Chelsea drops more points to bad competition. Why does this happen every damned year?

It seems like every year, starting with November, the damned wheels fall off for Chelsea. It’s been baffling. This November wasn’t the Greek tragedy that the last couple have been, but it wasn’t awesome, either. The Blues kicked this season’s chokefest off by losing to Newcastle. They tied West Brom, and in the Champions League found a way to lose to Basel. (In fairness, they’d lost to Basel before November, too.) So not a complete disaster, but that’s five points dropped in the league that a legitimate elite side simply doesn’t drop.

The misery has continued into December. On Wednesday Chelsea surrendered three goals to a terrible Sunderland club in a nervy 4-3 win (thanks to a heroic outing by Eden Hazard) and today they coughed up three more to Stoke. This time, though, the Blues only scored two, and that’s three more points the club could have used.

I keep trying to figure out why. Why can’t a club with so much talent at least show up once November begins? It isn’t the managers, since it’s happened with all 16 owner Roman Abramovich has employed in the last couple of years. It isn’t a lack of talent. It isn’t depth – Chelsea’s rosters routinely feature 20 players who are arguably better than anyone on the rosters of the clubs they’re losing to. They just seem unmotivated, but there’s no obvious reason why.

Today I may have had an idea that helps explain a bit of it. Big clubs like Chelsea play a lot more games than do smaller sides. There’s the European competitions, you’re probably in the later stages of the League Cup, and if you had big success the previous year you may have played in the Community Shield and/or the Euro Super Cup. Today’s game was Chelsea’s 23rd of the campaign (not counting a very busy off-season, which saw the team touring Asia and traveling to the US for two separate tours). It was Stoke’s 18th. This means Chelsea has played, according to the terms smaller clubs operate by, and extra month of games so far.

Then the calendar starts to get really busy, with the wind-up of Euro group stages and the onset of some added league fixtures and, if you’re still alive, the League Cup quarters.

In other words, the top sides reach this point having played a lot more football than the teams further down the table. Fatigue is potentially an issue, so managers start really using those deeper rosters to keep everyone fresh. If you’re a deep side, like Chelsea, this is fine in theory because you have 23 great players on the roster.

But here’s where the advantage that the smaller sides enjoy kicks in. if you’re a Stoke City, you don’t have all those extra games so you don’t have to worry about lots of player rotation. Each week you’re running out the same lineup, or close to it. Which gives you a slight edge deriving from continuity. The eleven guys on the pitch are familiar with each other and don’t have to worry about making a lot of adjustments game to game to account for new faces in the lineup.

This piece of the puzzle is a little trickier for the big club. No matter how great you are, when the guy next to you on the pitch is a different guy every game, it makes it tougher to develop the kind of precision chemistry you need to win at the highest levels.

Now, you may be saying, if this were true why don’t all the big sides collapse late in the year? Good question. I think it hits Chelsea harder for a couple reasons. First, there’s the aforementioned managerial musical chairs. Counting Ray Wilkeis’s brief interim spell, there have been nine managers at Cobham since Mourinho left in September of 2007 (his return making him the ninth). The team rarely has the same guy at the helm two years in a row, and if it’s hard to generate continuity in the midst of frequent player rotation, it’s probably even more difficult in an environment where there are different managers and different systems to settle into. It’s probably next to impossible to get a rhythm going.

The second problem is a related one – each manager represents a shift in style, which means efforts are made to bring in players that fit his system. This is the minimum case, and when you set out to do a complete makeover, as they intended with the hiring of Andre Villas-Boas, and again now with the return of Mourinho, the situation is made more impossible still. You simply can’t change managers and embark on another rebuilding program every few months and expect a well-oiled machine on the pitch. It takes time – it takes time together – for a manager, a coaching staff and a group of players to become a team.

This is my theory. I don’t know how valid it is, and if I’m onto something I don’t know what percent of the problem it accounts for. But I can’t help thinking that the annual winter collapse won’t be as bad in Jose Mourinho’s second season next year, and perhaps things will be better still the season after (if, against all odds, he survives that long).

Continuity. I’m looking at you, Roman.