The manager of Chelsea football club, Thomas Tuchel does not see his club as the number one favorite to win the 2021-2022 Premier League title.
The German Tactician believes that Chelsea are the fourth favorites to win the title, behind Liverpool, Manchester City, and Manchester United which means that the priority of the club might be to finish in the top four.
Recall that since Thomas Tuchel became the coach of Chelsea late last season, the fortunes of the Premier League club have completely changed for the better.
Tuchel took the club from the 9th spot to the 4th spot in less than 6 games. Not only that, he took Chelsea to the final of the FA Cup which the London club lost to Leicester City.
When football fans across the world thought the best Thomas Tuchel could help Chelsea to get last season was a fourth-place finish, the German Tactician led the Premier League club to the final of the UEFA Champions League.
To the dismay of many, Tuchel helped Chelsea to beat Manchester City 1-0 in the final of the prestigious European club competition to secure the club’s second Champions League title.
At the start of the season, Thomas Tuchel led Chelsea to play against Villarreal in the 2021 Super Cup, a one-game tournament played between the winners of the Champions League and the winners of the Europa League. Fortunately for the former coach of Paris Saint Germain, Chelsea beat Villarreal via penalties.
On Saturday, August 14, 2021, Chelsea played their 2021-2022 season Premier League opener against Crystal Palace. Chelsea won the game 3-0.
Despite such a high flying start to the season, Thomas Tuchel believes that even with the addition of £95.7 million–striker, Romelu Lukaku, Chelsea is not the favorites to win the Premier League title this season.
“To be honest, I see us as the number four, that cannot be the favorite in the next year,” he said. “They have to close the gap to three, two, and one. We said during the campaign in the last half-year we set the bar high and look to close gaps during 90 minutes, and that’s what we’ll try to continue.
“This is the Premier League, a tough competition. It’s on us, we are in this role and the role of the hunters, we have to close the gap to Liverpool, Manchester City, and Manchester United.
“We have to do that week in, week out, so this was a very good first step, but that’s the reality and we are not shy to say this out loud that we try to be the best in any competition we play, but the reality is we come from fourth place and have three teams to close the gap to.
“We played in the Champions League and won it, but we played that as underdogs, it’s a different competition, it’s a tournament, we played it at a super-high level and reached constantly the highest level when necessary so had a feeling we deserved to win.
“But this is one competition, and the reality is we were fourth last season and needed help from Tottenham on the last game to get that. It doesn’t help if we translate the win of the Champions League into the status of becoming favorite in the Premier League. This is the toughest league in the world to win, and now it’s on us to keep calm and work hard to reach the highest level permanently.”
On the signing of Lukaku, Tuchel said: “We are well aware of the situation, the problem, it was hard for us to convert all the chances we created. We had in our opinion a lot of chances in the box, which should be enough to score more.
“We tried to help with the addition of Romelu to our squad, and in the Premier League it will stay super hard to score, so we are very happy we were able to have three goals today. We did it without a penalty from Jorginho which is quite impressive too.”
What dreams are made of! 👌 pic.twitter.com/91bmHipKF3
— Chelsea FC (@ChelseaFC) August 14, 2021
