Can things get any worse for Chelsea? They won’t like the answer

The Roynaissance has come at a cost. Not to Crystal Palace or Roy Hodgson but to his captain in his last game at a World Cup. Nine years after Frank Lampard led England in a stalemate against Costa Rica to ensure Hodgson’s team left the tournament with a solitary point, he finds himself at the helm of another side facing a historic low.

Crystal Palace’s win over West Ham demoted Chelsea to the status of the sixth-best team in London, at least if the standings are to be believed, and puts them 12^th in the table. End the season now and it would be their worst finish since 1994.

Yet that was before Chelsea were in the elite, before the era of the superclub. Now such clubs can only fall so far, protected by their greater resources and talent. As a general rule, they bottom out in eighth place. Liverpool are set for a 61^st consecutive top-eight finish, Manchester United for a 33^rd in the top seven; even amid the seeming disaster of some seasons since Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement, they never actually finished eighth, let alone below that. Arsenal had twin years that ended in eighth under Mikel Arteta, falling as far as 15^th during the 2020-21 campaign, but have not ended up any lower since 1995. Since being supercharged by Sheikh Mansour’s investment, Manchester City came fifth in the 2009-2010 campaign and in the top four ever since. Tottenham gravitated more organically to the higher bracket but even traumatic campaigns have ended in the top eight.

So Antonio Conte, in a mischievous fit, coined a term for a year so bad it stood out: ‘the Mourinho season,’ when Chelsea came 10^th in 2015-16. It transpires ‘the Todd Boehly season’ may be even worse. “We’re not in a great moment, are we?” asked Lampard rhetorically. “I’ve been able to live this now for a few weeks and I also lived maybe 10 years of incredible success here and saw that continue. I think it can be pretty normal, if you look at the history of all of the top clubs in the league, of moments, of tough periods.”

Yet the scale of this underachievement is abnormal, even before the £600m outlay on players renders it still more embarrassing. Two years after winning the Champions League, 15 months after lifting the Club World Cup, Chelsea are standing out from everyone else for a very different reason. If their campaign has often posed the question of whether it can get any worse, the answer has always arrived in the affirmative.

Now the fixture list comes laced with peril. Chelsea’s last six fixtures include four against the top four; their diabolical record against the sides in the upper half includes a solitary point and a lone goal against the quartet who look bound for the Champions League, while they have already been beaten three times by City this season. Then there is Saturday’s trip to Bournemouth where, unless they beat Arsenal, defeat would leave them below Gary O’Neil’s team. Only a home game against a Nottingham Forest team with the worst away record in the country offers respite. Otherwise, it might be logical to predict their year would end with six more losses.

And Chelsea’s awful April, terrible 2023 and lamentable last six months make their recent return ominous. Since Lampard returned, they have lost five successive games for the first time since 1993. They scored one goal in seven matches in April in all competitions. They took one point in the month, the joint fewest; over the calendar year, only two clubs have fewer points, and none less goals. They are in the bottom three of the table for results since October’s draw with United. If they are safe from relegation, it may only be because Thomas Tuchel won three of their first six games before, in a fit of genius, Chelsea sacked him.

A trip to the Emirates is a rematch of the 2020 FA Cup final; Mikel Arteta won a battle of young managers fast-tracked to the top job at their former clubs; his and Lampard’s careers have gone in different directions since then. Arteta’s Arsenal have been top for 247 days and the Spaniard insisted the title race is not over. End up second and he has still taken a seismic step forward.

“From the coaching side, it’s great to see a club stick with a manager when maybe at another club they may have changed a manager two or three times,” said Lampard; including caretakers, Chelsea are on their fourth manager of the current campaign.

The more people involved, the worse it seems to get. Lampard described his team, perhaps unintentionally cuttingly, as “low on confidence and also low on performance”. They are scarcely short on players, given the surfeit at Stamford Bridge, but there will be a patched-up look: Mason Mount and Reece James are out for the season, Kalidou Koulibaly may be and Marc Cucurella is sidelined for two weeks. But Kai Havertz is back and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang could make a first return to the Emirates since being exiled by Arteta.

The quest for goals may yet involve him; Aubameyang twice scored 22 in a Premier League campaign for Arsenal whereas Chelsea have only scored 22 since Tuchel’s September sacking. “The reality of football is, your career will not be full of successes,” argued Lampard, though his playing days were stacked full of achievements. But now Chelsea are simply trying to mitigate failure, to stop testing the theory of how bad it could get.