When I arrived at Stamford Bridge at around 3pm last Saturday, a couple of hours before Chelsea’s game against Tottenham in the Premier League, murmurs were already spreading around the press room.

Chelsea’s official channels were not revealing any team news, but on X, the pieces of the puzzle were coming together. A handful of accounts had noticed that on various betting websites, Chelsea’s likelihood of scoring multiple goals had been steadily dropping since 10am. Their probability of winning the game was falling too.

Then there were the fantasy football sleuths. An account called “Team news and ticks” is well known for its reliable leaks, and it posted: “Some massive assets [players] missing in multiple games today,” in a direct call to the FPL community. Given there were only three more games that day, and Chelsea were the most popular team for fantasy managers, it raised the possibility of an injury among their supreme front three: Cole Palmer, Morgan Rogers and Joao Pedro.

Then came the real investigative work. An account called FPL Joe posted a diagram analysing the fantasy football teams of individuals closely linked to the Chelsea dressing room, featuring players, staff and family members. It suggested one of Chelsea’s staff had benched Joao Pedro, an odd move with one of the top-scoring fantasy players so far this season.

Another X account spotted that a Chelsea youth coach had apparently transferred Joao Pedro out of their team. Another suggested a family member of Morgan Rogers appeared to have sold Joao Pedro and replaced him with Aston Villa’s Nicolas Jackson, an inspired move considering Jackson’s two-goal haul against Manchester City earlier in the day.

Joao Pedro was not spotted in pictures of Chelsea players boarding the team bus and sure enough, the Brazilian was missing from Xabi Alonso’s squad when the teams were officially announced at 3:15pm, an hour and 15 minutes before kick-off. Chelsea did want to comment on the leak, and Tottenham did not comment when asked whether the club were aware of developments on social media.

At this point it is probably fair to ask whether any of this really matters. If Spurs had found out a little early that Joao Pedro wasn’t playing, would they have made any major adjustments to their gameplan? They might even have anticipated Danny Welbeck starting the game, only to discover it was Rogers leading the line beside Portuguese teenager Geovany Quenda, a surprise inclusion on the left of the front three. It didn’t prove a particularly inspired move by Alonso and Quenda was replaced in the second half.

Then again, had the game been on Sunday or Monday night, Tottenham would have had plenty of time to prepare for Chelsea’s possible line-ups. That scenario would not have pleased Alonso, who is highly secretive when it comes to team news, to the point where journalists who regularly cover the club can find themselves with very little to write about after pre-match press conferences. Alonso even refused to reveal Joao Pedro’s injury in September, before the last international break, despite the striker having already been ruled out by Brazil.

After Tottenham’s 2-0 win at the weekend, the Chelsea manager was asked whether he was bothered by the inadvertent leak from inside the club. “I am not into the fantasy team thing, so I didn’t know that,” Alonso replied.

It is not unusual for Premier League team news to slip out on social media, particularly in the fantasy football community, where knowledge is power. Five years ago, the FPL’s weekly transfer deadline was moved back by half an hour to combat leaks which were giving an unfair advantage to those fantasy managers glued to the right social media accounts in the minutes before the deadline fell.

The situation came to a head at Aston Villa during that 2020/21 season when an account called FPL Insider posted that five people inside the Villa dressing room, including some first-team players and a club physio, had transferred Jack Grealish out of their fantasy teams.

The news surfaced on social media more than 24 hours before kick-off in their Premier League match against Leicester City, and Leicester manager Brendan Rodgers admitted he had learnt about the reports of Grealish’s injury well ahead of the game. His Villa counterpart, Dean Smith, was unimpressed.

“I’ve been made aware that on social media there’d been rumours that he wasn’t going to play,” Smith said. “If it’s coming out of our training ground then I will find out where that’s coming from and reprimand where it’s coming from. It’s something I wouldn’t be happy with and we’ll get to the bottom of it.”

Villa players and staff were banned from playing fantasy football as a result of the incident. Several clubs around the Premier League brought in their own rules, with some also banning employees from playing FPL, and others, such as Fulham, advising players not to select themselves or their teammates in their fantasy teams.

There is no indication that Alonso is planning to follow Smith’s hardline stance on fantasy football. But after a week in which the manager’s secretive bubble was seemingly breached, employees at Cobham might be taking a little more care ahead of this weekend’s game Premier League game against Manchester United.