Chelsea’s owners have turned the club into a highly-profitable talent factory - but they haven’t yet worked out how to build a team.
When Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali first took charge of Chelsea in 2022, it was chaos. It quickly became clear that the new ownership knew too little and involved themselves too much, as Chelsea spent a record-shattering £550m on new transfers within a year of the fall of the Abramovich regime. Most of it was squandered recklessly.
Since then, however, Chelsea’s owners have learned quickly. The excess and wastefulness of their early transfer business didn’t last long and while they have continued to spend exorbitantly, as they offer much-mocked nine-year super-contracts to their players, a seemingly coherent plan is beginning to emerge.
It doesn’t look well-organised at first glance. Teams whose squads are carefully and intelligently constructed don’t have ‘bomb squads’ of unwanted and overpaid players that they’re desperate to get rid of, after all. There is method behind the apparent madness, however, and Chelsea have quietly become an extremely clever business. The question is whether they can turn smart investment into a good football team.
How Chelsea became a smooth money-making operation
Since BlueCo took the reins at Chelsea, led by Boehly and Eghbali (who, despite being the less well-known of the two, is much more involved in the day-to-day running of the club), they have broken spending records seemingly on a string of whims.
That £550m spend in their first season was just the start. In total, they are estimated to have spent almost £1.4bn on transfer fees since taking over, including the British record £107m signing of Enzo Fernández. Given the return on their investment so far – one top four finish and two trophies of debateable value – it tends to look as though all that spending hasn’t achieved very much.
On top of that, the habit of offering players immensely long contracts, often spanning close to a decade, has been widely pilloried. Certainly, in some cases, it has backfired horribly – just look at the way in which the club are lumbered with Mykhaylo Mudryk, who wasn’t exactly paying his transfer fee back before he was suspended due to the alleged use of a controlled substance. He is due to be paid nearly £4m per year until 2030.
Over the course of this summer, however, everything has slowly started to make a little more sense. Not only do The Athletic claim that the club came into the transfer window with the best PSR position of any team in the league despite all that spending, but they have slowly begun to turn players into profit.
Selling Noni Madueke, one of Boehly and Eghbali’s first-year purchases, netted the club around £18m in profit on the transfer fee. They made another £10m selling goalkeeper Djordje Petrović despite the fact that he had struggled in his few games before he was loaned off to sister club RC Strasbourg. They have made a small fortune in the sales of youth players.
There have been misses to go with the hits – they will lose the better part of £20m in total between the sales of João Félix and Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, for instance – but the overall direction of travel has been clear.
The way they have profited from younger players signed and then sold a few years later stands out. Between Ian Maatsen, Ângelo, Lewis Hall, Diego Moreira, Bashir Humphreys and Omari Hutchinson, they have made around £115m profit in transfer fees. The success stories have more than paid for the failures, and even those are seldom all that expensive now.
The errors of their early windows have not been repeated. Instead of spending significant sums on ageing, high-wage veterans such as Kalidou Koulibaly and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and quickly losing money on the deals, they are aiming young and targeting profit – since Aubameyang arrived, Chelsea haven’t signed a player older than 25 years old.
Those nine-year contracts also help to keep player values up. Instead of being put in positions where the club are forced to sell at a discount as players start to wind their deals down, Chelsea can persistently sell high regardless of whether they bought low or not. Nicolas Jackson could soon provide another fine example – after two rather mixed seasons, his valuation is still expected to be set at close to £80m, more than double the amount paid to Villarreal in 2023.
There are hangovers from early errors, of course, most notably the ‘bomb squad’ consisting of players like Raheem Sterling and Ben Chilwell, and it’s plain that the scouting isn’t as consistent as it could be – but the foul-ups are becoming fewer and further between.
With a pliant feeder team in Strasbourg (who rather conveniently bought both Moreira and Mathis Amougou from Chelsea) and a procession of gifted young players coming in, the plan to convert Chelsea into one of Europe’s most efficient buying and selling machines looks likely to work wonders. This is a club set up to turn profits for years to come. But that doesn’t mean that they are going to become the team they want to.
Chelsea may have learned to make money – but they need to learn how to win
Chelsea are, undoubtedly, on an upward curve on the pitch as well as off of it. After years of major underachievement, Enzo Maresca has got them back into the Champions League, won the Europa Conference League and even made them the new world champions.
It’s hard to say quite how much the latter two achievements mean, of course, and as much as the club will be keen to make a considerable fuss of their Club World Cup win in the United States, the Premier League and Champions League remain the bigger prizes and still feel rather out of reach. One wonders how much closer they will get this season.
Chelsea have once again spent substantial sums across the close season, but for all the good business they have done, there is still the sense of a club chasing its own tail as it tries to marry a transfer model built to make a profit with the needs of a successful squad.
The Madueke situation provides a case in point. Selling him at a mark-up was a perfectly logical business decision, but it has taken away one of Maresca’s regular starters and forced them to spend again in order to plug the gap, may compel the head coach to play Cole Palmer on the right wing whether he wants to or not, and has even strengthen a direct rival in the process.
Madueke may not have been Chelsea’s best or most dependable player, but he is good enough for England squad and will offer sorely-needed depth for Arsenal’s attack. Selling him made money, but weakened the team and boosted another who will be challenging for the titles that Chelsea crave.
And when Chelsea buy a replacement for Madueke – likely RB Leipzig and Netherland’s star Xavi Simons, based on recent reporting – not only will it change the tactical paradigm under which Maresca has to operate by forcing Palmer wider, but it will introduce another level of uncertainty. Simons will probably be better than Madueke, but there is no guarantee.
Similarly, after Mauricio Pochettino was dismissed, the club made the decision to sell Conor Gallagher to Atlético Madrid despite the fact that he had been arguably their most important player across the 2023/24 season. It made sense in the context of the PSR situation, but instead of keeping a versatile and important player, they opted to sell and disrupt the squad’s stability further. And did they really benefit from selling Gallagher to be able to buy Christopher Nkunku?
The lack of stability and continuity, of course, extends to the coaching job. Boehly and Eghbali have already gone through five managers in three years, including Frank Lampard (who was technically only an interim appointment). The tactics and style of play have chopped and changed. There is no overarching vision to build a squad to a particular philosophy, as there was with Manchester City when they built Pep Guardiola’s squad, for instance.
In short, Boehly and Eghbali continue to run the club like businessmen who don’t understand football. The sheer weight of talent which they have been able to purchase means that Chelsea have a good enough squad to make the top four, but the coherency and sense of unified purpose that most of the best football teams possess is absent with nobody present to instil it.
Chelsea’s owners have solved some of the problems that they created in the first place. Their transfer business is coherent, and the balance books show plenty of purpose. But it’s unlikely to count for anything if they can’t find a long-term blueprint and stick to it – and stop buying and selling players solely to keep the dollar signs spinning.
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