Thiago Silva played virtually every game for PSG in the league and in the CL including the final where he looked so comfortable against arguably the most in form player in Europe this season. He will be fine.
Kepa was a flop. Morata was a flop. Baka flop. Wont even go with Drinkwater. Emerson didnt fill the expectations. Barkley was a weird signing too. Zappacosta pointless. Jorginho didnt reach expectations. Rudiger didnt reach expectations.
But you can't do that can you? It is really unfair to judge in hindsight. It is so easy to look back and say X or Y was a flop or did not live up to expectations. People blaming the board when they were excited at the time of signing is really hypocritical IMO. There is always a risk about every transfer not working for an array of reasons. So everyone is buzzing for Havertz, but if he flops we're gonna say "damn you board, how could you spend 80M on him"?
This summer has been great end of.
Awesome deal. Exactly the kind of business I love. Low risk high reward. can not do any wrong with this one. Either walks into the team next year or a nice 20m+ profit.
Sure it's a good deal for Leverkusen. If they'd kept Havertz till next year he'd have gone for a much lower fee due to contract length and chances are Bayern München would have been the main candidate to sign him in 2021. I'm sure Leverkusen fans are glad he's moving out of the Bundesliga and not to another German club.
But I think it's silly to actually celebrate when their best player leaves. Last year I was satisfied with the fee for Hazard but really sad that he left.
Apparently we can’t get rid of him. We shot ourselves in the knee there with a rocket launcher panic buying him for 80m€ on a fat ass contract. That deal will cripple our long term plans for the whole decade. Worse than Torres
Explained: Why Chelsea can afford to spend big this summer
https://theathletic.com/2025309/2020/08/28/chelsea-transfer-accounts-abramovich-chilwell-havertz-silva/
A little more than 17 years since he silently swept into Stamford Bridge and transformed English football forever, Roman Abramovich is dominating the transfer market again. Chelsea committed over £85 million to acquire Hakim Ziyech and Timo Werner either side of the coronavirus shutdown, and £50 million more this week to take Ben Chilwell from Leicester City. Thiago Silva will also be a Chelsea player next season and an imminent club-record deal for Bayer Leverkusen sensation Kai Havertz will push the total outlay on transfer fees well north of the £200 million mark, and Frank Lampard still wants a new starting goalkeeper.
Contrary to popular belief, Abramovich’s financial commitment to Chelsea did not waver even as a stand-off with the UK government curtailed his ability to watch his team at Stamford Bridge; the club’s most recent accounts show he contributed £247 million of his personal wealth to help cover costs during the year ending June 30, 2019. But even so, it is startling to watch this latest spending spree while other elite clubs respond to the lingering financial consequences of the pandemic by shelving their grand transfer plans and tightening their belts.
As one agent who has dealt with the club tells The Athletic: “This is Chelsea flexing their muscles, showing they mean business.” But how can they commit to spending on a scale that their rivals won’t even countenance in this climate?
Chelsea posted a pre-tax loss of £101.8 million in their 2018-19 accounts, the largest recorded by the club since 2005 when Abramovich was bankrolling the transfers that first lifted them to the top of the Premier League. UEFA’s embattled Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations stipulate that clubs are only permitted to lose a total of €30 million (about £25.5 million) over the course of any three-year monitoring period, meaning another significant loss in the 2019-20 accounts might make it very difficult to remain compliant.
But there are a few things to note. Buried deep within the lengthy document, Chelsea stated that a total of £115.4 million from player sales had already been banked for the next financial year — primarily due to the high-profile departures of Eden Hazard to Real Madrid and Alvaro Morata to Atletico Madrid. That income, coupled with the fact that transfer spending in 2019-20 consisted only of £40 million to make Mateo Kovacic’s loan move permanent, should ensure a very healthy profit on player trading in the most recent set of accounts submitted to UEFA.
All new signings made in this transfer window are officially registered no earlier than July 1, meaning the costs associated with signing Werner, Ziyech, Chilwell, Thiago Silva, Havertz and anyone else who might follow will be included in the 2020-21 accounts. There is also the fact that UEFA has already indicated that it is prepared to give clubs some wiggle room with regard to FFP compliance in light of the financial fallout of the pandemic, with extra financial support from club owners to be assessed on a case-by-case basis.
