Chelsea have signed Liam Delap - but will he make much difference at Stamford Bridge, and is he an upgrade on Nicolas Jackson?
While firepower in front of goal wasn’t necessarily Chelsea’s greatest weakness over the course of the recently-finished campaign, overhauling the attack seems to have become the club’s first priority of the summer anyway – and the recent signing of Liam Delap from Ipswich Town is the first of what could be many moves in the transfer market which propel Enzo Maresca’s side towards more goals next season.
Delap arrives for £30m after a breakout campaign in which he netted 12 Premier League goals for his relegated side and earned warm reviews for his take on the classic pacy central striker role which Maresca plainly prizes. At Leicester, it was Jamie Vardy, in his first year at Chelsea it was Nicolas Jackson – now Delap is primed to take over.
But will Delap, with just one season of top-flight starts under his belt, really represent a marked upgrade over Jackson? And if Delap is so good, why isn’t he in the England squad?
Is new Chelsea striker Liam Delap better than Nicolas Jackson?
Delap is, unquestionably, a very clean fit for Maresca’s system, which demands a quick striker playing a narrow, central role who can play off the shoulder of the last man, pin defenders back and get on the end of quick crosses while hopefully generating space for the number ten in behind him.
For the 2024/25 season, that role was typically filled by Jackson, and the Senegalese striker offered the same mixed results as he had the year before. On his day, Jackson’s movement, speed and guile make him almost unplayable. On his other days, he misses far too many clear-cut chances and cuts a frustrated and frustrating figure.
Jackson finished the campaign with 13 goals in 33 games, at average of almost exactly one goal every 180 minutes. A healthy return, by most standards, but when combined with the inconsistency that was, ironically, one of the few consistent elements of his game, Jackson can’t be argued to have proven himself to be an entirely reliable first choice.
Still, his return was better than Delap’s. The new signing scored 12 goals in 40 matches, averaging 0.41 goals per 90 minutes played. Clearly, the fact that he was playing for a struggling, newly-promoted team reduced his opportunities for production, but it’s fair to question how much better than Jackson he proved himself to be over the past year.
In terms of finishing alone, Delap appears to have a fairly clear edge. Taking his two penalties (both scored) out of the equation, Delap managed 10 Premier League goals from 7.8xG, a 128% conversion rate against the average that closely mirrors the 127% rate he managed in scoring eight Championship goals with Hull City the season before.
Jackson, meanwhile, needed 12.3xG’s worth of chances to score 10 Premier League goals. That 81% conversion rate compared to the ‘average’ top-flight forward isn’t brilliant, but is better than the 75% rate he posted in the 2023/24 campaign, when he scored 14 league goals against a huge xG of 18.4.
In short, Delap takes his chances considerably more efficiently than the average striker, and far more efficiently than Jackson. The stats suggest that had Delap been given exactly the same quality of service that his new team-mate was offered, he would probably have scored 15 or 16 goals instead, and more when you factor in that Jackson only started 28 games due to injuries or rotation.
Logic suggests, then, that Delap will score more goals next season if he does indeed wrestle the starting job away from his counterpart – but goal-scoring isn’t all that matters, even when you’re a number nine.
Where Delap struggles compares to his peers
While Delap’s predatory qualities appear to be beyond dispute at this point, his all-round game still has plenty of room for improvement, and it’s here that a player like Jackson might have the edge – and in Delap’s stats past simple goal-scoring, we might start to understand why he was once again left out of Thomas Tuchel’s England squad despite a broad expectation that he would be included and a summer bidding war which involved a number of elite Premier League teams.
The 22-year-old is a fine finisher and his pace and off-ball movement open up the chances to exploit that skill, but his all-round game is lacking based on the evidence we have so far.
Take his passing and capacity to create chances for others, something which can be important even for the most tactically focused of central strikers given how many times they will find themselves forced wide and into the channels, where they will have to recycle possession instead of shooting.
This past year with Ipswich, Delap attempted an average of just 12.4 passes per match, and completed only 61.3% of them. That wouldn’t matter so much if they were all killer balls, but on average Delap was responsible for just 0.6 ‘key passes’ per match, created three big chances by xG and finished up with only two assists, a low return given how much of his football was spent in close proximity to the goal.
Jackson, by way of comparison, may not be considered a great creative force but completed 75.9% of his passes, offered up 50% more key passes, generated six big chances for Chelsea – twice as many as Delap - and provided five assists for the second consecutive season, all despite playing fewer matches.
None of that makes Jackson a great playmaker but based on the relatively small sample size we have, Delap may be a very poor one, and that could hamper the overall contribution he could make. When forced wide or into positions from which it makes more sense to tee up a team-mate than go for goal, Delap has struggled to make things happen.
Delap is, at least, good in the high press. He managed to recover the ball in the final third 0.5 times per game (0.3 for Jackson) and forced 1.8 turnovers per 90 minutes in total – it’s 1.3 for Jackson, a willing runner who tracked back more often and more effectively, but wasn’t as good at pressure defenders on the ball.
But ultimately, Delap is not a great technician and lacks a broader skill set. That doesn’t seem to matter to Maresca and apparently didn’t bother Manchester United, who were also keen on striking a deal along with several other sides, but it does put his failure to make the England squad in some perspective. Coaches who value link-up play and the capacity to bring others into the game around them may see Delap in a more negative light, not without reason.
At the age of 22, of course, there remains time for Delap to develop his wider arsenal, and his deficiencies may matter less at Chelsea, where he will have a relatively inflexible role and where the wingers tend to stay wide enough that bringing them into goal-scoring positions with sharp passing and quick interchanges is less relevant – but it’s fair to assume that Cole Palmer will have slightly more opportunities of his own if it’s Jackson playing in front of him instead of Delap.
Jackson – hardly long in the tooth himself at 23 – may well get every chance to fight for his place and earn minutes in a busy season in which Chelsea are once more primed to fight on an additional front thanks to Champions League qualification. There are murmurings of other moves – Hugo Ekitike’s name has been cropping up, and there are even hints that other teams could be interested in Jackson himself – but the odds are that the Senegal international will have a chance to put the side-by-side comparison made here into practice.
Delap will likely prove to be a successful signing to at least some degree. Players who routinely finish their chances at the very highest level have an extremely high floor, and even if he never develops into a genuine all-rounder, goals speak loudly enough that many fans won’t care too much. But there are faults and flaws there, and plenty of work to do as he settles into life at a new club.
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