The dust has settled, and the numbers are in. Since June 10, when the summer transfer window opened, Chelsea has spent more than €600 million on new signings ($650m): 14 permanent signings and two on loan. In that time frame, covering the past two transfer windows, they released players to other clubs for a total of just over €65m ($70m), putting their net spend for 2022-23 at a number approaching $600m. During that time, they also changed owners, manager, chairman, scouting director and recruitment staff.
There may be other examples, but what springs to my mind was what happened at Real Madrid in the summer of 2009. There was a new president — Florentino Perez, back for his second stint — a new coach (Manuel Pellegrini) and eight new signings that revolutionised the club, among them Kaka, Karim Benzema, Xabi Alonso, Raul Albiol and somebody named Cristiano Ronaldo. The total spend was €258.5m — around $370m at the time — and the net spend came to €170m ($243m).
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Chelsea’s spend dwarfs those numbers, but you have to remember that this was nearly 14 years ago, when the revenue of most top clubs was less than half what it is now. If you look at it as a percentage of revenue, you’re in a similar ballpark.
Remember the old tech motto attributed to Mark Zuckerberg: “Move fast and break things”? Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali, who lead the club’s ownership group, are doing just that in West London. Eghbali said in December that the Chelsea he took over from Roman Abramovich was “not terribly well-managed on the football side, sporting side or promotional side” and that European sports were some 20 years behind the U.S. in terms of “sophistication” on the commercial side, as well as the data side. Hence, the opportunity to disrupt and to grow for his clients.
(Lest we forget, while Eghbali and Boehly are very wealthy, they don’t own the club themselves. Not only are there other investors, they themselves have clients who have chosen to invest with them and to whom they have to answer.)
There are two vantage points from which to consider Chelsea’s transfer spending: on the pitch and financially. They’re obviously related because resources, for even the wealthiest clubs, are finite and if you spend on one thing, you can’t spend on another that may have been a better option. Plus UEFA’s new financial sustainability rules — which replace financial fair play from next season — mean that you have to somehow move towards balanced books fairly quickly. But it also makes sense to view them separately as an indicator of where the club are.
This window is entirely different. Each of the eight new arrivals is 22 or younger (other than on loan Joao Felix, who is 23). Five of them have less than 50 top-flight starts to their name. These are guys who you bring in more for what you think they can become rather than what they are now, simply because their body of work thus far is limited.
Chelsea are currently 10th in the table, a function partly of injuries, partly of the difficult transition from Tuchel to his successor, Graham Potter. Of the January intake, you can expect Benoit Badiashile to be part of the center-back corps and you imagine Enzo Fernandez will go straight into midfield. Mikhaylo Mudryk is also penciled in as a starter while Joao Felix, you presume, will compete with Raheem Sterling and Christian Pulisic for playing time once they return.
Do they move the needle enough — and bear in mind these are youngsters adjusting to a new league — to help Chelsea make up 10 points and seven places over 18 games to get into the Champions League? Probably not.
Does the team now feel complete and ready for a title run next season? From where I sit, unless some of the other youngsters suddenly turn into world-beaters, most likely you’ll still need a defensive midfielder — N’Golo Kante has been injured most of the season and is out of contract in the summer — and a center-forward, unless they decide to deploy Christopher Nkunku, who is joining in June, in that latter role and he proves to be productive. Clearly then, on the pitch at least, this is still part of a process.
Read all the latest news and reaction from ESPN FC senior writer Gabriele Marcotti.
It’s a bit like a mortgage. If you were 30 in 2010, then paying $1,000 bucks a month on your mortgage might have felt like a lot, whereas today that same payment may not feel like such a struggle since you probably earn more money, and inflation means a thousand bucks doesn’t buy what it used to.
And no, there’s no real loophole or work around here. You can diminish Gusto’s amortization by extending his contract, but that simply pushes the costs down the road and you’re on the hook for more years. (Baba Rahman, who joined Chelsea for a fee of around €18m in 2015, but hasn’t actually played for them since May 2016, is the perfect case study.) And before you bring up multi-club ownership — something Boehly and Eghbali have referenced numerous times — it may be of use in terms of developing your youngsters, but you won’t be able to use them to “cook the books.” UEFA’s regulations are pretty clear that they will assess transactions between related parties at “fair market value.”
It feels like Chelsea are rolling the dice and gambling. They’re gambling on being able to meet financial sustainability requirements, and maybe that UEFA won’t be as strict or zealous in enforcing them as some would like. Gambling on being able to grow revenue (most likely without Champions League income next year). Gambling that their recruitment gurus — who thus far did very well elsewhere, albeit shopping in a different category of store — will get more right than they get wrong. Gambling that their investors will stay the course for the long haul.
That’s not a bad thing, per se. Folks who succeed in business — and yes, this is a business to them — often do so by being bold and daring and taking risks. Heck, that’s what Real Madrid did with their spending spree back in 2009.
How did it work out for them? They changed managers after a year, bringing in Jose Mourinho. Cristiano Ronaldo rewrote the record books, Karim Benzema was a valiant sidekick who turned into the main man and won a Ballon d’Or of his own last year. Xabi Alonso was exceptional and Alvaro Arbeloa gave them seven years of reliable service, four of them as a starter. On the other hand, Kaka was hampered by injuries and never lived up to his fee, while Raul Albiol had a year as a regular, was also slowed by injuries and left to join Napoli.
Real Madrid’s spending, understandably, diminished substantially in subsequent seasons. What did they win in the next four years? One LaLiga title and one Spanish Cup, though to be fair, this was at the time that Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona were dominant, so it was a high bar to clear. But there’s a lesson in that too: for all your plans and careful consideration, this is sport and, even though you might do everything right, you can’t control what your competition does.
And that’s another layer of risk to the Great Chelsea Spree of 2022-23. We all have different appetites for risk and, as the saying goes: No risk, no reward. Just be aware of what’s at stake when you do roll the dice.
