Chelsea Beat AC Milan 3-0 as Joao Pedro Double Shows Alonso Rebuild Taking Shape

Joao Pedro scooped his first chance over the bar from close range, put his head in his hands, and looked set to add another miss to a Chelsea pre-season that had produced back-to-back defeats. Three minutes later he made up for it, and two minutes after that he did it again. By the time Chelsea beat AC Milan 3-0 in Jakarta, Xabi Alonso had the first pre-season performance that looked like the team he wants to build.

The win over Ruben Amorim’s Milan side arrived after Chelsea had lost their two previous pre-season matches, and it came with a tactical shift that Alonso had only shown in flashes before this game: a full commitment to his preferred 3-4-3 shape, dropping the hybrid system that had blended it with a back four earlier in the summer.

Joao Pedro’s two minutes

The breakthrough came moments before half-time. Marco Palestra, deployed at left wing-back, turned his man inside the box and found Joao Pedro with a low ball across the area. The forward scooped his first-time effort over the bar with the goal at his mercy, a miss that would have been the story of the half had Chelsea not been handed a route back into the game seconds later. From the resulting corner, Moises Caicedo whipped in a delivery and Joao Pedro peeled off Milan goalkeeper Lorenzo Torriani to turn the ball home unmarked, sending Chelsea in at the break a goal to the good.

He was not finished. Milan made seven changes at half-time, and Chelsea punished the reset defence within a minute of the restart. Joao Pedro smartly finished a cross from Pedro Neto to make it 2-0, two goals in as many minutes either side of the interval. Set-piece work played a part in both moments of the win: Chelsea scored only 10 goals from corners across the whole of the 2025/26 Premier League season, roughly half the total managed by champions Arsenal, but found two in this one match. Austin McPhee, appointed as Chelsea’s set-piece coach a couple of weeks before the game, appears to be leaving an early mark.

The system Alonso has been building toward

Chelsea had shown a hybrid of a 4-2-3-1 and Alonso’s favoured 3-4-3 in earlier pre-season matches. Against Milan, it was the 3-4-3 in full, and the shape gave Caicedo and Romeo Lavia significant responsibility through the middle of the pitch. Caicedo regularly dropped into the back three to help start moves from deep, while Lavia was given a specific defensive job: shadowing Luka Modric, who found few openings and had a quiet afternoon for Milan.

Palestra’s performance at left wing-back stood out inside a system that asks a lot of the players in those wide positions, both defensively and as the primary source of width in attack. His assist for the opening goal came from exactly the kind of inside-out movement Alonso wants from his wing-backs, cutting infield before finding a teammate rather than simply putting crosses into the box.

Chelsea were not finished chasing a third. Substitutes Geovany Quenda and Nicolas Jackson both came close to adding to the scoreline, with Quenda standing up his marker in the Milan box before driving past him and striking the near post with a powerful effort, and Jackson denied by the woodwork as well. The eventual third goal, which took the scoreline to 3-0, arrived to cap the best performance of Alonso’s short time in charge.

Opponents with their own rebuild underway

Milan arrived in Jakarta on their own pre-season tour under Ruben Amorim, who took charge at San Siro this summer after leaving Manchester United. The seven changes Amorim made at half-time reflected a squad still being assessed rather than a settled team, and Chelsea’s two goals inside the opening minute of the second half punished a defence that had just been reshuffled. Modric started the match in Milan’s midfield and had one of his quieter afternoons, kept largely out of the game by Lavia’s man-marking job. For a player who has spent his career dictating matches from deep, being shut out so completely said as much about Chelsea’s approach as it did about Milan’s afternoon.

A response after two defeats

Alonso arrived at Stamford Bridge this summer after leaving Real Madrid, becoming the fifth permanent manager of the BlueCo ownership era that began in 2022, following Graham Potter, Mauricio Pochettino, Enzo Maresca and a brief spell under Rosenior. His first two pre-season matches in charge ended in defeat, results that would ordinarily draw little scrutiny in July and August but still raised questions about how quickly his ideas would translate onto the pitch with a squad that has changed significantly this summer.

Danny Welbeck and Geovany Quenda both made their first Chelsea starts in the defeat to Juventus in Hong Kong earlier in the tour, a match Chelsea lost 1-0. The win over Milan followed almost immediately, and showed far more clearly what Alonso’s Chelsea will look like once the Premier League season begins. New arrivals Jordan Henderson and Maxence Lacroix have added experience to a squad that leaned heavily on academy graduates and young signings last season, and the balance between that experience and the club’s development pipeline will be one of the defining themes of Alonso’s first campaign.

Alonso won the Bundesliga at Bayer Leverkusen without losing a single match across all competitions in his first full season in charge, a European record 51-game unbeaten run that made him one of the most sought-after coaches in Europe before Real Madrid appointed him as Carlo Ancelotti’s successor. He won 24 of his 34 games in the Real Madrid job before leaving for Chelsea this summer. The identity he built at Leverkusen, disciplined out of possession and adventurous with his full-backs and wing-backs pushed high, is the same identity now taking shape at Stamford Bridge.

Building around a young core

Alonso inherited a Chelsea squad shaped almost entirely by the recruitment strategy of the last two years, heavy on young signings brought in on long contracts and light on senior players who had won major trophies. Henderson’s arrival on a free transfer, along with Lacroix’s move from Crystal Palace and Welbeck’s switch from Brighton, was designed to change that balance without breaking from the club’s recruitment model. None of the three are the kind of marquee, headline signing Chelsea have made in past windows. All three bring a level of experience the dressing room had been short of.

Reece James remains Alonso’s captain, and Enzo Fernandez has been asked to stay at the club even as other sides circled, both decisions that point toward continuity in the leadership group even as the head coach changes the way the team plays. Caicedo and Lavia, both signed under previous regimes, look like the two players best suited to Alonso’s system in central midfield, and their performances against Milan will have done nothing to change that view inside the club.

What comes next

Chelsea’s first competitive match under Alonso comes away at Craven Cottage on August 24, with their first home fixture of the season following on August 29 against Brighton. The performance in Jakarta will not settle any arguments about how Chelsea’s season will go, but it gave Alonso and his coaching staff clear evidence that the principles they have been drilling in training are starting to show up on the pitch, most of all at set pieces and in the shape of the back three.

For Joao Pedro, the two goals continue a pre-season in which he has looked one of the sharpest attacking options available to Alonso, and a player capable of playing through the mistakes rather than being defined by them. Missing an open goal and then scoring twice inside three minutes is the kind of afternoon strikers either crumble under or use to build confidence. Joao Pedro chose the second option, and Chelsea’s pre-season is better for it heading into the final weeks before the Premier League returns.

The near misses from Quenda and Jackson stood out too, even without goals attached to them. Quenda has arrived at Chelsea with a reputation built on exactly that kind of direct running at defenders, and his effort against the post came from precisely the situation Chelsea signed him to create. Jackson, who has spent long spells out of Alonso’s first-choice attack from the moment the new manager arrived, will have taken some encouragement from a performance that showed his movement and finishing are still sharp even without a regular run of minutes. Neither substitute changed the final score, but both gave Alonso options he did not have when the same fixtures were being lost in July.

Chelsea now have three weeks to turn one strong pre-season display into a settled approach they can trust from the opening weekend. A single win over a Milan side still finding its own shape under a new manager will not be treated as proof that Alonso has solved every problem in his squad. It is proof, at least, that the team is capable of playing the way he wants, and that is a considerable improvement on where Chelsea stood a few days earlier.