Chelsea improve from 61st to 26th best team in Europe – Pochettino has solid evidence for his review | OneFootball

Now that the top 5 leagues across Europe are all completed or just one game away from being done, it’s great fun to look at FBRef’s combined Big 5 table and work out how Chelsea rank against their peers across the continent.

Given that this is how the Champions League is going to work next season (more or less), a big league table of all the best teams in Europe, it’s like a little preview of that. Chelsea won’t be in the Champions League of course, they’ll be in the Europa League or the Conference League depending on the FA Cup final result.

That seems fair, given they’re ranked as the 26th best side in the big 5 by points per game. By xG per game we’re way up in 17th, showing once again how much some improved finishing could help us next year. Our xG difference also has us in 17th, showing that basically some bad finishing and some soft goals conceded caused us to suffer pretty badly – the different between 26th and 17th on a scale of 96 total teams is pretty immense if you think about it.

A huge step forward by the numbers

The intentions of the owners is to have a team which is among the top 5 or so teams in Europe, not the 26th. But it’s a towering improvement on last year where we were only 61st in terms of points per match. That put us behind teams like Rayo Vallecano, Monza and Clermont Foot, if you were wondering.

Our xG difference had us in 48th, so there has been a big improvement in both performance and results, just going by the numbers. These are the kind of stats that Mauricio Pochettino is going to be pointing to in his notorious performance review over the next few days – and we have to say, they’re very much in his favour.