There was a feeling of satisfaction at Chelsea as the transfer window in England closed at the end of last week — and not because, for the third time in the space of 12 months, their relentless recruitment had dominated the market as well as the conversation.
With north of £400million ($503m) committed on transfer fees to bring 12 new players to Stamford Bridge, Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital managed to scale up the expenditure even from the first two jaw-dropping windows of their ownership. But club officials were more keen to draw attention to another figure: £295million.
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That is how much Chelsea claim they raised through player sales and loan fees this summer, offsetting the amortised transfer costs accumulated in the previous two windows and creating room to reinforce Mauricio Pochettino’s young squad with Moises Caicedo, Romeo Lavia, Christopher Nkunku, Nicolas Jackson and more.
Transfermarkt lists an incredible 25 departures from Chelsea this summer, and that only includes players who were either in the first-team picture or had previously been out on loan.
The scale of the exodus was nothing less than what was required after a season in which January signings found themselves unable to fit into the dressing room at Cobham and training sessions with two 11-vs-11 matches on adjacent pitches became a regular occurrence. But it is nonetheless an impressive logistical achievement, even for a club with two sporting directors and owners who remain actively engaged in transfer and contract negotiations.
How does the sales push look in football and financial terms?
To consider that question properly means setting aside the fact that Chelsea have lost two of their first four Premier League matches this season to West Ham United and Nottingham Forest, beating only relegation favourites Luton Town at home. It is far too early to know if the squad Pochettino has now will end up stronger or weaker than the one Thomas Tuchel oversaw in the summer of 2022.
But there are other assessments we can reasonably make right now. Namely, how Boehly and Clearlake fared against the three main aims they set for themselves in this window: to raise funds to offset further recruitment, to drastically trim the size of the squad and to lower the wage bill by offloading high earners from the Roman Abramovich era.
Every sale is different, and beneath the headline £295million figure lies a nuanced picture.
Extracting £65million from Arsenal for Kai Havertz can easily be seen as a win, given that the German failed to fully justify the fanfare that surrounded his arrival at Stamford Bridge in 2020 — or even find his best position on the pitch.
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Chelsea also negotiated Manchester United up from a £40million opening offer for Mason Mount to a final package of £55million with a further £5million in add-ons. That said, it should not be viewed as particularly difficult to garner a juicy transfer fee for a 24-year-old England international who has been your club’s player of the year twice, even if he does only have one year remaining on a contract that pays him significantly less than he is worth.
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Securing good value for players on what the new owners call “legacy contracts” handed out in the Abramovich era — deals with above-market salaries — is a bigger challenge.
Within that context, bringing in £25million for Mateo Kovacic, around £18million for Christian Pulisic and £15million for Ruben Loftus-Cheek is reasonable, even if it is likely that all three perform well for Manchester City and AC Milan. Chelsea believe all three took pay cuts to leave Stamford Bridge, as Callum Hudson-Odoi did to complete a deadline-day move to Nottingham Forest.
In the cases of Pulisic, Loftus-Cheek, Hudson-Odoi and several others who departed in this window, Chelsea also insisted on the inclusion of sell-on clauses that could net them further income in future years. They already benefited this summer from one such agreement initially made by Marina Granovskaia, banking up to £15.5million from Cobham graduate Tino Livramento’s £35million transfer from Southampton to Newcastle United.
The most controversial aspect of Chelsea’s sales were the deals that took Kalidou Koulibaly and Edouard Mendy, two unwanted first-team players without lucrative markets for their services in Europe, to the Saudi Pro League. Boehly and Clearlake were certainly more alive than some of their rivals to the opportunities presented by the recruitment drive of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, and offloading Koulibaly and Mendy — and their salaries — for a combined £36million did the club a big favour.
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But further deals for Romelu Lukaku, Hakim Ziyech and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang never came to fruition, while Al Ittihad also signed N’Golo Kante, a free agent Chelsea wanted to retain. The Frenchman’s injury record since 2019 suggests they might have been saved from themselves on that front, and the club subsequently re-stocked their midfield cupboard with several young players they regard as better long-term assets.
Some of Chelsea’s uglier outgoing business suggested a greater willingness to recognise a lack of market leverage than in the past, or simply to acknowledge their own transfer mistakes.
Nothing in her track record suggests Granovskaia would have agreed to loan out Lukaku, Ziyech or Kepa Arrizabalaga on such modest terms, or terminate the contracts of Aubameyang or Tiemoue Bakayoko. More likely there would have been disillusioned players kept around for the new coach to deal with, or top-up contract extensions handed out to preserve some hypothetical notion of “value”.
Boehly and Clearlake’s priorities this summer were very different.
Almost all of the players still on contracts agreed under Abramovich and Granovskaia have either been sold or loaned out and, in the current squad, only three players are inside the final two years of their current deals: Thiago Silva, Ian Maatsen and Conor Gallagher.
That is one area where Chelsea’s sales drive ultimately fell short. They were open to offers for Cobham graduates Gallagher, Maatsen and Trevoh Chalobah all summer, but suitors were slow to meet their valuations. When acceptable bids were finally received for Maatsen and Chalobah on deadline day — from Burnley and Nottingham Forest respectively — they came from clubs the players had no interest in joining.
Now the challenge is to re-assimilate players who have been made to feel unwanted and expendable — ideally, in the cases of Gallagher and Maatsen, to the point where they agree to sign new deals — or at the very least to get to January without some or all of them suffering precipitous declines in their transfer value due to a lack of game time.
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Selling all three would have meant losing three talented home-grown footballers, and one in Gallagher who is valued highly by Pochettino and has worn the captain’s armband this season. It would also have meant banking almost £100million more in sale revenue — all of which would have been recorded as profit on the accounts — and left the squad closer to Pochettino’s desired size.
Chelsea took the other path with Lewis Hall, loaning their academy player of the year to Newcastle with an obligation to buy for £28million plus £7million in add-ons.
The deal was greeted with understandable dismay among some supporters, and could end up looking cheap if he fulfils his potential at St James’ Park. But it was also a smart way to lock in a significant return for a player who was unlikely to see his value rise this season had he remained on the fringes of Pochettino’s plans. Instead, his sale price will go towards offsetting next summer’s chunk of the amortised fees of signings already made.
There are still 31 players on the first-team page of Chelsea’s website, though this includes academy goalkeepers Lucas Bergstrom and Eddie Beach, as well as teenage signing Deivid Washington, who is being used as short-term emergency striker cover while Armando Broja completes his recovery from an anterior cruciate ligament injury. It also includes Malang Sarr, whom Chelsea’s new head coach does not appear to have met or heard of.
Pochettino admitted prior to Chelsea’s loss to Forest that his squad may prove too big once the bulk of the club’s injured players return, but the situation does not appear to be anywhere near the unmanageable mess that was created in the second half of last season. Boehly and Clearlake are also convinced they have lowered the club’s wage bill by tens of millions, even as they have used this summer’s sales to maintain a relentless stream of new signings.
By their own metrics, then, this window was a largely successful one.
The big question no one can yet answer is whether Chelsea have emerged from it with a squad capable of returning to the club’s modern standards of trophy contention, now or in the near future.
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(Top photos: Getty Images)