While Chelsea added yet more players this summer, this season’s success has been built more around those players who arrived in the year before that finally getting settled and playing well.
There’s no better example than Moises Caicedo, who struggled mightily for months after last summer’s vast £100m+ transfer from Brighton. The first few months he was pretty dire, and even by the end of the season we were only occasionally getting flashes of his best.
Now he’s delivering consistently, and the stats are there to back it up. Bit by bit the team seems to suit him more and more – this formation works well for him, and switching out Enzo Fernandez for Romeo Lavia to play alongside him seems to help him thrive even more.
Caicedo starting to put up N’Golo Kante numbers as adaptation continues
OPTA’s look at the stats from the season so far show that the Ecuador star has the most tackles and interceptions combined in the Premier League, averaging 5.4 combined per game.
To give a historical context, that’s just short of N’Golo Kante’s 2020-2021 record of 5.8 per game.
48 – Moisés Caicedo has the most combined tackles and interceptions in the Premier League this season (48), while his per 90 average (5.4) is the highest by a Chelsea player in a single season since N’Golo Kanté (5.8) in 2020-21. General. pic.twitter.com/xyuGfIBynG
— OptaJoe (@OptaJoe) October 27, 2024
We wouldn’t want to compare anyone to Kante, whose abilities and stats were true outliers, but this is a solid sign of how much well Caicedo is playing and how well this team is suiting him.
We’ve also seen some really impressive play on the ball too, not least his assist at Anfield a week ago. Bit by bit this team is coming together, and the former Brighton star is without doubt established as a key cog for Enzo Maresca, and a piece around which everything else can be built.
Maresca spoke recently about “extra work” Caicedo had been doing, and that’s something we’re starting to really see the benefits of now.
