mitigating factors. Chelsea have led for 195 of the minutes they have played this season. That is the 10th-longest stretch over the first three matches of a season since 2009-10. Teams tend to play less aggressively once they take a lead, and Chelsea have scored in the first, fourth, and second minute of their three opening games. But Chelsea's total lack of control is still an outlier among early-season early-scorers. Nineteen different teams have led for at least 180 minutes over their first three matches since 2009, and Swansea City are the only other one with a field tilt below 40%. The average among those teams is 56.5%.

The five Champions League qualifiers from the Premier League last season averaged 3.6 matches with a sub-40% field tilt. The top two, Arsenal and Manchester City, each produced two across the whole season. Chelsea have three from their first three games. And although a game against Arsenal will skew anyone's numbers, the skews were even more extreme before Chelsea played Arsenal.

To make things even stranger, this is the exact opposite of what we have seen from Alonso's previous teams. Across his two full seasons coaching Bayer Leverkusen and his half-year with Real Madrid, 65% was the lowest field tilt any of his teams produced. When those sides were winning, that number dropped to 60%. The Bundesliga as a whole eschews control, and Alonso's Leverkusen stood out for how much control they wanted. Real Madrid always have lots of the ball in LaLiga because they have so much talent, but Alonso's Madrid had more control than any Madrid side we have seen in a long time. If anything, Alonso's desire for control, and what it required from superstars like Kylian Mbappé and Vinícius Júnior, is what led to his demise.

Perhaps Alonso does not want a repeat of what happened in Madrid. Had he tailored his approach to his three star attackers, Mbappé, Vinícius, and Jude Bellingham, the way he has with Chelsea, then he would probably still be sitting on the sideline in Spain. Exerting control nowadays requires organized and aggressive pressing from your attackers to win the ball back after you lose it. His Madrid players refused to do it. And now, Chelsea have been the least aggressive pressing team in the Premier League through the first three matches. They are allowing a league-high 18.89 passes per defensive action, while the league average is 12.20.

But the dialed-back press has not made Chelsea particularly hard to break down. They have conceded the fifth-most shots in the league, the 11th-most xG, and the second-most touches inside the penalty area.

Maybe the solution is the currently injured Moisés Caicedo. He has only played 14 minutes this season, and dropping one of the best defensive midfielders in the world into this system will obviously help. Not only should he give Chelsea a little more control, but he should be able to break up more opposition possessions before they reach the penalty area. If that is true, though, then the club have given themselves a very narrow path to success with the summer departures of Enzo Fernández to Manchester City and Andrey Santos to Manchester United. Beyond Caicedo, these are Chelsea's midfield options: Romeo Lavia, who has played 1,400 minutes for Chelsea over the last three seasons; Reece James, who has played fullback for most of his career and has broken 2,000 minutes in the Premier League once, six years ago; Jordan Henderson, who is 36 years old; and Malo Gusto, who has also played midfield minutes, but only about 300 of his 13,000 minutes as a pro have come in the middle. He is, by almost any definition, a fullback.

So maybe the most interesting question for the rest of the Premier League season is: what comes next for Chelsea? Are they really going to keep playing like this? And if they do not, then why did they do it in the first place? If Chelsea evolve to take more control, then the second-most interesting question is: how will they do it? Chelsea's best players are their attackers, and not having the ball and allowing them to run into space is getting the best out of all three. Plus, beyond Caicedo, Chelsea really do not have the kind of midfielders you can rely on to pin the opposition back and suffocate them with passing and pressing. Can Alonso figure out how to maintain the attacking firepower without the defense getting buried under an avalanche of chances? After three games, there are a lot more questions than there were before the season started.