Therein lies the issue - you’d think that young people with talent and luck to make it at the highest level should think about the long term, the stability of their career and trophies they can win, not just about how to earn some extra thousands of pounds over the thousands of pounds that they are already earning.
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It almost sounds like Clearlake sent him a brochure and he cherry picked what he liked and placed it on top of Chelsea’s structure.
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I think this is a big mistake.
Long term deals like these are common in baseball, and to a lesser extent hockey. Boehly owns the Dodgers. They’re applying a baseball model to football.
But baseball is not a high energy sport. It’s not physically demanding like football. Can you imagine having Keita or AOC on an eight year deal? What if several of these players get hurt or are busts? They’ll be carrying these contracts for a long time.
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That was my point. These long contracts make sense if the wages are reasonably low and/or heavily incentivized. But apparently Caicedo is set to earn over £100m from his contract. I assume, most of the new signings are earning similar wages too.
Only reason you’d do that is on wonder kids in my view (cost of wage would be a lot less).
As you say it’s a concern and it could land you with a guy at 25 who is done and yet will be earning silly for another 5 years.
I don’t think they are breaching anything.
Having said that, it’s a different model than FSG. It’s riskier IMHO.
Also, Clearlake is financing the ownership. Their cost of capital is 15-18%. That’s money coming out of the club. FSG doesn’t do that.
One of the reasons why they are offering 8 year contracts is because they are locking up their wage structure and making the business model more predictable. Their funds are typically 7-8 year funds. They’ll have more certainty on cash flow to pay their interest.
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Strong rumours of Cucurella going to Newcastle on loan now. £60m last summer, loaned out a year later. Perhaps should act as a cautionary tale for anyone heading there.
I wonder how that helps them with cooking the books. Same with Kepa. You sell Mendy for £16m, buy Sanchez presumably as backup for £25m and then loan Kepa out to Real Madrid for a year.
Presumably then they’ll have to go and buy another keeper now. Is that a back up to Sanchez or a clear number one? What happens when Kepa comes back next summer if no one then wants to buy him?
The whole thing is entirely baffling. It’s a level of squad turnover and spending we’ve never seen before and it seems so scatter gun. They went and got all those clever transfer folk from Brighton and instead of doing some really smart recruiting they’re just throwing astronomical sums about.
Are they banking on this squad of players being together for the next 5-8 years? Surely they’ll be loosing a fortune on any one that doesn’t work out other than those that come through the academy.
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DO they have another LB? I thought Hall might get some time this season but he’s on his way to Palace on loan.
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loan fees and offsetting wages?
Aside from Chilwell I don’t think they do. Good excuse to raid Brighton again, this time for Estupiñán.
Loan fees will be relatively small though surely and those wages are then having to be paid to someone else and he’ll be back next summer when they’ll have to try and flog him permanently with everyone knowing they need to get him off the books.
Yes, but it helps them get over any bumps in the road in the short term which is probably all they would be worried about at the moment. They have a very young squad for the most part, so future years may require less spending if the players they have do the business and perhaps run a surplus on transfers next summer.
They have Ian Maatsen
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Nice list of names, but how many of them have been successful? Seems like he is just swinging his dick around without any awareness of what he might hit. I’d say Caicedo and Fernandez are the two I’m envious of; Sanchez is still as dodgy of a keeper as he was at Brighton.
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Two from the Summer '22 list have already been sold and one more looks to be going on loan.
Mudryk has been woeful so far. Sterling hasn’t exactly pulled up any trees either.
Jury is out and probably will be for some time on the likes of Chukwuemeka, Slonina, Madueke, Gusto, Santos, Ugochukwu and some of the others given the limited playing time they’ll likely get.
Neither of the loan deals were successful.
They paid £25m for Robert Sanchez.
They’re buying enough that they’re bound to hit on a few but I see a lot of these being churned out over the next couple of years as they build an actual cohesive squad or continue to rattle through managers at a rate of knotts.
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I hope they get hit with a massive point reduction for flagrantly ignoring the PL’s financial rules, doubt they’d get relegated still but hopefully miss out on Europe and all their expensive acquisitions kick off and demand to be sold.
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What exactly is Boehly’s business model? He seems to be acting out a real world Brewster’s Millions.
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he has huge investors dumping money into his lap to unsettle UEFA and the league. they don’t care how much money they lose, with the backing they have it’s all about up-ending the apple cart with the help of the PIF.
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If Cucarella does go to Newcastle that theory will start building up steam.