We’ve noticed an interesting factoid about Euros 2024. Looking at the list of teams with the most players going to the tournament, you’ll notice Chelsea are not even among the 22 teams with the most players.
Teams like Brentford, Wolfsburg and Slavia Prague make the list, but Chelsea don’t.
You can see the list of the top 22 teams in the image here:
What does this tell us? Well it’s pretty hard to paint it as a GOOD thing – Man City, Inter, PSG, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Arsenal are the top of the list, so that’s clearly where you want to be, regardless of your strategy.
But there are some reasons behind Chelsea’s surprising absence. Firstly we have such a strong focus on youth that we have a number of players who haven’t made their national team’s squad despite likely having the potential to do so down the line – we’re thinking of people like Levi Colwill, Romeo Lavia, Carney Chukwuemeka and Lesley Ugochukwu, who will be hoping to have a good chance of making the list in 2 or 4 years.
More interestingly, it also tell you about the South American tilt in our squad now. While before we had a lot of French, Spanish and German, we now have players like Enzo Fernandez and Moises Caicedo, who are top internationals but not for European sides.
We’re also at a funny lull in terms of England players – Reece James and Ben Chilwell could easily be in there without injury affecting their season, Trevoh Chalobah needed another 6 months of regular play probably, Raheem Sterling has passed out of favour and a host of younger talents aren’t quite there yet.
When the World Cup comes around, expect Chelsea to be right back at the top of this list.
