Chelsea deserved top four despite Tottenham’s final day favor

Many are confusing “Spurs did Chelsea a favor” with “Chelsea don’t deserve top four, they were gifted it”. Did Tottenham do the Blues a favor in the Blues’ top four race? Yes. Did the Blues deserve fourth place or better after 38 match days? Yes. Are the Blues finishing fourth because of Tottenham and Gareth Bale? No.

There’s a reason Jose Mourinho said it’s easier to win the Champions League than to win the Premier League. The Champions League is 13 games from the group stage to the final. You play 13 champions League matches if you reach the final. That’s not up to 35% of a league season. Your Champions League campaign could end even after six games, or eight games. The amount of times the favorites to win the Champions League have actually won the UCL is countable on one hand probably. In cup/knockout football, your campaign could end on your one bad day.

Inter Milan 2009/10 beat Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona super team to win the UCL. Mourinho’s FC Porto beat teams who were favorites too, well more of favorites than them anyway. The Blues beat Bayern Munich in the Champions League final in their own stadium. Mourinho never reached a Champions league final with his Chelsea super team made up of Frank Lampard, John Terry, Didier Drogba and Petr Cech, while winning the league two times in a row at a canter.

In league football, it’s difficult to win the league in “moments”. It’s difficult to win the league on single game days except the final match day. The Premier League runs for 10 months (often August till May). Over a long period of time, trends stick, patterns are established, consistency wins out. The reason fans often get the “we don’t deserve X place despite being there after Championship Sunday” vibe is because they take the blanket quotes “x place is in our hands, if we win all our games from now till…” too seriously.

No team is guaranteed to win any amount of games in any stretch of time, not even if you’re the better team in all those games. No team will win all their games in the season. Teams lose at every point in the season at different ends of the table. Some times are just more convenient to lose than others. You don’t finish in a certain spot after 38 match days if you haven’t done enough to be there in the first place.

An example is “they’re top of the table with a game ahead”. That is how many teams get to the top of the table and stay there. You often first go top of the table with a game ahead, before being top of the table period. A team will have to do their part to get to the top of the table, even if temporarily. They then stay there when the teams with a game in hand don’t their own part. However, whoever is at the top of the table cannot remain there if the teams supposedly with a game in hand get their own job done.

Many Chelsea fans have expressed dissatisfaction over the team’s inability to put away an Aston Villa side they created seven clear cut chances against. This is understandable. Thomas Tuchel though, has acknowledged that the Blues have accomplished top four and it has been a good season overall. This has irritated many fans, as they feel Tuchel shouldn’t be happy that he got a favor on the final game of the season that seemingly secured his place.

Tuchel understands though, that you cannot control everything, or anything, in football. Even goals, you cannot control how many goals you score, if any team could, they’d score as much as they wanted. Tuchel arrived on January 26, 2021 after the Blues had played 19 games and were sitting on 29 points, at exactly half way point in the season, 11 points from the summit and five points from top 4.

Of those above Chelsea at the time, the Blues had only won against one: West Ham. Of the rest the Blues had lost to four of them and drawn three. This meant that the Blues had to take points directly from those teams above them, especially the more difficult ones in Manchester United, West Ham, Tottenham Hotspur, Liverpool, Leicester, Everton, and Manchester City. If the Blues did not do this, they had little to no chance of getting top four.

The Blues later beat Manchester City, Liverpool, Leicester and Everton and Tottenham while just conceding a combined 1 goal. They drew to Manchester United and Leeds, conceding nothing. Those results are to the Blues credit, and they’d later turn out to be crucial wins indeed. Every team that finished in top four this season got favors at different points in the season, even Liverpool. The fact that Chelsea’s own came on the final day of the season shouldn’t make it define the whole season. It sure shouldn’t make people talk about the season like the final day happened in isolation.

Liverpool at some point this season lost six home games in a row and found themselves in seventh place. They deserved to be there as well. On getting to the business end of the season they picked themselves up and won their last five games to finish third. Their own “favor” came in Match Day 37 when their top four rivals the Blues beat their other top four rivals Leicester, and they capitalized. Guess what though, Liverpool still had to do their own part of “finish” there and they did. Liverpool found themselves needing to win their last five games of the season to give themselves a chance of getting into the top four, they did. Obviously their results didn’t happen in a vacuum, but they did their part when they needed to, just like Chelsea got their points and wins when they needed to.

League results are not based on one Match Day, not even the “most important match day” because that’s always relative. An extreme example of this is if you concede 38 goals in your first game of the season, you still have 37 matches to fix that, because you don’t climb up the table with goal difference, you climb up the table with points.

If Chelsea is fourth after 38 games in a league season, it’s because they deserve to be there, like Manchester City deserve to be champions for the third time in four years; Like Manchester United deserve to be comfortably second, going unbeaten away in the whole season; Like Liverpool deserve to be third, after picking up 26 points from their last 30 available points despite being seventh and in horrible form at some point. In league football, consistency always wins out. Always.

That said, buy Erling Haaland, seriously Chelsea needs to start finishing these chances.