Chelsea Transfers

[manpe 10,861]

19 hours ago, ZAPHOD2319 said:

I hope they do get input from the new manager.

 

 

The prices quoted for that "generational talent" are insane. Felix is a luxury player who should be on our list only after we sort out our striker, midfield and possibly goalkeeper. And anything over €40-50 mill for another Havertz - hard PASS.

[ZAPHOD2319 4,477]

the source is suspect

[ZAPHOD2319 4,477]

 

[Vesper 28,795]

Chelsea’s ‘transfer deadline’ for domestic sales — and why it really matters

https://theathletic.com/4408012/2023/04/14/Chelsea-transfer-sales-deadline/

Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali have a lot of work to do this summer. Chelsea’s struggles on the pitch in their first season of ownership have exposed that the most expensive squad in football history still has a number of glaring holes in it — not least the lack of a striker who can be relied upon to score even semi-regularly.

More signings will be needed and the ownership will hope not to be scrambling in the final hours of deadline day on September 1 to secure key targets, as they were in the successful pursuit of Enzo Fernandez in January. Before then, however, Chelsea will have in mind another date that may act as a transfer deadline of sorts for them, if not for anyone else: June 30.

That is the cut-off date for any player sales to be booked in the club’s accounts for 2022-23 — the season that covers Boehly and Clearlake Capital’s eye-watering commitment of more than £500million ($626m) on transfer fees across two windows, so far only modestly offset by the departures of Timo Werner, Emerson Palmieri, Jorginho and Billy Gilmour for approximately £59m. While not yet officially confirmed, the 2023 summer transfer window in England is expected to open in the second week of June, giving Chelsea around 20 days to finalise domestic sales (most of the other major European leagues do not open for transfer business until July 1) that will help their books.

As things stand, Chelsea are poised to make a sizeable loss on player trading in this year’s books. That is a significant problem because, for much of the second half of the Roman Abramovich era, profit from player sales was a key part of the business model that mitigated the club’s overall losses, ensuring compliance with UEFA’s financial fair play (FFP) regulations as well as the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules.

Chelsea have reported overall losses totalling £343m over the four years of published accounts up to 2021-22 (a figure that includes significant revenue loss due to the COVID-19 pandemic), despite making £354m profit on player trading over the same period. These startling numbers provide an indication of how much more perilous the club’s road to FFP compliance will become if they remain significantly in the red on player trading.

It must be noted that football club finances are extremely complex and published accounts filed with Companies House are snapshots of the recent past rather than reflections of the present or projections of the future. As such, only Chelsea’s accountants know the full, up-to-date picture of what needs to be done between now and the end of June to stay on the right side of FFP.

But there is a growing perception within English football that there may be a fire sale at Stamford Bridge in the final days of June and rival Premier League clubs are monitoring the situation in the hope of exploiting it. A significant Chelsea clearout is inevitable this summer, primarily because a first-team squad bloated under Thomas Tuchel last summer ballooned to the point of being utterly unmanageable under Graham Potter in January.

The club’s official website lists 31 players on its first-team page — a number that does not include academy graduate Lewis Hall, who has started four Premier League games this season, or a lengthy list of loanees that features Ethan Ampadu, Levi Colwill, Malo Gusto, Andrey Santos, Romelu Lukaku and Callum Hudson-Odoi. Christopher Nkunku is also joining from RB Leipzig in a deal agreed last summer.

Six players in the squad and four loanees are about to enter the final year of their contracts, headlined by Mason Mount, Mateo Kovacic and Christian Pulisic. Another seven will have two years left at the end of this season — the point that Boehly and Eghbali want to establish as the threshold for tying players to contract extensions or selling them. That group includes Kai Havertz, Conor Gallagher and goalkeepers Kepa Arrizabalaga and Edouard Mendy.

