At the turn of the year, the Premier League title starts to creep into people’s minds. 

Judging by what’s already happened in the season, the media starts to predict which team is going to have bragging rights, and who’s going to fall short. 

By Christmas in 2013, it was Chelsea who were pipped to take the glory. 

They were performing well, defensively strong, and were led by their most successful Premier League manager, Jose Mourinho, for the second time.

It looked written in the stars for the west London side. But, they ended the season 5 points short of the top spot and finished below Liverpool and Manchester City. 

Here’s what the top half of the table looked like at the end of the season:

This is not the first time that the Premier League table has “lied”. When we analysed Newcastle’s 2011-12 Premier League season, we showed that a team’s results aren’t an indication of how well they played. For instance, the Magpies performed the same in the following season yet narrowly avoided relegation. 

So… the Premier League table can be deceiving. 

And with many still suggesting that Chelsea deserved to win the 2013-14 league title, we explore whether the underlying statistics agree or whether the Blues rightfully finished in third place.

Let’s dive in. 

Expected goals

Expected goals (xG) is a good indicator of a team’s defensive and offensive strength.

xG measures the probability of a shot resulting in a goal.

The graph below shows the expected goals against (xGA) per game and expected goals for (xGF) per game at the end of the 2013-14 season.

The data, taken from Infogol, shows that Chelsea was by far the league’s best defence that season. They had an xGA of 0.76 which meant they were expected to concede less than one goal per game. 

Only Manchester City achieved close to that with around 0.95. 

So Chelsea was defensively strong and their opponents found it difficult to create quality goal-scoring chances against them. 

However, their xGF couldn’t match the top two that season. Manchester City and Liverpool were both expected to score over two goals each game, whereas Chelsea was expected to score 1.85 goals per game. 

Though this may not sound like much, in a low-scoring sport like football, this is a big difference over a 38-game season.

That said, while Chelsea may have been less dominant in their wins, they were conceding far less. This meant that the difference between the top three was marginal.

Goal difference

So we’ve looked at what the stats expected of Chelsea, but how did they actually perform?

Let’s look at goal difference, another reliable statistic to show a team’s dominance throughout a season. 

When Chelsea finished third in the league, they had a +44 goal difference. The teams that finished above them, Liverpool and Manchester City had a +51 and +65.

That season, City scored the most goals (102) and Liverpool scored one less (101). Chelsea scored far less (71) which suggests they were winning games less convincingly than their competitors. 

So, in reality, Chelsea was far less dominant than Liverpool and City. The league leader’s offensive prowess outstriped Chelsea’s defensive strength by some distance. 

Unexpectedly strong rivals

Before the 2013-14 season began, Bloomberg Sports’ “supercomputer” predicted that Chelsea would win the league. 

The table below shows all their predictions from wins to losses and the chance of winning the league to goal difference. 

The algorithm they used wasn’t too far off what really happened with Chelsea. It slightly overestimated their goals scored and underestimated their goals conceded. 

Bloomberg didn’t do a good job of predicting City and Liverpool’s stats. 

Both sides had exceptional offensive production; Liverpool with Luis Suarez and Daniel Sturridge and City had prime Yaya Touré, Edin Dzeko and Sergio Agüero. The result was that Liverpool scored 40 more goals than expected, while City exceeded their offensive expectation by 26 goals.

At the time, many analysts underestimated Chelsea’s league contenders. It’s understandable. The Blues had won the Champions League and Europa League within two years of the campaign, they had a wealth of attacking talent, and Jose Mourinho was expected to take Chelsea back to the top. 

But, the attacking “talent” - Fernando Torres, Samuel Eto’o, and Demba Ba - failed to deliver on their expectation. 

That leads us to Chelsea’s poor conversation rate. 

Conversation rates

We’ve established that Chelsea scored less than Liverpool and City.

We can take this further by highlighting Chelsea’s poor conversation rate. 

Using FBref’s tool, we can see that Chelsea had the second most Shots on Target in the league, averaging around 7.39 shots on target in a game. 

League winners, City, were fourth for Shots on Target with 42 fewer shots on target than Chelsea throughout the season.

Yet, Chelsea’s Goals per Shots on Target  - i.e., their conversation rate - was the sixth worst (0.23) in the league, while City (0.38) and Liverpool (0.29) were joint top.

So, Mourinho’s side were regularly creating goal-scoring chances. However, their strikers were failing to convert them. 

It also meant that Eden Hazard was the only Chelsea man in the top 15 goal-scorers that season. 

To put this into context, when Chelsea won the league in the following season, they were third for Shots on Target and, most importantly, first for Goals per Shots on Target. 

Verdict

Sometimes the Premier League table lies to us. 

It tells us that a team played well throughout the season when, in reality, they didn’t. The opposite is also true.

But, in this case, Chelsea’s third-place finish was warranted. 

While they were the strongest team defensively, they scored far fewer goals than Liverpool and Man City. 

The most telling statistic was that the Blues were creating quality chances but they simply weren’t clinical. As such, their poor conversation rate is not fitting of a Premier League title-winning side.

Even though they had a worse defensive record in the following season, they won the league largely because they improved their conversation. 

Although our analysis suggests that a third-place finish was fair, considering they were poor in front of goal, it’s impressive that there were only four points between Chelsea and the champions Man City by the end of that season.