Chelsea’s massive £323m January splurge is not the end – they could spend MORE this summer
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Todd Boehly is either a genius or a player when it comes to his relatively short stint as Chelsea owner.
The club have now spent £600m across the two transfer windows since Boehly took over in May 2022 and that excludes the estimated £22m they paid Brighton in compensation for installing Graham Potter and his team. behind the scenes as a coaching staff.
Part of the reason Chelsea have been able to achieve this is because of the player transfer amortization method which, as previously discussed on Sportsmail, spreads the cost of a transfer over the duration of the contract.
Therefore, although Enzo Fernández cost a transfer fee of £107.6m in moving from Benfica, Chelsea in their accounts will only show an annual cost of £12.6m (£107.6m divided by 8.5 ).
If Fernández is as good as Chelsea believes he is as the 2022 World Cup Young Player of the Tournament, then the full cost, which will be included in his income statement until June 30, 2031, when his contract expires, will appear to be a bargain.
Chelsea, under owner Todd Boehly (right), spent £323m in the January transfer window
Chelsea paid a British record: £107m for Benfica’s Argentina World Cup winner Enzo Fernandez
The Argentine played an integral role for his country when they defeated France in the final in Qatar.
He has signed a mammoth eight-and-a-half-year contract that helps Chelsea’s repayment problems.
The club have spent £600m across the two transfer windows since Boehly took over in May 2022.
Furthermore, if Fernández improves and attracts the attention of big clubs like Real Madrid in the coming years, Chelsea will have a player with many years on his contract. They will then be able to extract maximum value from the player’s sale for a great fee.
If Fernandez had only signed a three- or four-year contract, they may have had to accept a discount as player values tend to drop as they get closer and closer to the expiration date of their contract, when they can leave for free with a Bosman deal.
Chelsea’s write-off expenses have risen over the past decade from £59m to £163m. They were already the highest in the Premier League at £163m before Boehly came along.
The gap between Chelsea and the rest of the Premier League is likely to grow, but spending £600m in 2022-23 on an average of six-year deals will result in an annual write-down cost of £100m. , whereas if the deals had been for just four years it would have been £150m.
While all the focus has been on Chelsea spending money, the success of developing their academy has been ignored.
We’ve seen the likes of Tammy Abraham, Fikayo Tomori and Marc Guehi leave for significant fees, and the academy sales are pure profit from FFP’s perspective, as the club didn’t have to pay a fee to register their contracts.
Throw in other academy players like Conor Gallagher, Callum Hudson-Odoi, Ruben Loftus-Cheek and Levi Colwill and there’s at least another £150m in potential sales and therefore profit, which could be offset by the cost of write-down.
Chelsea have many satellite football schools around the country and this has helped them spot talented kids and potentially offer them a pathway into the club’s academy.
The club made eight purchases in January, including Noni Madueke (left) and Benoit Badiashile (right)
Signing players like winger Mykhailo Mudryk to an eight-and-a-half-year deal allows the Blues to spread the cost of their £88m fee over the course of those eight-and-a-half years.
Chelsea’s write-off expenses have risen over the past decade from £59m to £163m. They were already the highest in the Premier League at £163m before Boehly came along
Sales of academy merchandise such as Fikayo Tomori (right) and Tammy Abraham (left) helped the club offset its expenses; academy sales are pure profit from a financial fair play perspective
Although there is a high failure rate in football academies, you only need a Mason Mount or John Terry to go through the system every few years for them to break even.
Under UEFA’s new rules for cost control, clubs can spend 90 per cent of their revenue in 2023-24 on player salaries plus agent fees plus net transfer costs, which will be the amortization minus the gains from transfer fees.
This metric will drop to 80 percent in 2024-25 and 70 percent from 2025-26 onwards.
Looking at these costs in recent years, Chelsea have been in bounds, and remember that in 2020 and 2021, along with the rest of the football industry, they were affected by the Covid lockdown which reduced the money generated by ticket sales on match days.
While Chelsea are currently on UEFA’s ‘watch list’ of clubs that were close to the limits of the old FFP measures, as long as they continue to buy and sell players, they should still be able to spend on the transfer market this summer.
Chelsea have been within the limits of new UEFA rules for cost control in recent years (above)
Chelsea’s new owners are convinced the club was behind in terms of generating money and have plans to expand or rebuild Stamford Bridge, which has a capacity of 41,000, substantially below the number of seats sold in the peer group. of the club and the level of demand for tickets.
Furthermore, the Chelsea hierarchy feels the club has the ability to expand its commercial revenue, which was not always a priority under the Abramovich regime. The club’s former owner was willing to bear operating losses that have averaged £900,000 a week since he bought Chelsea in 2003.
Boehly’s team are optimistic that Chelsea have the ability to generate over £1bn per season in revenue, although this ambition is not expected to be realized for many years.
A lot will depend on the club’s ability to remove unwanted players from the roster, and this could be the biggest challenge going forward. Romelu Lukaku, for example, has not had a happy return to Stamford Bridge since his return to Stamford Bridge in the summer of 2021 for an estimated £97.5m.
His contract doesn’t expire until June 2026, and although he’s spent this season on loan at Inter Milan, it doesn’t mean his entire salary at Chelsea will be covered by the deal.
If some of Boehly’s signings turn out to be similar to Lukaku’s in terms of a lack of success on the pitch, the club could be left with players who have contracts that do not expire for many years and are unwilling to move. other places like Chelsea are some of the most generous payers in football.
Manager Graham Potter certainly can’t complain about not being backed by the market.
In the 2020-21 season, the total wage bill was £333m, the second-highest in the Premier League behind Manchester City, and is likely to have skyrocketed after his massive January outlay.
In the most recent accounts, for the 2020/21 season, the total wage bill was £333m, the second-highest in the Premier League behind Manchester City, whom they defeated in the Champions League final that season.
If Chelsea are paying multi-million-a-season salaries to players on contracts that don’t expire until the end of the decade, they will act as an anchor in terms of their ability to sign replacement players and comply with the new cost control rules of UEFA. .
If Boehly does everything right, the £2.5bn paid by the club will look like a bargain. Get it wrong and you’ll have to deal with some very steep costs in the long run.