Abramovich’s net worth has remained relatively stable in 2020 — it stands at £9.5 billion according to the Forbes billionaire tracker, making him the 152nd wealthiest individual in the world — and his presence has given Chelsea a level of financial security that many other elite clubs simply cannot count on from their owners. No staff were furloughed or made redundant at Stamford Bridge or Cobham during the shutdown and while talks were held with the first-team squad about the possibility of wage deferrals or cuts, ultimately neither happened.
Chelsea also went to great lengths and considerable expense to ensure they made a meaningful contribution to tackling the public health crisis in England; the Millennium Hotel and Copthorne Hotel outside Stamford Bridge were made available to NHS staff and key workers, while the club’s medical staff were granted permission to bolster frontline health services if they wished to do so. Abramovich also matched the £200,000 raised by the club’s supporters to donate to national domestic abuse charity Refuge, in response to a spike in violent incidents during the lockdown.
These actions are relevant to Chelsea’s subsequent transfer spending because there can be no accusations of moral or ethical inconsistency; Abramovich did not lay off 55 club employees before bankrolling well-remunerated new additions to his first-team squad, as Arsenal have done. There is no need to feel inhibited in the transfer market by the fear of appearing to put his own interests above those who work for him.
“What we’ve seen under COVID is the importance of social capital — how clubs are behaving when people are losing their jobs,” Dr Rob Wilson, football finance expert at Sheffield Hallam University, tells The Athletic. “There was a big backlash against Arsenal laying off 55 people and then going out and signing Willian to a fairly hefty contract, and that narrative is pervading football now. Communities are expecting their clubs to behave in a more responsible way, which I think is playing on the minds of some of the top teams in the Premier League.
“I wouldn’t say for one minute that Chelsea went out and did the community work in order to allow them to spend on transfers, but one of the indirect benefits of behaving in a socially responsible way is that they have the latitude to be a bit more aggressive now. Fans want to see it as well.”
Chelsea have felt freer than most of their rivals to attack this transfer window — a window they long ago identified as a key opportunity to re-mould and upgrade the team, but one that has only become more favourable to a buyer with deep pockets as clubs throughout Europe attempt to absorb the financial blow of matches played behind closed doors or with heavily-reduced attendances for the foreseeable future.
“They have a window now that they can exploit to freshen things up, and it’s essentially a buyer’s market out there,” the agent adds. “Clubs may not admit it publicly all the time, but so many of them have been really stretched by COVID and lockdown and playing behind closed doors. Most can’t really resist for long if Chelsea come calling with a blank chequebook. They have to be pragmatic in the end.”
Despite their initial insistence that Chilwell should command close to the £80 million that Manchester United paid for Harry Maguire in the summer of 2019, Leicester ultimately felt compelled to settle for a £50 million fee more in line with Chelsea’s valuation of the player. RB Leipzig made it known to Werner that realising the full value of his £54 million release clause in this window was in the club’s best financial interests even once Liverpool made it clear they were out of the race to sign him, further swaying his thoughts towards a move to Stamford Bridge.
Abramovich is spending more in this transfer window partly because he recognises that his money can get him more in this market than it ordinarily would. In normal circumstances, Havertz would have his pick of elite suitors across Europe and Leverkusen could realistically hope to spark a bidding war; instead, the path has rapidly cleared for Chelsea to sign one of Europe’s most coveted young attacking talents — arguably the first time they have been able to do so since acquiring Eden Hazard from Lille in the summer of 2012.
Marina Granovskaia’s bigger challenge will be to find new homes for the players Lampard does not want and some of the loanees who have run their course, and to trim a wage bill that rose to £285.6 million in 2018-19, or 63.9 per cent of the club’s turnover. Even if she succeeds, it is highly unlikely she will be able to bring in the kind of money from sales that Chelsea are committed to spending on their priority targets.
When the transfer deadline passes on October 5, Chelsea’s final net spend is likely to be considerable — but it’s important to remember that net spend is not the way that clubs themselves account for transfer activity.
