Big Questions for GW21

What's on our minds going into the twenty-first week of the season?

Welcome back to the Overthinking Football Gameweek Preview. It’s Week 21, it’s 2024, and after a break from the usual format through the Festive Fixture list, we’re back with our usual Gameweek Preview for this (elongated) Gameweek.

We’ve been hard at work trawling through the upcoming fixtures, consuming player news and looking at our Overthinking Football Projections Model to make sense of what we’re likely to see this weekend.

As ever, I have questions. This week I’m asking:

• No Jackson, more problems for Chelsea?

• Is Timo Werner a genuine Fantrax option in 2024?

• Could a slide become a crisis at Arsenal?

• Should we plug Ivan Toney immediately into lineups?

• How will West Ham navigate their injury crisis?

• Are we about to experience the Pep Roulette?

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Chelsea have an attacking problem (it might not be the one you think). Is there a solution?

For much of the season, Nicolas Jackson has carried the brunt of criticism for Chelsea’s struggles to put the ball in the net. We’ve talked a few times (including an in-depth article) about why that’s probably not particularly fair. But regardless of whether he has the experience to be the main man for Chelsea at this point in his career, what looks pretty undeniable is that he is a better option than Chelsea’s alternatives at the striker position. It’s a pretty big problem, therefore, that he’s now missing for a month. Christopher Nkunku looks a good player (though has a minor hip injury) but doesn’t profile as an obvious fit at centre-forward in English football. Armando Broja saved an otherwise pretty bad performance in the FA Cup last week with a goal but has not looked great in his limited use since his return from injury (thought did net himself a goal in the reverse fixture against Fulham back in October). And in midweek we saw Cole Palmer lining up as the 9 against Middlesborough and, despite having enough chances to put the game to bed in that role, he was too frequently near the half-way line rather than in the box.

So what should we take away from all of that? Well my biggest takeaway is that I would drop all Chelsea players a little from what our projections model (which is not factoring in Jackson-less games at this point, beyond the times he was suspended) thinks they’re likely to score in this one. And that is both the attackers and the defenders. Chelsea’s worst games this year defensively have been the ones where they’ve been totally unable to get the ball to stick in the oppositions half under pressure and until they show us otherwise, we can’t expect any of Chelsea’s available forwards to suddenly become high-level back-to-goal possession players. Any optimism comes from potential availability for Ben Chilwell, Nkunku and Carney Chukwuemeka but all three will need to be slowly managed back to fitness so likely won’t be involved more than substitute status.

So, unsurprisingly, I’d also be tempted to expect slightly more on the Fulham side than our model believes. Players like Antonee Robinson are projected down at around the 6 expected Fantrax Point mark, which is entirely to do with the expectation that Chelsea will score goals. Because of the investment in the team and because of the value of the brand, it’s easy to expect Chelsea to just turn up and do something. But they’ve been far from automatic for a long time. And the value play in this game looks to be to bet against Broja and co turning into cold-blooded chance-taking machines, much as I dislike writing it.

Chelsea vs Fulham - 12.30pm UK, 7.30am US kickoff, Saturday (13th)

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Can Timo Werner reset his reputation in English football?

Ok Ange, you’ve got my attention. One of the first things I ever wrote about Fantrax was looking at how to assess incoming transfers at the Forward position. It used Timo Werner’s impending move from Leipzig to Chelsea as the main example to evaluate. It also used some very rudimentary stats analysis. My fellow Overthinking Football contributors took pity on me since and have furnished me with much better data, thankfully. The general tone of that article was “Timo looks really good in Germany statistically and there aren’t obvious red flags”. But we all know that he wasn’t the smash success that we were hoping for that Summer Fantrax-wise, even if he did end up as a major contributor to Champions League success for Chelsea.

I wrote about Timo again in our Erling Haaland retrospective. The question there was “was there a good way to have expected Haaland to maintain his level moving to England that would also have given us caution around Werner?”. And I think there broadly was. Timo moved from a team that pressed effectively high up the pitch, created high-paced attacks and played behind (higher-lined) Bundesliga defences and moved to a Chelsea side that didn’t particularly do those things. He was effectively playing as a different sort of attacker to what he was in Germany and he was fine but not great. So his reputation in England is that of a bit of a flop, outside of Chelsea fan-circles. He returns after a few seasons in Germany heading to Tottenham. So what should we expect for Fantrax? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice… Right? Right?!

Let me tell you why I like this move…