There is something missing with Olise. He’s got great close control, good pace, takes set pieces, creative on the ball - but there’s still something he doesn’t have and I can only put it down to his mentality. He’s constantly injured and when he does play he often comes across as really passive. Electric when he gets the ball but not arsed otherwise. I’m not sure he’s currently cut out for the top of the game (so at least in that sense mid-table Chelsea would work).
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I don’t really understand Chelsea’s game. It’s all but impossible to list out their players, as there are too many. And when players sign for them, usually on very long contracts, they are going to have - no, they do have - a raft of footballers not playing, earning very high wages, and either sitting there or being farmed out on loan.
And for the life of me I can’t understand how they continue to amass players and not get punished for financial breaches.
What is the scam? Why aren’t they getting points deductions? What is Boehly doing to keep that at bay, as it looks very suspect?
The game plan appears to buying “the best” young players, amortizing the cost across a long contract and selling off homegrown players who are a “nil” financially meaning that they are 100% profit for FFP purposes.
Of course the flaw in the system is two-fold…
- Chelsea have one of the best youth development systems in world football so they’re often selling players who are better than the ones they are bringing in - Guehi & Tomori are better than Badiashile and Disasi for example.
- They are acting like their youth academy is infinite source of players that can be sold for 20m+ every year to balance the books. In recent years they’ve sold Lewis Hall, Mason Mount, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Callum Hudson-Odoi, Billy Gilmour, Tammy Abraham, Fikayo Tomori and Marc Guehi (it strikes me that if you’re going to be a mid-table team fans would rather it was by using players developed at the club rather than bought in but whatever…)
Looking at their homegrown players they have left to sell - Maatsen, Colwill, Gallagher, Chalobah, James, Broja. They also bought Hutchinson for a minimal fee which means he’s mostly profit if they sell. That means they do still have a pipeline of cash to come in to avoid FFP issues but this is running a very fine line to try and run a club on, expecting to continually turnout top level PL players for huge cash sums to offset your reckless spending. It doesn’t seem feasible in the long term and when they decide these players they have bought are actually not all that good it’s going to create big problems for them to move them on.
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Chelsea also have a good amount of ancillary businesses around the club, which give them “levers” to pull if they need to raise money. It’s very short term thinking though as those businesses by design are ones that pull in additional and consistent revenue, which is being traded in for a big one time infusion of cash to fund these moves.
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Olise to Chavs is done according to that fab romano blike
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Actually having said all the above I think the second part of the “plan” is that once they have cleared the amortization period then they can sell those players for “profit”. If I’m not wrong, they can sign someone for 100m on a five year deal (because their initial 8/9 contract year plan was ruled out by the new rules). Them having “paid” 20m per year on that deal then after 4 years they have cleared 80m in amortization. Now if they sell that player for 50m - a 30m loss in real terms - they actually report a profit of 30m on that sale for the year of the sale.
I think long term this may be their business plan, to ignore the real cost of running the club (because fuck it who cares) and base the entire thing on outfooling FFP. So this summer they could sell - for example - Maatsen and Chalobah for 20m a piece, they have sold Hall for 30m already so that’s 70m profit for the transfer window.
Then you add in players who haven’t been successful or are near the end of their contract and they believe they can make a “profit” on (compared to their amortized cost not the initial transfer cost).
For example below is a rough guide I quickly made of their recent signings and their projected Amortization across the length of their contract. This probably isn’t perfect and I’m sure there are parts of the financial rules here I don’t understand but generally speaking it works like this…
So this summer, entering the 2024/2025 season, if they decided to sell Moises Caicedo for 100m then they would have made a profit of 7.2m on the deal (despite the fact he cost 116m when they bought him last year). So I’d look out for players towards the end of their contract that they believe they could sell for more than their amortized price. They potentially could get more than 20m for Chilwell (probably not much more but a “profit” anyway) while Lukaku at 45m still looks expensive. I think they have lots of candidates for fake profitable sales next year like Gusto, Madueke, Fernandez, Jackson and Palmer. This year they’ll probably be reliant on selling their homegrown players to get through the window.
By continually doing this they can play FFP into being allowed to spend large amounts of money every season and spread those costs over 5 years. I think the reduction of allowable amortization did hurt them though, they obviously wanted 8 or 9 year contracts to further reduce the costs.
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It sounds a reasonable explanation. Accountancy Newspeak, of course, but at least reasoned. However it rather makes huge assumptions on player value when a football team is run as a cattle market rather than a sporting club.
The only thing is, what is Boehly’s aim, because this may dodge FFP, but it won’t turn an actual profit.
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But then,
Michael Olise’s £60M release clause at Crystal Palace can only be triggered by clubs qualified for the Champions League, which complicates the deal for Chelsea. (Source:
)
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We should bid 70, so they can bid 80m.
Sort of looks like an oil spill.
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Watery…like their defence
That’s not a kit, surely? Warm-up gear?
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It’s an additional pre-sale kit they introduced for their players during the transfer window.
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Wow - if I was marketing for a formerly Russian-owned club I would want to double down on the natural gas connection. May as well slap a Gazprom logo on them
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Definitely no hallucinogens for the opposition before kick-off…
https://x.com/wesley_fofana3/status/1813286455256519160?s=46&t=qjQdwJi2khWQQz87wqB34A
What a situation for a new manager to have to come in and deal with right away.
What were they saying? Any translation
This is what I saw
Listen, spread the word;
They play in France, but they are all from Angola;
How nice it is! They are going to run;
They are ‘cometravas’* like fucking Mbappé;
Their mom is Nigerian;
Their dad, Cameroonian.
But in the document …Nationality: French.
Cometravas is supposedly a loose slang term for somebody who “likes fucking transgender people”.
So yeah, not great. Chelsea have six black French players in their first team squad, it’s hard to envisage a scenario in which Enzo is welcomed back into that dressing room.
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