Chelsea insist that they are under no pressure to sell players in order to comply with their UEFA settlement agreement, but football finance expert Kieran Maguire disagrees.
Last summer, Chelsea were fined about £27m with another £52m suspended by European football’s governing body for breaching their spending rules.
BlueCo reached a settlement with UEFA that will affect them until at least 2028. Under the terms of that agreement, Chelsea must more or less break even financially in 2026-27, 2027-28 and 2028-29.
Depending on how they perform relative to that target, Chelsea may also be required to post a positive transfer balance for the squad they submit to play in UEFA competitions in each season, just as they did ahead of the current campaign.
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That will be a tall order. UEFA’s annual financial report has confirmed that Chelsea lost a gargantuan £355m in 2024-25, the biggest deficit in English football history. And while the club say that much of that figure is non-cash expenses in the form of player value write-offs, Chelsea have been running at a £200m operating loss every season since BlueCo took over.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, one club source said that they would be ‘strategic rather than reactive’ with their approach to player trading and that the loss should not force them into selling their superstars.
But given the need for Chelsea to get out of the red consistently in the next few seasons, player sales are inevitable. And some of them will be key players, not peripheral ones.
“They had got a get-out-of-jail-free card in that they could sell the women’s team, sell the hotels, sell players to Strasbourg,” says University of Liverpool football finance lecturer Kieran Maguire, speaking exclusively to The Chelsea Chronicle.
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UEFA revise the value of player transfer between clubs under the same ownership umbrella, meaning Chelsea cannot artificially inflate their bottom line that way. What’s more, UEFA’s rules do not recognise the intra-club asset sales that saw Chelsea book over £200m in profit for selling their women’s team and two hotels at Stamford Bridge to themselves. The same is true of the Premier League’s new system, too.
“They did have a net negative spend in the summer,” continued Maguire. “Such is the volume of sales, they have complied with the UEFA settlement. The ability to monetise the academy is absolutely spectacular. Connor Gallagher, Tammy Abraham, Fikayo Tomori, Billy Gilmour, Mason Mount – they have generated huge money here. They have made more money from the academy than they have through ticket sales.
“But the operating losses put huge pressure on them to make sales, however. They have used sleight of hand to get within the rules in recent seasons, but they can’t rely on that. You only need one or two less stellar years to put the club under a huge amount of pressure.”
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Throughout their reign, BlueCo have arguably tried to paint a rosier picture of the finances than is actually true, but there is no doubt that the tide is rising when it comes to the UEFA settlement.
In terms of cold, hard cash, the owners have plenty to burn. But regulatory pressure – what they are allowed to spend, not what they are able to spend – is a different matter.
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