The transfer fee paid for any new signing is instead written off over the full length of the player’s contract — a standard accounting process known as amortisation — and added to their annual salary to determine their cost on the books. Werner, for example, will not go down as a £54 million expense in the 2020-21 accounts; his transfer fee is spread across the five years of his contract, so the first £10.8 million of it is added to his annual salary of £8.84 million (£170,000 a week, as reported by The Athletic in June), making his total cost £19.64 million for the year.
By accounting for new signings in this way, clubs make it easier for themselves to spend in the transfer market without necessarily incurring losses in their accounts that fall foul of FFP. Player sales are accounted for using a different calculation, meaning outgoings don’t necessarily need to outweigh incomings in order for an overall profit on player trading to be recorded in a club’s annual books.
“It’s the right way to do it, but it’s a neat little accountancy trick to make things much more manageable,” Wilson explains. “Clubs write off the transfer fee over the length of the contract, and you’ll also see them looking to extend those player contracts after two or three years, because it allows them to write the fee off over an even longer period of time. It makes players much more affordable from an accounting point of view.”
“We get blown away by the big number, the transfer fee, but clubs tend to spread those costs over the length of contracts,” the agent adds. “They’re not always as dramatic as they first seem and can be built into longer-term business plans. Other than Thiago Silva, Chelsea are buying players for the long term. They technically have sell-on value. Look at what they did with Hazard: bought for £30 million, sold for three times that amount. They’re shrewd with their big signings. Yes, Kepa might be an exception to that rule, but even he’s still relatively young. They recognise potential.”
Chelsea’s recruitment drive in this window is spectacular, but also strategic. Ziyech, Werner, Havertz and Chilwell were all long-term club targets endorsed by Lampard. The hope is that collectively their impact will help bridge the gulf in class to Liverpool and Manchester City, but at the very least their contributions should enhance the club’s efforts to more clearly separate themselves from Premier League rivals who do not feel able to back up their own Champions League aspirations with the same will to spend.
There is risk, but also logic to Abramovich’s course of action. “It would be wrong to say that Premier League clubs can’t afford to do business in the market because they absolutely can,” Wilson says. “What they’re choosing to do is to look after the future financial models of their respective organisations, which is why we’re seeing a slightly lower spending pattern. Chelsea have gone against the grain.
“They’ve rolled the dice somewhat, and the thinking seems to be, ‘If we spend a fairly significant sum now, those players will be with us for the next three or four years and we can continue building the squad’. They’re signing their superstar front players early, and you’d probably expect them to spend less in the coming years to make up for what they’ve spent this year. It’s just a different strategy.
“The top six is pretty tight, so anyone spending now is going to steal a march on their rivals. Most of Chelsea’s business is coming after they secured a Champions League place, and the additional revenue they generate from broadcast and commercial deals could be as much as £100 million if they reach the latter stages of the competition. That’s £100 million more than those teams outside the top four are going to be earning.
“If we don’t see more spending from those teams outside this season’s top four, what we may see over time is a solidification of those four teams currently in the Champions League, and the Big Six could turn into a Big Four.”
The burden of maximising the return from this investment on the pitch will fall squarely on the shoulders of Lampard, but Abramovich is providing an emphatic answer to those who suggested he lacked the desire to bankroll the construction of another great Chelsea team. “The only way they could bridge that gap to Liverpool and City is by spending,” the agent says. “The alternative is to risk becoming an also-ran, a club that is looking at Europa League qualification at best for the foreseeable future.
“Bayern showed Chelsea how far they are off the pace in a competition like the Champions League. It all basically depended on Abramovich’s appetite, and everything we’ve seen so far suggests he’s as committed to the club as ever.”
He has made many world class saves in PL against Pool and Spurs for instance.He is 195 cm tall, has a big frame due tue his muscles and insane jumping abilities. He also is very dominant in the air and he improved his technical abilities. 10 million is nothing. Onana has weaknesses, but costs 30 million, Mendy is not perfect either.
Being hearing this since 2005-06 post we won back to back titles .. and it has been 15 years, still going strong and now a top 10 club. Good to hope I guess.
It's not just Romano, though. Far too many reliable sources saying it's happening and close for anyone to say it's not on.
The waiting is what's torture.
