Chelsea begin the 2026-27 Premier League season with a new manager, a British transfer record on the books and a finishing position they will not want repeated. They came tenth last season, and Al Jazeera's preview records the run that ended it as the club's worst in the league in 30 years.

Enzo Maresca left in July for Manchester City. As the preview puts it, "when the Italian left his role, amid internal tensions, his team had won only one of their last seven matches". Xabi Alonso has replaced him.

What a manager inherits here

The interesting thing about the Chelsea job is that it is not a rebuilding job in the usual sense. The squad is expensively assembled and young. What it has lacked is a settled idea of how it plays, and each new manager has arrived with one, applied it, and left before it hardened into habit.

Alonso used a 3-4-3 in preseason, including a 3-1 friendly win against Real Sociedad. Whether that survives contact with a league campaign is the first thing to watch, because a back three demands a particular kind of wing-back and Chelsea's squad was not assembled with one system in mind.

The record signing

Morgan Rogers has arrived from Aston Villa for a reported 117 million pounds, about $158m, described as a British record. He is a forward, and the question the preview raises is not whether he is good but where he plays: specifically, how he fits alongside Cole Palmer.

That is a real problem rather than a nice one. Palmer and Rogers both do their best work in the space between midfield and the front line. One of them will have to do something slightly different, and which one gets moved tends to say more about a manager's plans than any press conference does.

Palmer, and the thing nobody can coach

The preview's third talking point is whether Palmer can rediscover his best form. This is the least tractable item on the list. A club can buy a forward and hire a coach; it cannot purchase the return of a player's peak. If Palmer plays as he did at his best, the tenth-place finish looks like an aberration. If he does not, the record fee is covering a hole rather than adding to a strength.

The exits and the ownership

Enzo Fernández has said he wants to leave, with an asking price of 120 million pounds, about $162m, placed on him. The preview treats his departure as a possibility rather than a certainty.

Behind all of it sits uncertainty over the club's ownership, which the preview lists as one of its five talking points. That is the item supporters can do least about and which affects the most: who owns a club sets the budget, the patience and the tolerance for a bad autumn.

What we could not establish

We could not establish Chelsea's fixture list, the length of Alonso's contract, or the structure of the Rogers fee, and the transfer figures are as the source reports them rather than confirmed by the clubs. We verified this account from a single publication.