294 yellow cards in three years
Xabi Alonso arrives at Cobham with a file on the desk. It has one colour all over it. Yellow. A great deal of yellow.
Since Mauricio Pochettino turned up in July 2023, no Premier League club has been booked more often than Chelsea. 294 yellows. 14 reds. Three of the eight biggest single-season card hauls in the competition’s history belong to the Blues, every one of them from 2023-24 onwards. Pochettino could not fix it. Nor could Enzo Maresca. Nor Liam Rosenior.
Alonso’s own record hardly settles the nerves. His Real Madrid side collected six red cards in 28 competitive fixtures last season, and between August and his sacking in mid-January only Real Oviedo were worse in Spain.
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Welbeck and Henderson are here to make the squad older
Chelsea have named the youngest starting XI in the Premier League three seasons running. The average sat at 24 years and 194 days last year. The bench was greener still at 22 years and 83 days, a full 18 months younger than anyone else in the league.
Thirty players appeared for the Blues in the league last season. Not one of them played a minute after turning 28. Their combined Premier League experience came to 2,184 appearances, with Pedro Neto leading the way on 180.
Which explains a strange summer. Danny Welbeck, 35. Jordan Henderson, 36. Between them, 863 Premier League games, two of only 46 players ever to pass 400 in the competition.
The reasoning gets clearer when you look at how Chelsea closed games out. They dropped 19 points from winning positions last season and clawed back only 14 from losing ones. Seventeen of those dropped points came at Stamford Bridge, three more than any other English club.
Palmer and Joao Pedro have very different grievances
Cole Palmer spent a year fading. Fourteen goal involvements in 34 competitive matches across 12 months, nine of them without a penalty attached. Before his goal at Sunderland on the final day, he had gone 12 appearances without scoring or assisting, the worst run of his Chelsea career. Thomas Tuchel left him out of England’s World Cup squad.
Alonso has already handed the No. 10 shirt to someone with history in that role. Florian Wirtz was involved in 74 non-penalty Bundesliga goals under him at Leverkusen. Across that period only Harry Kane, on 84, did more.
Joao Pedro has less to grumble about, at least on the pitch. Twenty-three goals in 53 games in his first Chelsea season, eight clear of any team-mate. Carlo Ancelotti still left him at home and took Neymar to the World Cup. He comes back rested, with seven goals in 348 pre-season minutes, and a point to make.
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