Alvaro Morata scored 10 goals between the season opener and Boxing Day, and has not scored since. He is at the extreme end of a regular trend among Chelsea strikers of a hot start followed by a significant cooling off.
Alvaro Morata has yet to score in 2018, having made five Premier League appearances and been out of the lineup for three others. Combined with his tendency to go to ground under the slightest contact (or gust of wind), his drought has many Chelsea watchers declaring him the successor to Fernando Torres (or Andriy Schevchenko) rather than Diego Costa.
However, Morata started his Chelsea career strongly, putting himself on pace for a 20-goal season through the festive period. Morata followed a trend of his recent predecessors by blazing his start to the season and then tapering off as the matches wear on.
Diego Costa was Chelsea’s leading scorer in each of his three seasons at the club. Before him, the last two times the Blues’ centre-forwards led the team in Premier League goals was Daniel Sturridge in 2011/12 and Didier Drogba in 2009/10. Of those five seasons, only Drogba continued his scoring pace throughout the season.
Drogba opened his 2009/10 season with nine goals in the first 13 games. He followed those with eight goals in the middle third of the season and then – always the player to come through in the clutch – closed out the campaign with 12 goals. He is the only striker of the five seasons examined to score more goals in the final third of the season than the first.
Diego Costa only increased his goal output from the first third to the second third of the season once, in 2015/16 (Jose Mourinho could not be reached for comment). In his other two seasons he, like Sturridge, saw his output cut in half over the middle 13 fixtures.
Morata had the most significant drop, with his second 13-game span netting only one-quarter the goals as his first. However, across the first two-thirds of the season he scored as many as Costa in 2015/16 and one more than Sturridge in 2011/12.
The spread of Chelsea’s leading-scorer strikers ranges from 11 goals by Sturridge to Drogba’s 29. Despite this wide range of goals, they accomplished their feats in a narrower range of appearances. Costa had the fewest (26 in 2014/15) and most (35 in 2015/16) appearances in this study.
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Morata’s goalless drought seems particularly severe because it spans five games in a row. However, his one goal in six games (going back to Brighton) is only one goal shy of being the same output as Costa’s three goals in nine games to start the 2015/16 season. And it is the same as Sturridge’s two goals in 12 games to close out 2011/12.
The 2011/12 and 2015/16 seasons are not the benchmarks Chelsea nor their strikers want to measure against. The Blues finished sixth in 2011/12 and 10th in 2015/16. If Alvaro Morata is an indicator of a season like that, Chelsea fans have every reason to be concerned.
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However, their concern should be with the club as a whole and not one player. Morata is more of an outlier for his first 13 games than he is for his first 22, and certainly more than his last five.