Pochettino’s Chelsea maelstrom the best yardstick for what lies ahead at United

Detailed summary

Argentinian oversaw high-scoring games in his one Chelsea season and Opta predicts his United side will move upfield quicker than that team ...

Among the 20 managers with more than 290 matches in the Premier League, only the five “big beasts” of Alex Ferguson, Arsène Wenger, José Mourinho, Jürgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola have better points-per-game averages than Mauricio Pochettino. He is an elite manager.

However, the Argentinian has competed in only one of the past six Premier League campaigns. Winning Ligue 1 and the Coupe de France in an 18-month spell with Paris Saint-Germain tells us little. His most pertinent recent experience for the Manchester United job is the 2023-24 season he spent at Chelsea, a campaign that left more questions than answers.

The club had finished 12th the season before, in the first year of the Todd Boehly/Clearlake Capital era. Pochettino was always likely to take Chelsea higher. And he did. But his influence is harder to judge.

Opta predicted Chelsea would finish sixth in 2023-24, a forecast that proved correct. By this measure Pochettino hit par though, as Transfermarkt rated the market value of his squad as the third-highest in the Premier League in October 2023, perhaps he fell short.

The squad value grew thanks to remarkable investment. Chelsea spent more than any other club in Europe’s big five leagues in each of the three transfer windows from the summer of 2022 to the summer of 2023. Working for Boehly will have provided a good primer for the madness of Manchester United, even if the spending won’t be as generous.

Assembling a winning team from a rapidly evolving squad is not easy. Pochettino crafted a side that delivered the fifth-most expected points in 2023-24. Chelsea’s 63.4 was a fair way shy of Arsenal (81.2), Manchester City (79.3) and Liverpool (76.2) but it was a decent first season.

Chelsea conceded 63 league goals, the club’s worst figure in the Premier League era. Yet only twice have they amassed more than the 77 goals they scored.

But even the xG numbers carried a question mark, because Chelsea benefited from 12 penalties, the joint-second-most in the past 10…

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Opening of the article, excerpted from The Irish Times. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.