Chelsea’s season in one sentence: a shambles so intense that the swing from the former league-winning reality to the current below-mid-table offering is already so deeply ingrained, 10 games in, losses to West Ham are no longer shocking—they’re kind of what we expect to see.
“Chelsea, the Champions, lost again? How passé,” we would remark, if we were even moved to comment on it any more.
That’s quite a shift. It’s also a sudden enough implosion to have left a decent power-vacuum right at the top of the Premier League. Where last season’s title race felt all-but comfortably decided by this point in October—a sharp Manchester City rise and equivalent fall notwithstanding—this season anyone who looks up the current table will note that five teams sit within three points of top spot, two of them Leicester City and West Ham, who are really not supposed to be there under any circumstances. After a year full of certainty, the league has opened up. Now, uncertainty rules, and Chelsea doesn’t.
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Of course, this isn’t all Chelsea’s fault. It’s everyone else’s too.
Manchester City was clearly supposed to step up in case of Jose Mourinho-related emergencies, Raheem Sterling and Kevin De Bruyne calmly replacing the dark blue ribbons on the Premier League trophy with light blue City ones, no fuss required. But it hasn’t happened. Instead Manuel Pellegrini’s team has so far trodden out a slightly bizarre, barely coherent season—acting in one moment as a high-class super-team might be expected to, flicking five past Bournemouth and six past Newcastle, but then in another acting in the complete opposite manner, losing 4-1 to Tottenham and retreating all the way back into a dim 0-0 draw in the Manchester derby.
This isn’t the behaviour of a team that can be relied upon to quell uncertainty—it’s a team that will inevitably feed into that uncertainty, sustaining and enhancing it until we all cry out “Save us, Jose Mourinho! Save us!”
Then there’s Manchester United, the other team involved in that disappointing derby. It’s offered the odd suggestion that it can be more than a top-four hopeful, but for every one of those suggestions there’s a 3-0 defeat to Arsenal or a tendency to play Antony Martial out wide while prioritizing Wayne Rooney in the main forward role. This is of equally little help in looking to back a title winner. There’s nothing to grasp onto. I mean, Louis Van Gaal has been reduced to pointing out that his team hasn’t had much luck so far, and that’s never a good sign.
Which really leaves only Arsenal of the realistic contenders to look at, and we all know how that process plays out.
To be fair to Arsene Wenger’s team, it is currently playing by far the most convincing football in the division, graduating from “hopefully challenging” Bayern Munich to actually beating it last week, with one of the strongest European performances under Wenger. But we have been burnt too many times before to feel anything but insecure in Arsenal’s hands.
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Even if, somehow, we feel that it could be the favourite to win a title, it just isn’t a team we can feel comfortable around; a team who can help us relax into a season, safe in the knowledge that it will win. It might well win, but that victory will never feel secure until the exact moment that its name is carved on the trophy. You’re simply never safe with Arsenal. It doesn’t need a logical explanation, it’s just a footballing fact.
So we have the Premier League power-vacuum, a swirling, anarchic mess at the top of the table in which the notional “best” two teams in the division have already each lost twice after 10 games, and West Ham has a better record against the “contenders” than any of the other “contenders.”
How could they have collectively allowed this to happen? What are we, the watching public, supposed to do? What kind of reaction are we supposed to summon up? This writer can’t say for sure.
It’s fundamentally disconcerting though. We’re left to wonder what will happen next, even while all of our training as watchers of modern football has taught us that it should always be broadly predictable. And that will continue as long as the main players fail to provide definitive evidence that any one of them is either a certain bet to succeed—or any two of them are a certain bet to fail.
Actually, wait, this is kind of good.
Ethan Dean-Richards is a London-based writer. Follow him on Twitter