Chelsea what ifs: The season was never delayed indefinitely

Football has been gone for a while and will be gone for a while yet. What would the season have looked like for Chelsea had it continued?

COVID-19 has been sweeping through the world causing havoc. It has been nearly a month since Chelsea last played and the early May start date seems to have been reconsidered as well. Whenever football does resume, the world and the game will look much different than it did beforehand.

But what if the season was never halted? What if COVID-19 did not cause any league to halt? What would the season have become?

Chelsea had a thumping victory against Everton just before the break with a soft ball match against Aston Villa leading into a near dead rubber with Bayern Munich. It seems likely Chelsea would have defeated Aston Villa and put up a fight against Munich, albeit not one enough to overcome the aggregate.

It would probably be around this point that the first Chelsea players begin getting sick. The Premier League urges everyone on, but things are not getting any better. Stadiums are closed, sure, but that does not save the players from contracting the illness.

A tricky run against Manchester City and West Ham in the Premier League and Leicester City in the FA Cup (which Chelsea narrowly win) is marred by the increasingly thin squads and coaching staff getting sick.

Liverpool will have won the title mathematically by this point and they begin to lead the campaign to stop the season. Manchester City agree. Other clubs fighting for top four stay silent until the government begins locking down the country. Football becomes delayed regardless, but at the cost of players and coaches and their families being exposed along the way.

The potential solutions on what to do with the season from there do change however. With Liverpool having won their title “the right way” there is less of a consideration for finishing the season just to finish the season. A playoff style end to the season is floated but ultimately the clubs agree (or are told in some cases) that a points per game method will be used.

Chelsea make the Champions League but only just. The actual Champions League is frozen in the quarterfinals rather than halfway through the Round of 16 being done as happened in reality. Both that and the FA Cup are to be finished early in the 2020/2021 season.

But perhaps the biggest event is how the players react. Many of the players feel unjustly used as the league’s continued. Many look at how their club acted and the precautions they took (or did not) and opt to make moves. The transfer window sees an exodus across Europe but especially in the Premier League.

COVID-19 is no joke. The Premier League and leagues around Europe absolutely made the correct decision to stop play. If anything, it should have happened weeks earlier. Delaying the leagues even more until all of this settles down is absolutely the correct decision. It will be tricky to figure out a path forward, but that is certainly better than having tried to push through the epidemic only to be stopped regardless.

What other what ifs would you like to see? Let us know in the comments and on Twitter!