Chelsea have confirmed their squad numbers for the 2026-27 season, and the headline change is João Pedro taking the Chelsea Number 9 shirt from Liam Delap, whose one season in the number produced just three goals in 47 appearances before he was shifted to No. 12 and linked with a move away from Stamford Bridge.
Pedro’s reward comes after a genuinely outstanding debut campaign — 20 goals, nine assists, and Chelsea’s Player of the Season award.
Predictably, the reaction from parts of the Chelsea fanbase has been closer to dread than celebration.
The Number 9 shirt has developed a reputation as cursed, passed from one expensive flop to the next: Fernando Torres, Radamel Falcao, Álvaro Morata, Gonzalo Higuaín, Romelu Lukaku, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, and most recently Delap.
Chelsea Number 9 history tells a more complicated story than that reputation suggests — the shirt has produced genuine failures and genuine success, and looking closely at both undermines the idea that the number itself is responsible for either.
The most basic problem with calling it a curse is that the number has, in fact, been worn successfully — repeatedly.
Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink wore No. 9 from 2000 to 2004 and was one of the most prolific strikers of the Premier League era, winning the Golden Boot in 2000-01 before topping the league’s scoring charts again in 2001-02 with 23 goals (29 in all competitions)
A single-season tally no Chelsea Number 9 has matched since. Gianluca Vialli and Mark Stein also had productive spells in the shirt before him.
More recently, and more relevantly for the Pedro discussion, Tammy Abraham wore No. 9 in 2019-20 and scored 15 Premier League goals, finishing as Chelsea’s top scorer in the league that season — just five years before Delap’s struggles in the same shirt.
None of this proves the shirt is entirely harmless, and it’s true that Chelsea Number 9 failures outnumber its successes over the past 15 years.
The existence of Hasselbaink and Abraham does undermine the idea that wearing the shirt inherently causes poor performances. If the number itself carried some kind of curse, it’s hard to explain why it worked out fine for two different players in two different eras.
What the record actually shows is a group of individual strikers who each had their own reasons for succeeding or struggling — not a pattern tied to the number on their backs.
Look closely at the supposed curse victims — Torres, Falcao, Morata, Higuaín, Lukaku, Aubameyang — and each one had an obvious footballing explanation for their struggles that had nothing to do with a shirt number.
Torres arrived from Liverpool for in January 2011 already carrying a serious injury history, and expectations that were arguably impossible to meet given the fee.
Lukaku returned to Chelsea for a club-record £97.5m in 2021 and still scored 15 goals in all competitions in his first season back — a campaign disrupted more by injuries, dips in form, and the fallout from a Sky Italia interview in which he questioned his own role at the club, than by anything superstitious.
Morata and Higuaín both struggled to adapt to the physical demands of the Premier League after arriving from Serie A and La Liga respectively.
Delap, most recently, struggled to establish himself after his £30m move from a relegated Ipswich side, with Nicolas Jackson and Marc Guiu among the options pushing him down the pecking order.
Injuries, transfer-fee pressure, tactical fit, managerial changes and competition for places explain these struggles far more convincingly than a cursed shirt does.
The number on a player’s back doesn’t cause any of that — it just happens to be the number Chelsea keep handing to whoever their most expensive or most hyped forward happens to be at the time, which is precisely why it keeps attracting players who are already under pressure before they’ve kicked a ball.
That’s what makes Pedro’s situation genuinely different from most of the “cursed” names before him — and it’s worth spelling out why.
Every one of the failed No. 9s arrived at Chelsea still needing to prove themselves in the shirt, whether that meant adapting to a new league, justifying a record fee, or simply beating out the competition for a starting role.
Pedro isn’t doing any of that. He’s already played a full season for this club, in this league, under real pressure, and produced 20 goals and nine assists while doing it.
The shirt isn’t being used to signal potential this time — it’s being used to reward proven performance. His tactical role, fitness and consistency will ultimately decide how his time in the No. 9 shirt goes, exactly as they did for every player before him.
Unlike Torres, Lukaku or Delap, he’s not walking into Stamford Bridge with a reputation to build from nothing.
Chelsea’s Number 9 shirt isn’t cursed. Chelsea simply have a long history of putting enormous expectations on whoever wears it — and for once, the player wearing it has already shown he can handle exactly that kind of pressure.
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