After 13 Premier League Matchdays, Chelsea sit third in the table and are slowly but surely becoming a lock to return to the Champions League for the first time since the Todd Boehly era began at Stamford Bridge.
It’s been a whirlwind past two seasons for the Blues, who have gone from a regular fixture in the Champions League to barely making it to the Conference League last season.
Under Enzo Maresca in 2024/25, Chelsea have made real strides, and the new manager is now proudly proclaiming that Boehly’s grand vision of having Chelsea dominate the landscape of English football will indeed come to fruition over the next five to ten years.
So let’s take a look at three players who are central reasons why Chelsea believe they can dominate the Premier League and become the champions of England once more.
AM Cole Palmer
Cole Palmer is the most obvious reason for optimism at Chelsea, and even when they were, at times, flat-out putrid in the 2023/24 season, Palmer rose above the fray to fire the Blues to enough victories that they could mount a second-half comeback to secure at least some level of European football.
When Palmer signed with Chelsea after flashing potential as one of Manchester City’s top prospects, I doubt even his most bullish supporters could have predicted him immediately becoming both Chelsea’s best player and one of the best overall players in European football.
After firing 22 goals and 11 assists last season in the best Chelsea campaign of any player since Eden Hazard, Palmer remains a Premier League Player of the Season candidate in 2024/25 with 8 goals and 6 assists so far in 13 appearances.
Palmer is such a great all-around threat. He scores, he creates, he shines at a number of attacking positions, he helps in defense, and he is just as good at starting moves with his progression as he is at finishing them off with the killer pass or lethal finish.
This season, Palmer is averaging well over three combined dribbles completed and fouls drawn per game with 2.6 key passes per contest, which would both be improvements from his breakout 2024/25 campaign.
That’s the scary thing everyone else in the Premier League has to reckon with. Palmer is only 22 and in his second full-time season as a starter, so he’s only going to get even better with Chelsea, as evidenced by his performances this season.
DM Moises Caicedo
Moises Caicedo has been just as impressive for Chelsea as Cole Palmer this season, and because he plays a role that is so scarce in terms of talent around the world, there’s a case to be made that Caicedo is the Blues’ most valuable player.
That is actually what Chelsea had to have envisioned him being when they spent a record 115 million pounds to sign him in the summer 2023 transfer window over interest from virtually ever other elite Premier League club.
Caicedo struggled in his first season, but he has rebounded strongly in 2024/25 and is arguably even better than the version we saw torching the Premier League with Brighton in his breakout 2022/23 campaign when he helped the Seagulls achieve history by qualifying for the Europa League.
The first signs of Caicedo’s turnaround occurred in the summer at Copa America, where Caicedo was pretty much as impressive as Colombia Player of the Tournament James Rodriguez.
Defensively, Caicedo was a colossus. The impervious Ecuadorian left opponents bruised physically and mentally with 4.3 tackles and 2.5 interceptions per game, which are just mind-boggling numbers.
This season with Chelsea, Caicedo has clearly carried that form forward with 3.3 tackles and 1.6 interceptions per match in the Premier League while contributing positively to the team offensively as a defensive midfielder.
You have to remember that Caicedo is only 23, so the adjustment season in 2023/24 really has to be taken for what it is: growing pains. Caicedo needed some time to get in sync with his new team, especially because Chelsea themselves were not organized in midfield under Mauricio Pochettino.
With a new manager and mindset, Caicedo has grabbed the Premier League by the scruff of its neck again, and you would be hard-pressed to find any midfielder capable of going toe-to-toe with Caicedo.
DM Enzo Fernandez
Alongside Caicedo, Chelsea also invested heavily in Enzo Fernandez as an anchoring point in the midfield after watching him shine for Argentina in the World Cup as one of the tournament’s breakout stars.
Enzo was already one of the most touted young midfielders in the world even before the January transfer market or the World Cup, as Benfica were already holding out hopes of selling him for an exorbitant fee.
They got the 100 million euros they were looking for from Todd Boehly, who gladly splashed a then-record 106.8 million pounds on the Liga NOS star to set what was then a Premier League record.
Chelsea signed two record-breaking, anchoring midfielders: Caicedo to be a defensive destroyer with box-to-box attacking bonuses and then Enzo as the stabilizing anchor with serious playmaking upside.
But Chelsea didn’t get to see any sort of upside from Enzo, who was fairly mediocre in the Premier League last season both offensively and defensively. He made defensive recoveries and showed moderate playmaking ability, but he wasn’t truly taking over or controlling games in midfield, neither was he proving to be a demonstrable asset in terms of shielding the back line.
Slowly but surely, Enzo, too, has improved in the 2024/25 season after a tumultuous summer that included a strong performance in Argentina’s Copa America triumph and a crisis in the form of release footage after the World Cup showing him – more pointedly than other teammates joining in – participating in a racist chant against French national team players.
Enzo apologized and avoided sanctioning from the FA, and even though the controversy quieted as people – more or less – decided to focus on something else, there was an element of understanding that Chelsea could look for any excuse to get rid of an overpriced, underperforming player with potentially serious locker room damaging effects.
He has been excellent in recent matches, so far reaching two goals and two assists despite only starting eight games, so he is nearly matching last season’s goal contributions in less than a third of the starts so far.
Enzo is averaging 1.9 key passes and 1.6 fouls drawn per 90 minutes with a whopping 3.3 tackles per 90, highlighting the all-around defensive and playmaking impact he can have.
If this is a sign of things to come and if Enzo has indeed learn from his past transgressions to earn the trust and respect of his teammates, this could be the start of a very fruitful midfield partnership between himself and Caicedo that proves to be the foundation from which Chelsea build their success.
The managing editor of The Trivela Effect, Kevin has 15 years of experience in digital media. He covered Real Madrid from 2019-2022 for The Real Champs as a site manager. You can contact him at the site’s official Twitter handle @TrivelaEffect or via the site’s official email thetrivelaeffect@gmail.com.