Can Xabi Alonso get more out of Cole Palmer and co this season? 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. Despite taking 73 shots worth 5.5 xG, the side lost five successive league games without scoring for the first time in 114 years – a run of defeats that saw Rosenior ousted as head coach.

Did Chelsea become bad finishers, was it simply a run of bad luck or was it something else? Whatever the reason, the Blues are unlikely to suffer such a sudden slump again this season. Given where they finished, the Blues will not be playing in any European competition this campaign. While that's obviously something clubs the size of Chelsea seek to avoid, there are benefits to playing just one game a week.

Since the so-called 'Big Six' – Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Man City, Man Utd and Tottenham – all finished in the top six of the Premier League for the first time in 2010-11, nine of their sides have had no European football to play, with Chelsea and Tottenham set to join that list this season. All but one have finished higher in the Premier League, with sides moving up five places and taking 16 more points on average than they did the previous season.

While Conte's Chelsea obviously took full advantage by winning the title, Liverpool also came very close to lifting their first Premier League trophy in 2013-14. After finishing seventh the season before, an absence of European football saw them take 23 more points but they ultimately fell just two short behind champions Manchester City.

Manchester United also took advantage of playing once a week last season by taking 29 more points than they did in 2024-25 to finish third, although there was a lot of room for improvement after finishing 15th with just 42 points the season before.

Chelsea's transformation under Antonio Conte was incredible, but there's another title-winning side that can match it – Alonso's Bayer Leverkusen in 2023-24. After taking over as manager in October 2022 with the club in the relegation zone, Alonso led them to a sixth-place finish that season with 50 points – the same tally as Chelsea in both 2015-16 and last season (although Bundesliga sides play four fewer games).

Then in his first full season in charge, Leverkusen incredibly took 40 more points in 2023-24 – just three fewer than Conte's Chelsea did – to win their first-ever Bundesliga title without losing a single game. Only two sides in Premier League history have finished outside the top three one season and won the title the next – Leicester in 2015-16 and Chelsea a year later – so the Blues repeating such a feat would be remarkable.

But with a team better than they looked last season, the benefit of no European football and a new manager that's already pulled off a miraculous transformation at one of his former clubs, it's certainly not impossible.

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