Chelsea vs. Real Madrid, Preseason friendly: Preview, team news, how to watch

Chelsea wrap up our extremely busy USA Tour with a friendly against Real Madrid in Charlotte, NC today, bringing to an end a 17-day, 5-city extravaganza, which has featured thousands of miles, hundreds of smiles, lots of concerns, and a few entertaining bits of football, even.

Head coach Enzo Maresca has admitted that there hasn’t really been all that much time available for proper training, which certainly isn’t an unexpected or surprising revelation. We’ve seen this story play out before, and never to a happy ending.

“Five games in 17 or 18 days is a lot of games. In this moment, the ideal situation would be to prepare for the games but for most of the games we have been without the preparation. [We] tried to adapt and I think we had a very good two weeks in Cobham.

“We have one week or 10 days in Cobham when we go back. For me, the real pre-season has been the two weeks at Cobham and the week or 10 days we have at Cobham. Here, it has been a mixed feeling.”

-Enzo Maresca; source: Football.London

Let’s try to end the trip on a good note, shall we?

Date / Time: Tuesday, August 6, 2024; 7pm EDT; 23.00 BST; 4:30am IST (next day)
Venue: Bank of America Stadium, Charlotte, NC, USA
Forecast: Warm and humid

On TV: ESPN2, ESPN Deportes (USA); none (UK); elsewhere
Streaming: ESPN+ (USA); Chelsea TV (int’l pay-per-view)

Photo by Darren Walsh/Chelsea FC via Getty Images

Chelsea team news: Axel Disasi and Nicolas Jackson still haven’t played a single minute this preseason, dealing still with injuries from earlier this summer. The former’s hopeful of maybe featuring in our last friendly, next weekend against Inter Milan at the Bridge; the latter is now back in full training and perhaps ready for a minute or two.

The rest of the squad — other than those who has seen limited action, like Ben Chilwell or Armando Broja — have been rotating out for workload-management offdays as needed, so hopefully we’re not overworking anyone. It certainly would be ironic were someone to get injured because of that, considering we have more players at our disposal than we can count.

Photo by Antonio Villalba/Real Madrid via Getty Images

Real Madrid team news: This is only the third preseason friendly for Real Madrid, yet it’s already their last. They have the UEFA Super Cup next Wednesday (against Atalanta), then start their league season the weekend after, same as we will be doing. They have lost both of their previous friendlies, 1-0 to AC Milan and 2-1 to Barcelona — the latter stinging quite a bit, as one might expect, among their faithful.

Carlo Ancelotti, who once managed Maresca at Juventus, is of course not bothered and is just trying to get his players back into fighting shape.

“The objective now is to give minutes and get the players who are returning back into shape. We are not thinking about the tactical aspect or other things, just getting the players who are working now into good condition. On a tactical level we will work from the 7th.”

“Let’s not go crazy. They are pre-season matches, we are missing eight players… The result is not as important for us as getting the players into good form.”

-Carlo Ancelotti; source: Diario AS via Google Translate

Those eight not with the team at the moment include Kylian Mbappé, Jude Bellingham, Eduardo Camavinga, Dani Carvajal, Ferland Mendy, Aurélien Tchouaméni, David Alaba, and Federico Valverde. Ex-Chelsea men Antonior Rüdiger and Thibaut Courtois are here, so is the latest future superstar, Endrick.

View from the frenemy: Managing Madrid

Previously: This will be our third preseason friendly against Real in the last dozen years, following the games in 2013 (3-1 defeat) and 2016 (3-2 defeat).