Can Chelsea repeat the 10th‑to‑title turnaround under Xabi Alonso?
On 14 August 2026 Chelsea, now managed by Xabi Alonso, head into the Premier League season after finishing 10th in 2025-26, prompting the question of whether they can emulate Antonio Conte’s title-winning turnaround a decade after a 10th-place finish. The season ahead also raises the specific question of whether Alonso can extract more from Cole Palmer and his teammates.
Chelsea’s 2025-26 league record closely mirrors their 2015-16 campaign under interim manager Guus Hiddink: they finished with the same goal difference, having scored one more and conceded one more, and ended two points better off than in 2015-16. In 2015-16 Chelsea finished 31 points behind champions Leicester and were placed below Southampton, West Ham and Stoke, only to lift the Premier League trophy under Antonio Conte the following season.
Conte began that title-winning season using a back four but, after a 3-0 defeat at Arsenal in the sixth game, switched to a back three; Chelsea then won 13 consecutive league matches. That winning run produced a lead that proved unassailable and saw them win 18 more games than in 2015-16 to finish on 93 points.
The possibility of a similar tactical shift this season is highlighted by Alonso’s Bayer Leverkusen side, which won the 2023-24 Bundesliga unbeaten while playing with three at the back, a switch the article notes the Blues could adopt under Alonso. The scale required to match Conte’s turnaround is large: improving Chelsea’s points tally by 43 would surpass the biggest single-season points increase to win the Premier League, with Leicester having improved by 40 the previous season.
The target total Chelsea would need may be lower than Conte’s 93, given that Arsenal’s points total last season was the second-lowest to win the Premier League since Claudio Ranieri’s Leicester in 2015-16, and the article contrasts that with the higher demands of the Guardiola-Klopp era when even 97 points in 2018-19 was not enough.
Underlying metrics suggest Chelsea were better than their 10th-place finish implied: they were the fourth-most dominant side by expected goals, dropping to fifth when penalties are excluded, yet they scored eight fewer goals than their 66.3 xG would suggest, netting just 58. Only Crystal Palace and Wolves were worse finishers last season. Much of that underperformance occurred in five games in March and April under Liam Rosenior, when Chelsea took 73 shots worth 5.5 xG but lost five successive league matches without scoring for the first time in 114 years, a run that led to Rosenior being ousted as head coach.
Chelsea will not compete in European competition this season. Since the so-called ‘Big Six’ all finished in the top six for the first time in 2010-11, nine of those sides have had seasons without European fixtures entering the following campaign, with Chelsea and Tottenham set to join that list; all but one of those nine finished higher in the Premier League the next season, averaging a rise of five places and a gain of 16 points. The article cites Liverpool’s example after a seventh-place finish—an absence of European football helped them take 23 more points in 2013-14 but they still finished two points behind champions Manchester City—and notes Manchester United last season took 29 more points than in 2024-25 to finish third after a prior 15th-place finish with 42 points.
Alonso’s record at Leverkusen is detailed in full: he took over in October 2022 with the club in the relegation zone, led them to sixth with 50 points that season—the same points total Chelsea had in both 2015-16 and 2025-26, with Bundesliga sides playing four fewer games—and then added 40 points in 2023-24 to claim Leverkusen’s first-ever Bundesliga title without losing a single game, a points increase three fewer than Conte’s Chelsea achieved. The article notes only two sides in Premier League history have finished outside the top three one season and won the title the next—Leicester in 2015-16 and Chelsea a year later—and concludes that, given Chelsea’s stronger underlying numbers, the lack of European fixtures and Alonso’s previous turnaround at Leverkusen, repeating such a feat "is certainly not impossible."
