When BlueCo, the consortium behind Chelsea FC, acquired RC Strasbourg in 2023, it signalled a major shift in the multi-club ownership landscape. The vision was clear: build a network similar to the Red Bull or City Group models, creating an ecosystem for shared scouting, data, and player development.
For Strasbourg, the deal promised financial stability and, crucially, access to a superior talent pool. Within months, the link became tangible as Chelsea prospects like Andrey Santos and Angelo Gabriel arrived on loan, turning the Alsatian club into a high-level testing ground.
But has this “ecosystem” actually translated into success on the pitch? To answer this, we combine traditional metrics with synthetic control-group modelling to estimate the causal effect of the acquisition.
The Surface Level: A Season of Record Results
The main way to assess the football club’s performance is to look at its league position; after all, it’s the ultimate sign of the team’s strength.
Strasbourg’s position shows us evolution, but definitely not a revolution. The club’s performance in the season immediately after the acquisition showed no quick improvement. The real change came in the 2024/2025 season.
This season, Strasbourg finished 7th, one of the team’s best results in recent years. This position enabled the team to qualify for the European Conference League and to qualify again for the continental stage.
By points scored per game, Strasbourg’s post-acquisition trajectory looks very promising. The 2022/2023 season brought a drop in performance, but the following campaign was the best for Strasbourg since 2019.
The improvement aligns with the influx of new players or, perhaps more importantly, with a new coach.
In 2024, the club announced that it had appointed a new manager from England, Liam Rosenior. A more disciplined tactical approach led to Strasbourg’s best season in years.
The club shifted from being not so far from the relegation zone to a stable position in the elite of French football.
The Efficiency Paradox: Overperforming the Model
But how efficient was the Strasbourg performance in the 2024/2025 season? Was it due to an increase in skills or tactics, or was it more about sheer luck?
Let’s take a look at a less obvious football efficiency evaluation.
Digging into the data, we can see how Strasbourg performs on expected goals, the metric used to evaluate the quality of situations created by a football team.
In football analytics, expected goals (xG) and expected goals against (xGA) have become essential tools for assessing a team’s performance. Those metrics are not perfect and leave ample room for interpretation, but they can help evaluate the football team’s performance more rigorously.
Expected goals evaluate the quality of each shot the team takes, estimating the probability that it will result in a goal.
It is based on extensive historical data from a similar situation, along with factors such as shot location, angle, and distance to the goal. A high xG means the team creates good scoring opportunities, even if they are not converted.
Expected goals against follow the same logic but in the opposite direction. It measures how many goals a team is expected to concede based on the quality of shots it faces. The lower the xGA, the better, as it indicates how effective the team’s defence is.
A difference between expected goals and expected goals against does not look so good for Strasbourg as the points scored. The xG minus xGA balance turned negative, meaning the team was conceding higher-quality chances than it created. And what’s more striking, this difference had been steadily improving before Chelsea’s acquisition.
And this is where it gets interesting, as it shows a disconnect between Strasbourg’s strong league position and its theoretical performance. Strasbourg was the only top-8 club in Ligue 1 with a negative expected goals difference.
The “Talent Hack”: Why Individual Quality Matters
Does it mean that the Strasbourg’s results in 2024/2025 were obtained only due to luck? This statement would not be fair towards players who actually performed on the pitch. The most sensible explanation is that the individual quality of Strasbourg’s players helped overcome the lower quality of the chances.
The Strasbourg goalkeeper Djordje Petrovic (on loan from Chelsea) was among the best in Ligue 1, ranking second in the percentage of goals saved. He saved many difficult shots, even when the defence allowed them.
And their offensive was also good at converting the lower-quality chances. The difference between goals scored and expected goals increased drastically in the 2024/2025 season. They were able to successfully finish the situations when the probability of success was relatively low.
It shows the better quality of players who were able to score under challenging situations. Luck could also influence football. Or most likely both of them.
We can certainly highlight a performance of Strasbourg’s top goalscorer this season, Emanuel Emegha. He scored 14 goals, with an xG of 17, meaning that he could have scored much more if he had finished better.
But the true star performer of Strasbourg was Andrey Santos.
The midfielder scored 10 goals with an xG of 6.6, according to Understat. His performance was one of the main reasons for the Alsatian team’s offensive overachievement. And where does Andrey Santos play now? In Chelsea. He was on loan in Strasbourg.
An analysis of expected goals leads to checking the expected points-per-game. The metrics estimate how many points the team should have scored based on their balance between expected goals and expected goals against in each game.
This metric evolution differs significantly from what we observed in the team’s actual points scored. These metrics only confirm what we observed above. Since 2021, the expected points have steadily declined, and Chelsea’s acquisition has not changed that.
In other words, in the 2024/2025 Strasbourg, they overperformed relative to their chances. It shows that the team’s performance in the previous season was likely driven more by individual achievements and luck than by consistent improvement in the team’s quality.
The Counterfactual: Determining the “BlueCo Lift”
To move beyond correlation and test the points above, we built a synthetic control group model, applying a popular causal inference method to football analytics.
It’s the statistical method trying to estimate what would have happened to Strasbourg if BlueCoo hadn’t acquired it. It does so by comparing Strasbourg’s pre-acquisition performance with that of similar teams.
The result is a counterfactual, an estimate of how Strasbourg would likely have performed had the BlueCo takeover never happened.
When we compare the two lines, the real Strasbourg versus its synthetic counterpart, the outcome is clear.
After 2023, points per game began to rise above the synthetic Strasbourg. It suggests a genuine and positive ownership effect on short-term results.
But the high performance was most likely due to an increase in player quality. Loaned players from Chelsea brought a level of skill that improved Strasbourg’s results compared to what could have been expected from the whole team.
The main goal for Strasbourg in the upcoming seasons must be to stabilise the team’s performance, relying not only on individual skills or luck but also on the consistent performance of the whole squad.
Verdict: Sustainable Growth or Individual Brilliance?
The BlueCo acquisition has delivered a short-term performance uplift for Strasbourg. It was primarily driven by the arrival of high-quality players from Chelsea, who raised the team’s performance, helping Strasbourg convert lower-quality chances and defend difficult situations.
And this is the practical manifestation of multi-club ownership: access to elite talents that translates into better results.
Yet the data also suggest that Strasbourg’s underlying quality, chance creation, and defensive quality remained largely unchanged before the 2025/2026 season. The club was winning more efficiently, but the wins came from the individual quality of players.
The question Strasbourg fans must ask is if BlueCo’s takeover will lead to long-term gains for the team.
It depends on many factors, and only time will tell, but the foundations for the upcoming successes already exist. The team must now focus on further improvements to achieve more consistent performance without relying solely on individual brilliance.