Gary Lineker on The Rest Is Football podcast
(Image: The Rest Is Football podcast)
Pundit and former England striker Gary Lineker has questioned whether Chelsea's approach to transfer dealings, in the current climate of PSR which has hindered Aston Villa's own progress, should actually on reflection be applauded after their recent Premier League exploits.
Chelsea have spent hundreds of millions of pounds - and nine figure sums on individual players, no less, in the case of Enzo Fernandez and Moises Caicedo, while the cost of Mykhailo Mudryk could rise to those sorts of numbers in the years to come - in recent years and have also chopped and changed their managers at will, too.
Owner Todd Boehly has sanctioned deals which have abided by the much debated financial rules by offering extensive contracts to players in order to spread the cost of their signings over a number of years, in order to remain within the limitations of any given three-year cycle; Fernandez, Caicedo, Mudryk, Nicolas Jackson all have contracts for another seven years.
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It's become a subject which has irked Villa's hierarchy; having to comply with certain monetary rules, while trying to make progress in closing the gap to the bigger clubs in the Premier League, and despite having willing and wealthy investors at the top of the club, Villa have already achieved plenty under Unai Emery but sustaining themselves at the very top table requires spending that the Lions aren't necessarily permitted to green light.
Lineker told the Rest Is Football podcast : "Have we reached a point now where, if we go back a few months or even a year, or two years, we were all going 'what are the owners doing here?'. They were buying players, they were spending a fortune, they were giving them incredibly long contracts, they've got an extraordinarily large squad. How are they going to be able to cope with all this?
"We're seeing now that they rotate all the time, they've got so much quality that they can afford to do that. Do we have to say, perhaps, that we were wrong and the owners were right? At the moment, it's starting to look that way. The appointment of Maresca was a really clever one. He's done an incredible job in not easy circumstances."