Chelsea lead all the traditional top 6 clubs and Leicester when it comes to off-the-ball defensive work.
Here’s a graph of the hardest working teams in the Premier League as shared by u/AdzBoogie on Reddit.
One of the stats used to deduce this are the number of opposition passes allowed per defensive action [To measure the pressure that the defending team puts on the opposition players when they are in possession of the ball].
The other stat is defensive actions per minute of opponent possession [A team metric, quantifying how many defensive actions like defensive duels, loose ball duels, interceptions, tackles a team is doing per minute of opponent ball possession].
While Leeds lead the league comfortably on both counts, Chelsea are comfortably 3rd, with only Southampton ahead of them.
Considering that the Blues also dominate possession, the fact that they initiate so many defensive actions in the time that they don’t have the ball is truly impressive.
Frank Lampard deserves a lot of the credit for this, having spent a lot of his tenure trying to instill this discipline into the current Chelsea group.
With Thomas Tuchel’s aggressive style of play, these metrics are likely to look even better as the season goes on.
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