Under the guidance of Thomas Tuchel, last season Chelsea conquered Europe, winning the UEFA Champions League. In his first full season at the club, he somewhat fell short of expectations finishing third in the Premier League, reaching the quarter-finals of the UEFA Champions League and losing both domestic cup finals to Liverpool on penalties. The second half of the season was under the shadow of off the field issues with Roman Abramovic selling the club and sanctions being placed on it.
There is now a fresh start for Chelsea, which has recently been sold to a Todd Boehly-led consortium. The new ownership has promised Tuchel a £200 million pound transfer budget and one of the first areas that they will be looking to strengthen is at centre-back.
Antonio Rudiger has departed the club on a free transfer for Real Madrid, with Andreas Christensen looking likely to follow a similar path, to Barcelona. This is in addition to Azpilicueta and Thiago Silva being over the age of 30 and coming to the end of their careers. The club does have Trevor Chalobah, Malang Sarr, Levi Colwill and Ethan Ampadu, who are all young promising centre-backs however if they are going to close the gap to Liverpool and Manchester City, they will need some immediate quality.
This recruitment analysis and data analysis will look to analyse data and provide some potential options that Chelsea could acquire at centre-back this summer.
What does Chelsea want from their centre-backs?
The first place to start when looking to find replacements or suggest transfer targets is what the club want from their players in that position. Without having access to the club KPIs and the specifics of how Tuchel wants his players to play, the best way is to look at how the incumbent players perform in those areas, to maybe find some clues. Below shows some percentile ranks of Chelsea defenders, amongst centre-backs with over 2000 minutes in Europe’s top five leagues plus the Eredivisie and Primeira Liga.
The first chart shows us departing centre-back Antonio Rudiger, who is usually used on the left of the back three.
Secondly, we have Azpilicueta, now although he does play at right wing-back he is sometimes deployed on the right side of the back three.
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