Chelsea’s season is over, so there’s only one thing to do now – look ahead to next season. That’s the cycle of football for you – one season ends, the transfer window opens and you’re already thinking about the next campaign.
If you’re looking to bet some money somewhere like the Casumo Casino, you’ll see that Man City are heavy favourites to continue their sterile domination of the division with what would be a 5th title in 6 year.
They’re astonishingly short 4/6 favourites, with even Jurgen Klopp’s impressive Liverpool trailing them at 7/4.
The phenomenal distance between those two and Chelsea is pointed out by the gap that follows. Thomas Tuchel’s team are third favourites, but so far back that they’re given 20/1 odds.
Given we were looking like the best team in Europe for a while earlier this season, that seems harsh, but on the other hand we did fall away horribly in the second part of the season, and we still have a lot of unanswered questions in the team, while City look set to go to another level once again with the addition of Erling Haaland and Julian Alvarez.
Their forward planning is really paying off, while Chelsea seem to flounder from season to season, lurching from one manager to another, signing expensive players for each of them and then discarding the previous manager’s choices.
Even so, 20/1 seems very pessimistic given the evidence we’ve already seen that Thomas Tuchel is a top coach. That number really puts a lot of weight on what happened in the last couple of months of the season as our results collapsed, but we think that will quickly prove to be a slightly fugazi run of results.
Not only was there serious behind the scenes disruption with the ongoing spectre of the takeover, there were plenty of mitigating factors on the pitch too.
The team had little to play for in the league once they had fallen off the relentless pace of the leaders, and the defeats in the FA Cup and EFL Cup finals, as well as the manner of elimination from the Champions League, combined to form a really nasty cocktail of apathy and disappointment in the final stages.
After a summer off, refreshed with new signings, we think this team will come back and make that 20/1 look very harsh indeed. We might not catch the breakaway pair at the top next season, but we will run them a lot closer.
