Chelsea's grip on the WSL title is slipping - but are Man City strong enough to take advantage?

City have been outstanding through the first 10 games of this WSL campaign. New head coach Andree Jeglertz has mixed things up well without causing too much disruption to the already-quality squad he inherited - and the results have been excellent. Since losing at Stamford Bridge to the defending champions on the opening day, City have won all nine of their games by an aggregate score of 25-7.

No team in the league has scored more goals, with the 3-0 thumping of Manchester United in last month's derby one of their most impressive results yet. Only Chelsea have a better defensive record than the Cityzens, too, while the fact that their actual goals scored and conceded statistics are very close to their expected goals scored and conceded statistics suggests there is no crazy over-performance going on here that could suddenly revert to the mean.

City are very much as good as their six-point lead at the top of the WSL table suggests, with there no reason to believe they should drop off.

That's especially the case because City are not in European competition this term. Last season's fourth-placed finish was not what the club wanted, with them making a quite stunning managerial change five days before March's League Cup final in order to try and secure a top-three finish. However, the silver lining of that disappointment is shining through this term, while United and Arsenal, in particular, are struggling to succeed on the continent and challenge for the WSL title.

"We really must aim for first place," Yui Hasegawa, the excellent City midfielder, told GOAL before the season, noting the significance of not having to play Champions League football. "We can focus on the domestic league so I think the chances of winning the title are probably the highest."

Chelsea haven't endured a dramatic drop-off this term, but they certainly don't look like the inevitable force that went an entire domestic campaign unbeaten last time around, winning the WSL, FA Cup and League Cup without losing a single game. It would be unfair to expect them to hit those levels again, really, but there will be internal, as well as external, frustrations at how the first half of the season has panned out.

One of the main issues has been defensive stability. That was what Chelsea's treble-winning campaign was built upon, with only 16 goals conceded in 30 games in domestic competition last term. This season, however, head coach Sonia Bompastor wants her team to "take more risks".

"Sometimes, depending on my starting XI, we have a lot of offensive players on the pitch and I think that's okay," Bompastor explained earlier in the campaign, asked about her team's defensive metrics not being quite as impressive as last year. "We want to be a team who want to dominate the opposition. We also want to have a team who take risks on the pitch going forward. So sometimes, depending on the games, in terms of balance, we focus more on in-possession [things] and how we can create and how we can move the ball forward on the pitch, rather than maybe trying to defend more.

"That's okay for me. This is what we want to achieve as a team. I know going into every game, maybe the plan will change a little bit, so it's always important to find the right balance between in and out of possession. But, again, I think I'm someone who really likes to take the risks. We want to be offensive."

If Chelsea were scoring at the rate they were last season, this probably wouldn't be as big of an issue. After all, while Bompastor's side are conceding significantly more shots, shots on target, key passes and shot-creating actions per 90 minutes this term, compared to last, they've still only conceded six times in their 10 WSL outings. That makes for the best defensive record in the league and one, to this point, that sees them letting in goals at only a slightly worse rate than last year.

The other problem, which accentuates the impact of a slightly leakier defence, is that lack of cutting edge in the final third. Chelsea have only scored 16 goals in the WSL so far this season, a number that can be significantly bettered by all of Arsenal, United and City. That is despite the Blues having the second-highest number of expected goals in the WSL this season, at 20.7.

Perhaps this will even itself over the course of the campaign. Sunday's shock 1-0 defeat to Everton, for example, felt like the kind of game that, if played out 100 times, would end up in a Chelsea win 99 times, with the Blues absolutely peppering the Toffees' goal but finding numerous bodies, excellent goalkeeping or the woodwork in their way on the occasions when they didn’t fire off target. Either way, Chelsea's finishing absolutely has to improve and return to its clinical best if the Blues are to seriously challenge City in the second half of this campaign.

Of course, with 10 of the 22 WSL games played, the title race is by no means done yet. It was this time last year where City looked a serious contender for the crown, primed to close the gap to Chelsea to just three points before the winter break, only to suffer their own shock defeat to Everton.

The season before was even more dramatic, when City were six points clear at the top of the WSL table with only two games to play. However, a devastating defeat to Arsenal in their penultimate fixture paved the way for Chelsea, with games in hand, to get back into the mix and triumph again, even after Emma Hayes had infamously declared the title race over when her Blues lost a seven-goal thriller to Liverpool only a few days earlier.

On both occasions, injuries would prove to be a significant factor in City's undoing. They lost Khadija Shaw, their star centre-forward, for the tail end of the 2023-24 title race, something which proved incredibly costly. Last season, meanwhile, a full-blown injury crisis left the Cityzens remarkably depleted, as the likes of Shaw, Alex Greenwood, Vivianne Miedema, Lauren Hemp and more spent extended time on the sidelines.

This time around, though, it feels different. City have performed brilliantly at the start of this season despite the likes of Hemp and Greenwood being missing for spells, and the squad generally feels in a better place to cope with absentees, especially given there are no European games on their schedule.

It's not going to be easy for Jeglertz to get this team over the line, though. Unlike Chelsea, City don't have that automatic setting when it comes to clinching the biggest titles, with it almost four years since this team won a major trophy. Plus, while neither Arsenal nor United look capable of challenging for the WSL crown this term - unless they can do some serious work in the January transfer window - both will still present serious tests on their day and provide potential stumbling blocks for City - and Chelsea.

That said, City have spent the first half of the season putting themselves in an incredible position for their pursuit of a first WSL title since 2016. Keep this up, and that trophy will surely be heading back to Manchester. Yet, that is not to say we shouldn’t experience plenty of twists and turns over the next few months.

After all, Chelsea are unlikely to go down lightly, if at all. That's not what champions do, and if one thing is for certain at the midway point of this season, it's that Bompastor's Blues are still great champions and remain more than capable of showing it.