Chelsea are getting more goals from their substitutes this season than Maurizio Sarri did in any of his years at Napoli. His teams often leave it late, but these Blues more than ever.
Chelsea hired Maurizio Sarri – and fans quickly threw their support behind him – because of the wide-open, fluid, pass-and-attack nature of his trademark tactics. Napoli played the sort of beautiful, entertaining football that Roman Abramovich has supposedly craved over the last 15 years, but never found for any prolonged periods under his conveyor belt of managers.
Sarrismo’s fluidity necessarily goes in both directions. The more a Sarri team expands the pitch to ping passes at high speed, the more space they leave for a counter-attack or for any entreprising dynamism from their opponent. It should be little surprise, then, that for most of Sarri’s time at Napoli, periods of the game with lots of goals scored also had – relatively speaking – lots of goals conceded.
Taking our inspiration from Martin Laurence’s excellent article in The Guardian last week, we looked at all the goals Sarri’s Napoli and Chelsea scored in Serie A and the Premier League. Slicing the games up into 15-minute intervals, we can see how regularly the goals at either end of the pitch flow in the same direction. The 2017/18 season is the most notable exception, as Napoli scored an increasingy number of goals over the first 60 minutes while conceding fewer and fewer. Within each season, too, the relationship weakens a bit in the late stages of the game as things can open up, both teams throw on substitutes (more on that below) and opponents may throw in the towel as Sarri’s Napoli would run up the score.
In his first 13 Premier League matchweeks, the pattern is much the same. However, the Blues are scoring a far higher percentage of their goals in the final 30 minutes – the final 15, even – than Napoli ever did.
Over his three seasons at Napoli, Sarri’s sides scored about 26% of their goals in the first 30 minutes, 37% in the middle 30 minutes and 38% in the final 30 minutes.
So far at Chelsea, the first half-hour is comparable: 22% of the goals scored. However, the Blues do not pick up steam in the middle 30 minutes. They score 26% – that is to say, one additional goal – in the middle 30. Just over half of their goals, then, come in the final 30 minutes of games. In fact, of those 14 goals (not counting an own goal), 10 came in the final 15 minutes.
Because the goals are coming so late, the substitutes are scoring a decent share of them. Six of Chelsea’s 28 Premier League goals have been from substitutes: one each from Alvaro Morata, Pedro, Willian, Olivier Giroud, Ross Barkley and Ruben Loftus-Cheek.
Six substitute goals matches the season-long output from Napoli in 2015/16 and 2017/18, and is only two shy of what Napoli’s subs managed in 2016/17. As a percentage of total goals scored, Sarri’s Napoli subs never produced more than single digits. At Chelsea, they account for over one-fifth.
The opening 15 minutes has been the quietest period for Chelsea throughout the season. They have only scored one goal and conceded one goal in the first 15 minutes this season. Napoli, on the other hand, frequently opened their scoring within the first 15 minutes and almost as frequently conceded.
This speaks to Chelsea’s continuing development under Maurizio Sarri, and how they still need time to work their way into the rhythm of a game. It also highlights their vulnerability in this period, as Tottenham showed most effectively but even Burnley kept Chelsea shakily the backfoot for the first 20 minutes in matchweek 10. Keen opponents will add this to the list of exploitable patterns in Chelsea under Maurizio Sarri.
The first hour of games last season at Napoli shows what could lie ahead for the Blues as they build Sarrismo competence. They had all the goal-scoring effectiveness that defines the system without the defensive vulnerabilities that currently haunt Chelsea. After two seasons, they likely also had a psychological edge over their opponents, who would should show Napoli too much respect early on and would struggle to recover from this mistake.
Chelsea have already taken on many of the characteristics of a Maurizio Sarri team, for better or worse. He is a man of patterns and habits, above all else, and his teams reflect that.