What the London club is doing in the transfer market is controversial and does not seem to be subject to a deliberate approach
Chelsea, under its new American owners led by President Todd Bohle, has spent about 500 million pounds since last summer on new player deals, including 300 million during the last transfer window in January (January), but nothing seems to have improved, as the same problems appeared in The team drew goalless with Fulham on Friday night.
Bohli, owner of Chelsea, signed 16 new deals that cost the club 500 million pounds (Reuters)
The amount of money that was paid made heads spin from the horror of what you hear, and apart from the fact that the team faces the risk of violating the rules of financial fair play, skeptics believe that spending £ 500 million on 16 new deals will not be in the interest of the team! And with the first test of the new deals, the question returned: Is there a deliberate plan to do so, or is the whole matter an entirely irrational act? The extravagance of English clubs during the recent transfer window has certainly made it easy for the rest of the footballers to despise the Premier League, which is doing everything to bring in all the most talented and experienced players and managers from all over Europe, even if it takes a chance on a club like Chelsea by the rules of financial fair play.
Chelsea included Modric twice as much as Arsenal offered (Reuters)
But in the aftermath of Chelsea breaking the record for the most expensive signing in British football history by signing Argentine midfielder Enzo Fernandes from Benfica for £106.8m late on the final day of the January transfer window, there is no sign that Chelsea will be ready. About to stop what he’s doing. And people close to the new owners, who took over the club to succeed the Russian businessman Roman Abramovich, said that the new Chelsea administration will not stop what it is doing soon, because the money is abundant, and the club management has contracted with a number of players under contracts that extend for a full eight years, and therefore there is a desire from Todd Bohle and Clearlake Capital Group have developed a long-term plan to build a strong team, no matter the cost.
Fofana (left) is a new deal that Chelsea hopes for (AFP)
It is clear that Bohli and the Clearlake Capital group are not at all shy about spoiling the player transfer market. It is also clear that they have studied the rules of financial fair play well, and have found a way to circumvent them by distributing the enormous transaction value over long contracts. This allowed them to contract with Argentine Enzo Fernandez in a record deal, and although many see that spending with this extravagance will lead to a certain financial disaster, the London club officials seem not to see this at all, as there is a sense of confidence and happiness, especially after outperforming Arsenal in The contract battle with Ukrainian Mikhailo Modric. And this deal came shortly after the strange decision to pay 8.8 million pounds for the loan of Portuguese Joao Felix from Atletico Madrid for only six months. Chelsea was ready to do anything to sign Modric, who was very close to joining Arsenal, and the atmosphere of happiness and victory prevailed inside «Stamford Bridge» after the success in signing the Ukrainian player for 88.5 million pounds! Although Arsenal would have included him for half that amount or less.
The dismissal of Tuchel is still a step that Chelsea fans have not been satisfied with
‘We’re just getting started’, was the message from someone close to Chelsea chairman Todd Bohle, who and his partners then paid £35m for England Under-21 winger Noni Madueki from PSV Eindhoven, then paid another £31m for him. French right-back Malou Gusto, 19, from Lyon.
But the logical question now is: What is the bottom line of all this? Will Chelsea succeed in dominating the football world after all these deals? In fact, there are those who doubt that this extravagance will lead to success within the green rectangle in the end. The new owners spent more than £250m last summer signing players who did not achieve the expected success, and then the club sacked German manager Thomas Tuchel. And now Chelsea occupies the tenth place in the English Premier League table, bid farewell to the two local cup championships, and faces the risk of failing to qualify for the Champions League next season, which would raise more doubts about the future of Graham Potter at the helm of the technical leadership of the team.
Chelsea’s extravagance has led to player prices being overpriced, which will have huge ramifications for the transfer market as a whole, not just in the Premier League, but around the world… Free market advocates will say this is healthy and good. , but it is not at all like that in reality.
They will say that this is the way business works in the United States, but they really don’t know anything about business America, in which successful investors at least try to understand their markets to be smarter than anyone else’s competitor. Perhaps the most surprising thing is that Bohle does not doubt at all that what he is doing may be wrong. On the contrary, he has complete confidence that only he knows how to fix the European football industry, although he has no experience in this regard. .
People remember when it was said that the giant Belgian striker Romelu Lukaku was the “last missing piece” in the Chelsea squad, and that the team would become integrated once he was signed, but Bohli got rid of this team entirely, and began building a completely different team! What makes matters worse is the feeling that the American owner is contracting with a large number of players without an accurate study of the team’s needs, and knowledge of its strengths and weaknesses, which threatens the existence of a sleazy and completely unbalanced team. However, Bohli seems to brag that he is the only one who understands everything, and even mocks the ossified mentalities that do not understand what he is doing.
Will this experiment succeed? It is clear to everyone that Chelsea are looking to rebuild the entire squad, regardless of the money they will be paying, the wage bill or the huge commitments that will ensue. The club put together a recruitment committee including former Brighton officials, another from Southampton and a third from Monaco, as well as the new director of football, Christopher Pfeiffel, who was very excited to discover Chelsea’s “clear and sustainable philosophy”.
But the most obvious problem with this philosophy (buying talented young players in the hope that they will then increase in value) is that Chelsea have already experimented with this before, and ended up selling their players for less than they were contracted for. Another problem is that there is no clear market to sell these players to then, because no other club is able to pay such money for these players than Chelsea themselves.
