The soundtrack is blander, biting criticisms replaced by forgettable musings, the sense of a self-destructive manager blowing his empire up has gone, with quiet, vague notions of progress in vogue instead, but in a sense Chelsea have not been transformed by regime change.
At least one problem remains the same. They do not score enough goals. Not under Thomas Tuchel and not under Graham Potter either. Compile a league table over the last four rounds of fixtures and Chelsea are the lowest scorers: two goals in four games leaves them behind even Wolves. A meagre haul of two points in four games is why they will not spend the World Cup in the top four. A derby defeat to Arsenal was an exercise in attacking impotence: just five shots, with only one on target, a mere eight touches for Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, an expected goals total of 0.28, their lowest in the top flight for over a year. There was a bland bluntness to Chelsea.
A beguiling trait of Chelsea over the last two decades is how the characteristics could remain as the manager changed. Potter got the new-manager bump that Tuchel experienced; that most of their predecessors did, too. For years, Chelsea were resourceful, redoubtable winners, no matter who was in charge. They were a byword for pragmatism. Now, whoever is in the dugout, they struggle to be prolific enough.
Even with Romelu Lukaku’s failure, they mustered their highest tally in five seasons last year, 76 in the league. It was insufficient to compete with Liverpool and Manchester City. It feels far off when they have 17 now, outscored by Brighton and Brentford, Leeds and Leicester, way behind their neighbours from Fulham.
After a change of manager, they still contrive to be still less than the sum of their expensive attacking parts. Raheem Sterling is yet to score a league goal for Potter. Aubameyang has one. Neither has an assist. Kai Havertz has a more respectable two goals, but has created virtually nothing. Mason Mount has been Potter’s most productive performer but was muted against Arsenal; Potter rebuffed suggestions he erred in selecting the Englishman against Dinamo Zagreb, leaving him overworked ahead of a more demanding test. Hakim Ziyech feels an afterthought. Christian Pulisic, Conor Gallagher and Armando Broja may yet all be beneficiaries of the new regime, but it feels too soon to say.
The Potter-esque way is to focus on the collective. “We need to do better in terms of how we create chances because otherwise you’re zooming in on individuals and it’s a team issue,” he said. And an increasingly big team issue. “We huffed and puffed, I thought,” he said after defeat to Arsenal. “We had an idea of what we wanted to do but we couldn’t execute it.” It was hard to work out what that idea was but Potter added: “We’re not in a fantastic moment. We didn’t function as fluently as we would like. If I am looking at how we build our attacks generally, we not as fluid and in as good a place as I would like us to be.”
The statistics back up the evidence of the naked eye. Over the course of Potter’s seven-game reign in the Premier League, Chelsea have the fifth lowest expected goals, behind all three promoted clubs. Some of their expected assists per 90 minutes figures are negligible: 0.09 for Sterling and Aubameyang, 0.05 for Havertz.
They can sign wingers, strikers and No 10s and yet they feel over-reliant on wing-backs for creativity. Their title challenge ended last winter when deprived of Reece James and Ben Chilwell. Now James has missed their last five league matches; while Chilwell is now sidelined for longer, he is yet to fashion a chance of note in Potter’s reign.
A lack of end product felt more forgivable at Brighton, Potter’s former club started to turn their problems with expected goals into a social-media joke. Yet the underlying point was that Albion delivered chances and, at times, Neal Maupay found remarkable ways to miss them.
Now Chelsea are barely creating them; those they do forge tend to stem from set pieces. One of those two goals in the last four games was a Jorginho penalty, courtesy of a needless foul by Scott McTominay. Trevoh Chalobah hit the post against Manchester United, but from a corner. Their best opportunity against Arsenal, for Thiago Silva, also came from a corner.
Chelsea’s haphazard way of compiling a squad is a contributory factor; underachiever as each is now, Sterling, Havertz and Aubameyang are scarcely creative forwards; none looks particularly suited to combining with the others. Yet while Potter is entitled to talk of being at the start of a “process”, part of the rationale for his recruitment was that if he was given superior players, he could get the goals that eluded Brighton. And Chelsea’s recent experience in the Premier League is that Potter has only made one team score a handful of goals: and that was Brighton, when he lost on his return to his old club.