Chelsea players nearing free agency

PLAYER	CONTRACT EXPIRES
Thiago Silva	June 2024
Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang	June 2024
Ruben Loftus-Cheek	June 2024
Christian Pulisic	June 2024
Mason Mount	June 2024
Mateo Kovacic	June 2024
Callum Hudson-Odoi	June 2024
Tiemoue Bakayoko	June 2024
Baba Rahman	June 2024
Ethan Ampadu	June 2024
Kepa Arrizabalaga	June 2025
Hakim Ziyech	June 2025
Kai Havertz	June 2025
Edouard Mendy	June 2025
Conor Gallagher	June 2025
Cesar Azpilicueta	June 2025
Lewis Hall	June 2025

Chelsea officials insist the club are relaxed about the situation. They point out that in January and last summer they chose not to sell a number of players who attracted real interest from around the Premier League and clubs in Europe and there is confidence suitors will once again present themselves this summer.

That confidence looks particularly well founded with regards to academy graduates Mount and Gallagher, who would represent pure profit in the accounts if sold. But in those and other potential negotiations, what incentive do buying clubs have to work to a June 30 deadline? Brinkmanship is the dominant language of the transfer market and if suitors get the impression that delaying might pressure Chelsea into lowering their asking price, that is what they will do.

Chelsea would hope to raise north of £100m for Mount and Gallagher if they decide to sell both. They are demanding £70m for Mount alone, which seems optimistic for a player who is entering the final year of his contract. Lofty player valuations tend not to lead to quick transfers and the coming transfer window will follow a miserable season in which almost no player at Stamford Bridge has increased their value.

Beyond the end of June, the situation looks no simpler. Trimming the wage bill of several large Abramovich-era contracts is also desirable for Boehly and Eghbali — not least ahead of a season in which Chelsea’s revenue is likely to take a massive hit from failure to qualify for any European competition — as they strive to implement a more incentivised salary structure. Yet doing so will require either the players in question to accept pay cuts to leave Stamford Bridge or interested clubs to pay them at the same level.

The current landscape of the transfer market is not amenable to the latter scenario. January underlined that Europe’s other major leagues have been left far behind in the financial wake of the Premier League. Significant transfer fee commitments from Spanish, Italian and German clubs are increasingly rare and many of those in the Champions League simply cannot even afford to match the higher-end wages offered by English top-flight clubs outside the traditional ‘Big Six’.

Brexit has also complicated selling from the Premier League to mainland Europe. English footballers count as ‘non-EU players’ for the purposes of squad registration rules and Serie A clubs, for example, only have two such slots, limiting the opportunities to do more deals like selling Fikayo Tomori to AC Milan and Tammy Abraham to Roma.

Real Madrid, Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich still very much can pay top salaries but their appetite for signing expensive cast-offs from the likes of Chelsea, Manchester City and Manchester United is limited. Mid-tier Premier League clubs are better equipped, though the remarkable recent successes of Brighton and Brentford in building squads through smarter, cheaper overseas recruitment is a more attractive model for many to try to emulate.

In reality, the markets that develop for players like Kovacic, Pulisic and Hakim Ziyech are unlikely to be broad and the transfer fees offered are unlikely to come anywhere near what Chelsea paid to sign them in the first place. Fortunately, they do not need to be in order for these sales to be recorded as profitable transactions in the books.

For anyone not yet acquainted with how football clubs account for player trading, when a footballer is bought their transfer fee is spread evenly across the length of his contract (a process called amortisation), but when a footballer is sold the entire transfer fee is registered immediately in one lump sum — minus his remaining amortised value in the books.

So if a player is signed for £40m on a five-year contract and sold three years later for £20m, the club records a £4m profit: the sale price minus £16m, his remaining book value on the final two years of his deal. That, coupled with the accounting benefits of lowering overall player amortisation and the wage bill, means it is often more worthwhile for clubs to sell players even at heavily discounted prices than many people would assume.

The table below shows the estimated remaining book values of the Chelsea players in the final two years of their current contracts, based on their reported transfer fees. Most are either almost fully amortised or, in the case of the Cobham graduates, cost nothing to acquire (and subsequently their book values are listed as ‘N/A’). Selling these players for anything more than the figures listed this summer would count as a profitable player transaction.

