Is Ivan Toney the solution to Chelseas No 9 problem?

June 14, 2024

Mauricio Pochettino will probably regard it as a small mercy that, as Brentford attempt to earn their third consecutive victory over Chelsea at Stamford Bridge on Saturday, they will have to do it without talismanic striker Ivan Toney.

The 27-year-old, who is banned from football until January 17 after admitting in May to 232 breaches of the Football Association’s betting rules, did not score in either of Brentford’s two previous wins at Chelsea. He made his mark on both occasions, though: slipping a brilliant pass through to Vitaly Janelt to dink in the third goal in a 4-1 triumph in April last year and laying the ball off to Shandon Baptiste to spring Bryan Mbeumo away to ultimately give the visitors a 2-0 lead they would not relinquish a year later.

Brentford have adapted impressively well to Toney’s lengthy absence; the fact they are 14th in the Premier League does not reflect negatively on their attack, the team having scored 14 times in the season’s opening nine league matches — one more than Chelsea — with Mbeumo in particular shouldering a greater share of the goals burden. But it would be disingenuous to claim they have not missed Toney, scorer of 20 goals in 33 Premier League appearances last season and the muscular, intelligent focal point around whom Mbeumo and others have thrived.

Head coach Thomas Frank devised a 16-week plan in September to build up his top striker’s fitness, and the plan is to throw Toney back into competitive action as soon as he is eligible. He is allowed to play in behind-closed-doors matches until then and, after scoring against Como of Italy’s second division at the beginning of this month, he completed 65 minutes on Wednesday for Brentford’s B team against French side Monaco’s under-21s.

The big question is whether Brentford will be the club to benefit from this preparation work.

Toney will enter the final 18 months of his current contract at the turn of the year and has been laying the groundwork for a big-money transfer since last summer, when he enlisted powerful international football agency CAA Stellar as his new representation.

Toney has been on the sidelines since being banned in May (Alex Davidson via Getty Images)

Arsenal have been linked with signing him, Tottenham could also be in the market for a new striker in the wake of Harry Kane’s summer departure to Bayern Munich, and Chelsea are the Premier League heavyweights giving most thought to signing a No 9 in the winter market, when a deal for Napoli’s Victor Osimhen might also be attainable.

But how good is Toney, and what could he offer Chelsea? The Athletic takes a closer look…

In terms of his physical presence and style of play, the loftier Chelsea comparisons that Toney has attracted are Didier Drogba and Diego Costa. But the list of players similar to his statistical profile on respected data website FBref.com throws up another distinguished name — and probably a more accurate match — from more recent Stamford Bridge history: Olivier Giroud.

Toney, as with Giroud, is a late bloomer at the top level of football. Both have been credited by former team-mates and coaches with having the mentality of elite professionals even when they were labouring in relative obscurity, and have been widely praised for being positive dressing room influences.

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Another parallel with Giroud is the fact that Toney is more than a traditional target man, though his aerial ability is a core part of his appeal; with just under 3.6 aerial duels won per 90 minutes, he ranks in the 80th percentile for forwards in Europe’s top five leagues, the Champions League and Europa League over the past year.

Gareth Southgate handed Toney his England debut against Ukraine in March after describing his performance in a 1-1 draw against Arsenal the month before, when he dominated William Saliba and Gabriel Magalhaes in the air, as “outstanding”.

During his three seasons at Brentford, he has had an amplifying effect on the attacking production of those around him, using an array of incisive passes, layoffs, knockdowns and flick-ons to put team-mates in positions to threaten the opponents.

As the graphic below illustrates, these occur in deeper positions in the final third as well as inside the penalty area.

It is not difficult to imagine Toney’s smart hold-up and link-up play giving the likes of Raheem Sterling, Mykhailo Mudryk, Cole Palmer and Noni Madueke more good opportunities to stress defences, in much the same way that Giroud did with Eden Hazard, Willian and Pedro Rodriguez.

Toney’s particularly slick chemistry with a more nimble, skilful forward in Mbeumo, whenever Brentford switched to a strike partnership in attack, might also bode well for potential combinations with Christopher Nkunku — though it is also worth noting that he and the summer signing from RB Leipzig both like to drift into the left half-space in order to get on the ball.

Six of the 20 Premier League goals Toney scored last season were penalties. He is excellent at taking them, converting 29 of 31 attempts in his professional career and frequently sending goalkeepers the wrong way by employing a short, deliberate run-up that gives few clear hints as to his true intentions.