And at the moment, we should not judge the Chelsea experience based on whether it is good or not, or based on whether it leads to building a good team or not, because the whole experience is basically illogical at all! What the London club did is not an adventure or a bold new style, but simply something completely incomprehensible. Any club may develop a plan and then it turns out to be bad, but Chelsea does not work according to any clear plan in the first place, what it does has no mathematical calculations or a clear business model.
It’s a very strange thing. Bohli has previous experience in hedging, which is the area where the most important advantage is to make sure you have inside knowledge of the market, and then act accordingly, but the strange thing is that Bohli is acting completely unconsidered and spending large amounts of money completely irrationally. Thus, if any reasonable person were to be a hedge fund manager, Bohli would do so, he would remove him immediately.
Thus, there are only two possibilities in this regard, either Bohli is a person with an outdated mentality who does not possess any competence to run a football club, or there is a hidden element that we do not see and do not realize at the present time. These unbelievable and illogical things that Bohli is doing will lead to the complete destruction of trust in the way football is run. What do we not see here? But in principle at least, the question that must now be asked is: Does any sane person spend his own money in this way, and what is the point of it?
But what is really certain is that watching Chelsea will be fun and exciting, not because the team will present exceptional levels on the field, but to observe the repercussions resulting from what Bohli did, which are expected to be disastrous repercussions. And since English football is now talking about the procedures that must be followed in terms of club ownership and transparency, it must look at what Bohli is doing now, in order to realize that there is no accountability, regulation or values, and that everything that is said is just words on paper that are not done. applying it in practice. Instead, it is the way of thinking of Bohli and his ilk that determines the future of football.
Any sympathy for Chelsea’s misfortune in terms of results should be completely withheld by the statistic that the club spent more in January than all clubs in the Bundesliga, La Liga, Ligue 1 and Serie A combined! But Potter himself recently admitted that spending big is not the most difficult task in world football.
But the point where Coach Potter may be quite right is that he has led a very unbalanced team. Rebuilding the team is an essential part of the challenge facing the new owners, and there has been a marked shift in this since last summer. Bohle has stepped down from his role as caretaker sporting director and Chelsea have spent much of the autumn putting together a future-focused signing committee in selecting players for the club’s signings in the recent transfer window.
Perhaps the policy of signing young players will improve the situation in the future. The club has high hopes for David Datro Fofana, and young Brazilian player Andre Santos has a great future ahead of him. Gusto, who was loaned to Lyon, is considered one of the best young defenders in his position in the world. All of these deals could turn out to be big hits in the future, and the Chelsea officials are proving that they were right. Benoit Badiachel, the 21-year-old French defender, drew attention to him since joining Chelsea from Monaco for 32.7 million pounds. Modric also shone brightly in his team’s match against Liverpool, and showed everyone that Arsenal officials were completely right when they insisted on signing him. . However, Arsenal were not ready to enter into a financial race with Chelsea, who were quite confident they would succeed in acquiring the Ukrainian player.
Moreover, there is pressure from the fans on the officials, the fans were not happy with the dismissal of Tuchel, and they are not yet convinced of what Potter has to offer. During the winter transfer market, Chelsea showed an insane desire to sign Fernandez, whose release clause was 120 million euros. Chelsea’s owners initially felt it was “ridiculous to pay so much money”, but eventually gave in to Benfica’s financial demands. Chelsea believes that Fernandes will help him finish the current season in the top four places qualified to participate in the Champions League.
However, the team still suffers from a strange imbalance, and the evidence for this is that there are some positions stacked with a large number of players, such as the left wing center that includes Raheem Sterling, Christian Pulisic, Modric, and Callum Hudson-Odoi loaned to Bayer Leverkusen.
As for the offensive line, it includes Gabonese Pierre Aubameyang, the injured Armando Brugha, and Kai Havertz, with the possibility of Christopher Nkunku joining in the summer, and the possibility of Romelu Lukaku returning from his loan to Inter Milan. As for the substitute player in the left-back position, he cost the club’s treasury 62 million pounds.
For this reason, Potter warned against signing too many players, but in his heart he knows very well that the team is going through a complete rebuilding phase. And under the leadership of Abramovich, Chelsea had many players who were getting a lot of money and did not provide levels commensurate with that, but the current owners want to be more harsh in dealing with this matter, and see that they are contracting with new players for a large sum of money, but they deserve it, They will help the team reach higher levels.
Chelsea, which has been placed by the European Football Association on a watch list of clubs that may violate the rules of financial fair play, is seeking creative solutions to overcome this matter. Under Premier League rules, clubs can lose £105m over three consecutive years, while UEFA regulations say clubs can lose just £53m over the same period.
The London club believes that it has found a loophole in this matter, but the European Football Association alerted it, and said that starting this summer, clubs will still be able to sign players under long-term deals, but they will not be able to distribute the transfer fees to more than five years.
Will Chelsea be forced to change plans? There is another reason why clubs prefer not to sign a player for a period of seven years. Away from the financial calculations, what if this player does not succeed in providing the performance expected of him? One person says, “That would be genius or catastrophically stupid.”
But Chelsea’s owners refuse to accuse them of not having a clear vision. People who have known the new owners since last summer admire their quiet way of thinking. Although some painted a picture of Bohli as being obsessed with contracting with famous players and prominent names in the world of football, he did not think about contracting with Cristiano Ronaldo after his departure from Manchester United.
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