Chelsea finished 10th in the Premier League 10 years ago but incredibly were champions of England just a year later under new manager Antonio Conte. After finishing in the same position last season, with no European football again and a new manager in Xabi Alonso, can the Blues repeat the feat? Chelsea's Premier League record in 2025-26 is almost identical to when they finished mid-table under interim manager Guus Hiddink a decade ago.
With just one more goal scored and one more conceded, they finished with the same goal difference and just two points more than they did in 2015-16. Few would have imagined back then that after finishing 31 points behind champions Leicester and below the likes of Southampton, West Ham and Stoke, Chelsea's players would be the ones lifting the Premier League trophy the following season. After starting the campaign playing a back four, a 3-0 defeat at Arsenal in just their sixth game saw Conte switch his side to a back three.
The impact was tremendous as they won their next 13 games in a row. It's a tactical switch that the Blues could make this season as well under new manager Alonso, given that his Bayer Leverkusen side won the Bundesliga unbeaten in 2023-24 playing three at the back. That incredible winning run gave Chelsea what proved to be an unassailable lead at the top of the Premier League, as they won 18 games more than in 2015-16 to win the title with 93 points.
Improving the club's points tally by a whopping 43 points again is undoubtedly a huge ask for Alonso's squad, given that it's the biggest points increase that any side has achieved to win the title in Premier League history (Leicester improved by 40 points the previous season). But they may not need to. While Arsenal will likely mount a stronger title defence than Leicester, the Gunners' points tally last season was the second-lowest to win the Premier League since Claudio Ranieri's side 10 years ago.
The bar to become champions has dropped in the last couple of seasons from the dizzying demands of the Guardiola-Klopp era – where even 97 points wasn't enough in 2018-19 – so Chelsea might not need to reach the 93 that they achieved under Conte. While Chelsea would still need to improve considerably to win the title, they were better than their lowly 10th-place finish last season suggests. Based on their underlying expected goal numbers, Chelsea were the fourth-most dominant team in the Premier League (although they drop to fifth once penalties are excluded).
The problem was that Chelsea struggled to take their chances. They scored eight fewer goals than they should have, given the number and quality of shots they took – just 58 from an xG of 66.3 – with only Crystal Palace and Wolves worse finishers than them last season. Bizarrely, the majority of that xG under-performance in front of goal came in just five games in March and April under Liam Rosenior.
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