The £30m Chelsea player who is much, much better than you might think

Here’s a scenario – say you support a mid-table Premier League team. In the summer, they spend £30m on a 22-year-old striker with just one full season of senior football under his belt, and by mid-April he’s scored 13 goals and added five assists while many other players in your team struggle to find any kind of rhythm. You might not be planning the statue, but you’d probably be pretty happy, right? Well, that striker is Nicolas Jackson.

Granted, the scenario is stretched a little by the fact that Chelsea probably shouldn’t be a mid-table team and certainly have ambitions which move beyond that. But it’s extraordinary to see the extent to which Jackson has been written off, lambasted and mocked by the supporters, despite putting up some pretty good numbers and showing some flashes of genuine excellence.

Yes, it’s true that he didn’t start the season very well. He missed a host of chances in his early appearances and the verdict was drawn up rather quickly. He even got pilloried for scoring ‘the worst hat-trick in the Premier League’ when he bagged three late goals against Tottenham Hotspur having spurned some excellent opportunities earlier in the game. But is that really a fair assessment of him? Frankly, no.

For starters, he was barely 22 when he arrived at London. A Senegalese international, born in The Gambia, who broke through as a player in Spain. A lot of young people would take some time to adapt and adjust, especially with the weight of expectation conferred by a relatively hefty transfer fee, and especially when the team he was joining was messy at best and dysfunctional at worst. Jackson isn’t the first player who probably needed a little room to breathe, room he didn’t get when Christopher Nkunku got injured and he found himself as Chelsea’s senior central striker having barely got off the plane.

But yes, he did take a while to warm up. He still has the third-largest negative gap between his xG and the goals he’s actually scored after Dominic Calvert-Lewin and the entertainingly frustrating Darwin Núñez, and he moves up to second if you discount Darwin’s missed penalty against Chelsea. That isn’t ideal. But it’s also not the complete picture.

In his only full season of top-level football so far, Jackson scored 12 league goals for Villarreal off an estimated xG of 7.8. That’s outstanding, but also unsustainable for all but the very best players in the world. So while his regression to the mean has been pretty sharp, he’s still panning out so far as someone who scores more or less as many goals as he should given his chances. Over his entire career, he has 23 league goals at an xG of 24.6. That isn’t outstanding, but it’s hardly cause for condemnation.

And a factor that doesn’t seem to have entered the thinking of many people who have been giving Jackson short shrift is that you probably have to be quite good at other aspects of the game to earn a huge xG in the first place. His non-penalty xG of 13.9 is bettered by just four players in the top flight, all of whom play for what are arguably rather less chaotic clubs and all but one of whom (Darwin again) have played more minutes to help them push those numbers up.

Jackson’s finishing might be average, but his movement is first class. The speed at which he can burst between defenders from deep has carved him out a great many opportunities and his knack for finding a half-yard of space is at times uncanny. His ball control is good, his dribbling is impressive, and his passing pretty good too. Strikers may be judged on goals, but there is more to being a great striker. Jackson has a lot of the other elements of number nine play down pat.

And when we say he’s an average finisher… well, he’s had some missteps, but he’s also scored some gorgeous goals. His strike against Everton on Monday evening was a perfect example - plucking an awkward ball out of the air to turn his defender and fire past Jordan Pickford in one movement and two touches. It was a brilliant goal, and proof that he knows how to find the back of the net with élan.

He probably didn’t help public perception of him by getting into a comical shoving and shouting match with Noni Madueke and Cole Palmer over who got to take the penalty that made it 5-0, but he also picked up an assist to go with his goal (two, if you count Chelsea’s second goal which saw Jackson’s snapshot parried up and into Palmer’s path, which official statistics don’t) and drew a string of fouls. He was too quick, too sharp and too good for Everton’s usually reliable defence.

And he was brilliant in the 1-1 draw against Manchester City recently too, picking up a superb assist to open the scoring. He has scored crucial recent goals against Brentford and Newcastle United which were ultimately worth four valuable points that have reignited Chelsea’s chances of making it back into Europe. He hasn’t been the best forward in the Premier League, but he’s been pretty damned good.

It will probably be a while before Jackson shakes off the barracking and the barbed comments from the stands, but he would hardly be the first talented young player to take a little while to warm to his task, only to come good when it counts most – and Jackson is just starting to tick along rather nicely. There might be a few critics eating their words before too long.