Pedro Neto’s red card against Arsenal on Sunday was the seventh given to a Chelsea player in 28 Premier League games this season. Liam Rosenior is concerned, but just how bad is his team’s disciplinary record?
You know in a cartoon when there’s a big red button that says “Do not press”, and then a character becomes so overcome with the urge to press it that they do so, which is of course followed by dire consequences?
Well anyway, Chelsea Football Club.
When Gabriel Martinelli was pursued down the left wing on Sunday by Pedro Neto, who’d been given a daft yellow card for dissent just minutes earlier following Arsenal regaining the lead, you could almost see it happen before it did. It was as if the temptation was too great for Neto, who was never going to win the ball, but knew a foul would certainly lead to a second yellow and his dismissal. So, obviously, he absolutely cleared Martinelli out.
The second yellow was shown by referee Darren England, and Chelsea were reduced to 10 men. Despite some admirable fight to try to score an equaliser late on, they succumbed to a 2-1 defeat.
It was Liam Rosenior’s first Premier League loss since his appointment in January, and frankly, it was a game that could very well have been rescued if the visitors had kept 11 on the field. David Raya was forced into a good save from an Alejandro Garnacho cross into the box in stoppage time, while an offside decision against João Pedro denied Liam Delap an equaliser in the closing seconds.
Now, red cards can happen. Every club from time to time will lose a player in a game to something silly, vowing that lessons will be learned and often justifiably putting it down as ‘one of those things’. The problem for Chelsea, though, is that this is well beyond the point of ‘one of those things’.
Neto’s dismissal was the seventh red card shown to a Chelsea player in the Premier League this season; that’s an average of one every four games.
Apart from Everton (four), no other Premier League team even has half as many red cards as Chelsea this season.
Only six teams have ever received more red cards in an entire Premier League campaign, with Sunderland (2009-10) and Queens Park Rangers’ (2011-12) joint record of nine potentially under threat with 10 matchdays remaining in 2025-26.
Most red cards Premier League season
It’s a trend that Rosenior is aware of, and the Chelsea boss is eager to do something about it.
“The club’s [disciplinary] record is not great from the start of the season, and now it’s getting bad,” he said after Sunday’s defeat. “We had 10 games when I was in where we didn’t have these issues, but we’ve had two [red cards] in two games.
“There’s something deep-lying that we need to get to the bottom of.”
Not including Nicolas Jackson’s red card against Flamengo in last summer’s FIFA Club World Cup, it was Chelsea’s ninth sending off in all competitions this season, having also seen João Pedro dismissed in the Champions League against Benfica and Delap given his marching orders against Wolves in the EFL Cup.
One particularly astonishing aspect is that the nine red cards have been shown to nine different players, showing that this isn’t just a total being racked up because one or two can’t keep their discipline. They’re two away from being able to field an entire XI of players who have been sent off this season, or at least they will when they’re not suspended.
Chelsea red card XI 2025-26 March 2026
It started with Robert Sánchez getting dismissed in just the fourth minute of Chelsea’s 2-1 defeat at Manchester United in September for a particularly rash challenge on Bryan Mbeumo when the Cameroon international was through on goal.
Trevoh Chalobah was then sent off against Brighton the following week. With his team 1-0 up at the time, it was an especially costly one as Chelsea eventually lost 3-1 at Stamford Bridge.
The next one wasn’t costly at Nottingham Forest as the Blues were already 3-0 up when Malo Gusto received a second yellow in the 87th minute, but that just made his decision to foul Neco Williams with the game comfortably in the bag all the more baffling.
Moisés Caicedo was shown red in the first half of the 1-1 home draw with Arsenal after a reckless challenge on Declan Rice, while Marc Cucurella also earned an early bath when he brought down Harry Wilson as the last man against Fulham in a 2-1 loss at Craven Cottage.
Then, Wesley Fofana picked up two needless bookings against Burnley in last week’s 1-1 draw, before Neto’s red at Arsenal on Sunday made it a less-than-magnificent seven.
Former Chelsea boss Enzo Maresca said after Gusto’s red at Forest that he preferred a more hands-off approach to dealing with the issue, hoping to teach rather than punish, but also somewhat trusting the players to sort it out themselves.
“I’m not that kind of manager to punish players,” Maresca said. “I don’t think it’s the right way to do things. I prefer to help them to understand, and then do the right things. They are all different kinds of red cards, but if you concede four or five it’s something that we have to improve.
“I have four kids and when they do something wrong, I don’t punish them. I try to teach them to do the right things. I try to treat the players in the same way. I think the players have a system inside the changing room, so a fine is something that they manage.”
There is no denying anymore that whatever has been done to curb it hasn’t worked, and it continues to cost Chelsea valuable points. They have only won one of the seven league games in which they have had a player sent off this season (D2 L4), but as the game at Arsenal hinted at, they’re a good enough team that you would have fancied them to take more from each of them had they kept 11 men on the field.
None of the dismissals came in games that were well beyond them by that point. In fact, Neto’s red at Arsenal was the first time this season Chelsea had been reduced to 10 men in a league game that they were losing at the time, and they’d been behind for less than three minutes at that point with another 20 minutes remaining.
One obvious thing to point out is Chelsea have a very young squad. They haven’t given any minutes this season to a single player aged 29 or older. The average age of their players used in the Premier League this season is 24 years and 291 days, with the next youngest being Sunderland at 25y 308d, over a full year older.
Chelsea squad age profile 2025-26
Without any particularly experienced figures in the squad, could it be that having too many young heads without on-field guidance is the root of their consistently immature decision-making?
It’s possible, but it’s also worth bearing in mind that of the nine players to have been given a red card for Chelsea this season, seven of them are aged 24 and over. Of the 11 players aged 24 and over to have played for the club in the Premier League this season, six of them have been sent off, while another in João Pedro earned a red in the Champions League.
So, while they’re not very experienced, it has been mostly Chelsea’s more experienced figures who have been getting red cards rather than their youngest players.
We should note that this isn’t new for Chelsea. In fact, the club holds the unwanted record of most yellow cards in a Premier League season, achieving that just two seasons ago (105). They ‘only’ had four red cards in 2023-24, but their average of 2.9 cards (yellows and reds) per game that term is the most in the competition’s history.
Last season, they received 99 yellow cards, the fourth most since the Premier League began in 1992.
They have only had 65 yellows this season – three teams have more – meaning their average bookings per game has gone down from 2.8 two seasons ago and 2.6 last season to just 2.3 this campaign, but perhaps that’s because they’re instead collecting reds. Their average of 2.6 cards per game is joint-fifth most in the competition’s history.
There are shoots of promise at Chelsea, with some of the best young players on the planet in their squad, and Rosenior has largely had a positive impact since arriving. They need to figure out how to keep their discipline in big moments, though, because it is undeniably costing them.
If Chelsea don’t qualify for the UEFA Champions League this season, it will be a huge blow to the club, and you’d be hard pressed to find a more obvious reason for it than their struggles to keep 11 men on the pitch in more than 75% of games.
Premier League Stats Opta
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