The best stat to judge Chelsea’s Premier League campaign so far – green light for Maresca | OneFootball

Chelsea have reached the first international break of the season, and with the transfer window now closed and a fortnight to work on the training ground with players, we can consider this an important first staging post for Enzo Maresca and his players.

It’s been a mixed bag, especially when you consider the two disappointing performances against Servette in the UEFA Europa Conference League. But ignore those two games (which seems reasonable given they were played with an almost entirely second string XI) and what are you left with?

3 games in the Premier League – a win, a loss and a draw. The loss was against the best team in the league, the win was very convincing, and the draw could have been a win with some better finishing. Ignoring points on the board, and fans would be pretty happy. The dreadful defensive errors from preseason have been kept to a minimum, and there have been some really impressive flashes of attacking play.

Chelsea team look delighted after big win at Wolves.

xG shows Chelsea made good start to the season

While at this stage of the season all stats are heavily conditioned by the opposition you’ve faced, we can certainly take a first reading of the Blues’ temperature now and see how it changes through the next stage of the season.

As it stands, WhoScored’s xG table has us creating 0.71 more xG per game than we’re conceding. That puts us 15th in all of Europe’s top 5 leagues. Simply put, we’re creating better chances than we’re conceding, by a healthy margin. If we continue to move up this table, we will continue to move up the Premier League table, it’s as simple as that.

Keep the defensive errors out of our game and keep attacking well and we can climb into the top ten here. Let’s check back in October…