Why Chelsea score so few goals and how crucial big chances are

Chelsea, as at the writing of this piece, has created 41 clear cut chances in 21 games. For a team that control 59% of the ball in every game without fail, that’s really poor. The Blues don’t have bad strikers, they just have starving strikers. Their goals are coming from where you’d typically want them to come from, but there just isn’t much to draw from. Toulouse, a newly-promoted team in the Ligue 1 has created 12 more big chances in the same amount of games. This is poor from Chelsea.

This inability to get goals, is also something that Chelsea head coach Graham Potter suffered in all three seasons at Brighton as well, in his last full season at Brighton he was only able to distribute the goals better to finish 9th in the Premier League. This scoring problem was traceable to a lack of big chances as well. In Potter’s highest ever league finish with Brighton, the seagulls created 12.9 chances per game, 489 chances in all. They only created 61 big chances though, which accounted for 12% of their shots. From that 12%, they scored 45% of their league goals, which is normal.

There’s a narrative that Potter’s Brighton team usually underperformed their xG and those teams just had finishing issues, but his team finished chances fine, they just didn’t create enough of the good chances. This is not just true for his last season at Brighton, but his first and second too. In the 2020/21 season, big chances accounted for 13% of Brighton’s shots, and from that came 48% of their league goals. These figures were worse in his first season at Brighton, as from 13% of their shots came 28% of their goals. Potter’s Brighton didn’t underperform as much as was reported, they just struggled to create enough good chances. This is the same problem his Chelsea team is having. xG numbers are primarily from fbref, big chance numbers are primarily from Sofascore