Chelsea have spend huge sums on transfers since the arrival of Todd Boehly as co-owner last year.
A former financial advisor to Manchester City has questioned Chelsea’s approach to the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules after they completed a £173m swoop for Moises Caicedo and Romeo Lavia.
Chelsea landed Caicedo, 21, on Monday for a British transfer record £115m just eight months on from breaking it to sign Enzo Fernandez, and followed it up on Friday by confirming a £58m deal to sign highly-rated Southampton midfielder Lavia, 19, to take their spending since Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital took over the club last year to more than £900m.
The London side had beaten Liverpool to the punch when it came to acquiring Caicedo and Lavia, with the Reds having made a £111m bid for the Ecuadorian on Friday that was accepted by Brighton & Hove Albion before he decided on a move to Chelsea. The Reds had also seen a number of bids rejected by Southampton before reportedly agreeing a deal with the Saints only for the Belgian to opt, like Caicedo, for Chelsea.
It made for a bruising week in the transfer market for Liverpool, although the £16.25m signing of Japanese international Wataru Endo on Friday from VfB Stuttgart and continued reported interest in Crystal Palace’s Cheick Doucoure and Bayern Munich’s Ryan Gravenberch has brought some optimism.
But the aggressive spending at Stamford Bridge, largely built upon offering deals of seven, eight and nine years to young talents so as to spread the annual amortised costs (transfer fees are accounted for by dividing the guaranteed sum by the length of a deal), has caught the attention of football and posed the question of quite how Chelsea, with so much outlay in the last two windows, could continue in the same manner this summer and outgun the likes of Liverpool.
Chelsea’s net spend for this transfer window stands at a little over £100m after the sales of the likes of Kai Havertz, Mason Mount, Mateo Kovacic, Christian Pulisic, Kalidou Koulibaly and Ruben Loftus-Cheek. But not all of those players have been sold for much profit given their remaining book value, although the sales of academy products such as Mount, Loftus-Cheek, Ethan Ampadu and potentially Lewis Hall can be counted as pure profit from an accounting perspective.
But while there have been exits, former Manchester City financial advisor Stefan Borson, who now serves as CEO and general counsel to a Plc that deals with accounting issues, has questioned Chelsea’s approach to the P&S regulations that limit allowable losses for clubs to £105m over a three-year period.
Speaking on talkSPORT to former Crystal Palace owner Simon Jordan, Borson said: “You’re talking about a club that’s never made a profit in 20 years. They have historically operated at a loss and filled that gap by selling footballers.
Then what’s happened is Todd Boehly’s come along and I just want to say very clearly [he] knows exactly what he’s doing. Nobody would deny the quality of his team, of the individual. There’s no question.
There’s nothing that any of us can say on the outside that they haven’t thought about and that’s why I posit that this is all part of a strategy to accelerate the success of Chelsea.
“That’s partly because we all know in the background that Boehly, for all of his business success and wealth, has overpaid for Chelsea by a very considerable amount.
“It happens. Wealthy people sometimes make mistakes and he’s made a mistake in terms of what he paid for the club. He now wants to accelerate the success of the club.
“Since he’s purchased it everything has gone wrong. He’s picked the wrong managers, he’s overpaid for those managers, on the pitch they’ve failed, the shirt sponsor is empty, he’s got no sleeve sponsor, he’s got no European football at all. He’s not just got no Champions League, which is worth £100m per season, he’s got nothing. He doesn’t even have the Europa games to fill the stadium for five, six, seven, eight matchdays, which would be worth maybe £2m per game.
