There are several areas of the team that Chelsea are hoping to improve this summer, and after a 12-month transfer ban Frank Lampard will be keen to begin sculpting the team in his image.
Although the club may be looking for reinforcements in defence, midfield, and up front, there is one crucial area Chelsea need to upgrade - and one big statistic that underlines the importance of addressing this area.
Prior to Eden Hazard’s final season in England, Chelsea didn’t have a player rank among the Premier League’s top 10 for assists since the 2016/17 season, when Cesc Fabregas assisted 12 times. Two years before that, in 2014/15, Fabregas got 18 assists under Jose Mourinho, but aside from these two years, Chelsea lacked an out and out assist king for seven years.
Not since Juan Mata, have Chelsea had a playmaker who can hit double figures for Premier League assists on a regular basis.
Chelsea, then, desperately need a pure creator - a player who will conjure chances all on their own, either from pinpoint crosses or excellent through balls.
This issue has been clear throughout the 2019/20 season, in which Mason Mount’s early form dropped off to leave Tammy Abraham with little creative support. Far too often Chelsea’s football looked stale, with the team easily building into the final third only to look suddenly flat.
Many people have highlighted Eden Hazard’s absence as the main reason for their creativity issues, and yet the Belgian was rarely one for creating lots of chances. He only twice reached double figures for assists, and often failed to get more than six or seven. The signing of Hakim Ziyech may change that.
One particularly good measure of a player’s creative output is their ‘assist for shot’ statistic, which shows how often they have created a shooting chance for a team-mate, and data collected by the CIES Football Observatory reveals Chelsea should be looking at Jadon Sancho, Timo Werner, and Kai Havertz.
Sancho ranks seventh in Germany and the second highest among wingers behind Christopher Nkunku. The England international has created 56 shots from his passes, with 28.6% of these leading to goals - the highest percentage across the league.
The Borussia Dortmund star, with 17 goals and 16 assists in the Bundesliga this season, is in very high demand, and Chelsea are one of those clubs interested, according to multiple reports.
Havertz is another Bundesliga player whose stock is very high, and rightly so. The CIES Football Observatory stats show he ranks tenth in Germany with 53 shots created from his passes. However, only 9.3% of these ended in assists.
Timo Werner is among the top 20, creating 42 shots from his passes with 16.7% leading to a goal. The RB Leipzig forward, then, could also bring the assist figures that Chelsea have sorely lacked in their post-Fabregas and post-Hazard days.
Whichever of these three players Chelsea may or may not look to sign, the statistics suggest they can give Lampard the cutting edge his club has sorely lacked in recent years.
Sancho is clearly the dream option, but either Werner or Havertz can offer qualities that nobody in the current Chelsea team possesses.