Toney is yet to record a truly prolific top-flight campaign by modern standards, and his 0.4 non-penalty expected goals (npxG) per 90 minutes in the 2022-23 Premier League fell a long way short of the 0.66 registered by Osimhen in the same season as he fired Napoli to their first Serie A title since 1990.

These individual numbers, however, should not be separated from their team context.

Brentford have created chances at a good rather than great frequency in their two completed seasons in the Premier League. In 2021-22, their first year after winning promotion via the play-offs, their 1.08 npxG per 90 minutes ranked 11th in the division, and that figure improved to 1.33 12 months later, which was eighth-best.

The most encouraging thing for Toney is that he has done a relatively impressive job of turning the chances that come his way into goals. His shot conversion of 21 per cent over the past two seasons is very respectable and actually compares favourably to more heralded attackers such as Arsenal’s Gabriel Jesus and Marcus Rashford of Manchester United.

He has also made a year-on-year improvement in where he takes his shots from.

As the graphic below illustrates, the bulk of his goal attempts in 2021-22 were spread across the penalty area…

… whereas last season he did a better job of hoovering up chances in and around the six-yard box, which predictably led to a big increase in his expected goals (xG) per shot attempt:

Brentford did a better job of generating shot attempts in these high-value areas than Chelsea did in 2022-23, aided significantly by their set-piece prowess. Thirty-nine per cent of their total efforts at goal came either in the opposition’s six-yard box or just outside it.

That metric was just 32 per cent for Chelsea last season, whose overall shot conversion in the six-yard box was a startling 15 per cent — well below the Premier League average, which stood at 28 per cent:

Summer appointment Pochettino’s team have only been taking 31 per cent of their shots either in the six-yard box or just outside it in the opening nine games, though there have been marginal improvements in the average quality and distance from goal of their attempts.

The key question is: would Toney give Chelsea more of a goal threat in and around the six-yard box, or would his scoring production be negatively impacted by playing in a different system?

Toney would be an unusual Chelsea transfer target in several ways.

He turns 28 in March, so does not fit the age profile of a recruitment strategy that has overwhelmingly focused on players 23 or younger. Nor does he project as having huge untapped potential.

However, his steady improvement since failing to break through at Newcastle as a teenager following a move from Northampton Town of the fourth division should give any buying club confidence that he will continue to find ways to grow his game. He won the League One Player of the Season award in 2019-20 with Peterborough United before breaking the Championship goalscoring record at Brentford the following campaign, underlying his ability to step up.

There are other uncertain variables from Chelsea’s perspective.

Toney has never played in a team of such stature and expectations, even if standards dropped to historic lows last season at Stamford Bridge. It is unclear how well he would adapt to being part of a high-possession team regularly confronted by low opposition blocks.

His aerial presence would certainly provide a dimension not currently offered by Nicolas Jackson or Armando Broja, but his attacking threat at Brentford has not been reliant on that; only 19 per cent of his goal attempts since the start of 2021-22 have been headers.

Frank considers Toney a key part of his leadership group, responsible for ensuring high standards are set and then maintained on and off the pitch. Would that force of personality scale up to the Chelsea dressing room?

Whatever the answer, the harsh reality is that any club considering a large transfer outlay on Toney will also need to be completely convinced that the football betting which got him this suspension is no longer a risk.

Toney on England duty with coach Chris Powell last year (Eddie Keogh/The FA via Getty Images)

January and its transfer window will bring conflicting incentives.

Brentford need to cash in on Toney sooner rather than later. They will be conscious they allowed David Raya to enter the final 12 months of his contract and were unable to extract maximum value from his loan move to Arsenal, which is expected to be made permanent for £30million in total next summer. Brentford will also lose fellow forwards Mbeumo (Cameroon) and Yoane Wissa (DR Congo) to the Africa Cup of Nations that month.

Chelsea will have Jackson (Senegal) away at the same tournament, and need to decide whether Broja and Nkunku, who is on his way back from a pre-season injury, constitute enough firepower to see them through that period.

Even if they do pursue a No 9 in the winter window, Osimhen might be the better choice — although he stands to have Africa Cup of Nations duty then too, with Nigeria.

What transfer business is financially possible must be weighed against what is logistically feasible in the middle of a season, and the potential cost of opportunity as well as price. A deal for Toney might still be there next summer, and in the meantime, Pochettino cannot possibly know exactly what he has yet in Jackson, Broja and Nkunku — two summer arrivals and a player newly returned from a major knee injury suffered last December.

Toney has established himself as a serious Premier League striker and there is a world in which he could be as impactful as the best version of Giroud at his next club.

Whether or not that next club should be Chelsea is much harder to say.

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(Top photo: Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images)

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