Book values of pending free agents

PLAYER	REMAINING BOOK VALUE (£)
Thiago Silva	N/A
Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang	6m
Ruben Loftus-Cheek	N/A
Christian Pulisic	11.5m
Mason Mount	N/A
Mateo Kovacic	8m
Callum Hudson-Odoi	N/A
Tiemoue Bakayoko	N/A
Baba Rahman	N/A
Ethan Ampadu	N/A
Kepa Arrizabalaga	20.4m
Hakim Ziyech	13.2m
Kai Havertz	24.8m
Edouard Mendy	8.8m
Conor Gallagher	N/A
Cesar Azpilicueta	N/A
Lewis Hall	N/A

None of the above figures appear insurmountable obstacles to potential summer sales. It is very different in the case of Lukaku, however, who has three years left to run on the five-year, £340,000-a-week contract he signed as part of his disastrous £97.5m transfer to Chelsea from Inter in the summer of 2021. His remaining book value should be £58.5m, far beyond what any club would pay for a 29-year-old who has missed almost as many matches due to injury as he has played on loan at his former club this season.

There is one other accounting technique to note at this point: if a club deems a player’s value is less than what is listed in the accounts and there is a legitimate reason — such as serious injury or a player falling out of first-team favour — it can book a one-off impairment charge. This reduces the player’s remaining amortised value for future years, provided that auditors agree to sign it off. Is your head spinning yet?

It is complicated but important to bear in mind, since Chelsea reported a huge £77m player impairment in their 2021-22 accounts, without specifying which players had their book values reduced. It is very possible that some of the club’s worst recent signings, most notably Lukaku and Kepa, are part of that figure.

The big picture is a challenging one for Chelsea. Respected football finance analyst Swiss Ramble estimates the club are around £92.5m over UEFA’s allowable loss limit for the current FFP monitoring period, and will therefore require Europe’s governing body to grant allowances for revenue lost due to UK Government sanctions in 2022 and the player impairment — unless there are additional player sales prior to June 30 that improve the situation.

Of course, it may be that Boehly and Eghbali are privately not all that concerned about failing to comply with FFP; the latest round of fines imposed by UEFA on PSG, Inter and Juventus among others as part of settlement agreements in September 2022 were not particularly onerous. If you are determined to leave everyone else in the dust, a speeding ticket is a small price to pay. The prospect of actually being kicked out of European competition for excessive spending — whenever it is that Chelsea qualify again — does not appear to be a realistic outcome.

That said, the consistent public position of Chelsea’s new owners has been that they intend to remain compliant with FFP and are confident they will be able to do so. With that in mind, any Premier League clubs interested in players in Frank Lampard’s massive first-team squad will be paying very close attention to what happens in the days leading up to June 30.

 

[Vesper 28,795]

1 hour ago, ZAPHOD2319 said:

the source is suspect

 

Graeme Bailey
@GraemeBailey
Transfer Correspondent for 
@90min_Football
 | Insider for 
@TeamTalk
 & 
@SiriusXMFC
 | 🗣 Podcasts - Talking Transfers & PreMatchPod |✍️ Columnist 
@anfieldwatch
Cleveland/Teesside/Yorkshire90min.com/authors/graeme…Joined February 2009
2,651 Following
99.9K Followers
Followed by Fabrizio Romano and Barack Obama

 

lolol

 

 

[NikkiCFC 7,944]

 

[ZAPHOD2319 4,477]

54 minutes ago, NikkiCFC said:

 

I think he is quite the talent, and would love to see it.... but how can we afford all of this plus a striker?

[ZAPHOD2319 4,477]

He would be a free transfer. The following is a google translate of the Spanish article, so some of the phrasing might seem clunky.

 

Gavi's reasons for considering signing for Chelsea

New contacts between the English club and the player's entourage are planned in the coming days to try to continue advancing. Barça is his first option, but…

Manu SainzManu_Sainz

Chelsea have taken the first step to sign Gavi, but it won't be the last. As AS announced this Tuesday, the English club met three weeks ago, in Madrid, with the player's agent, Iván De la Peña, to convey to him the desire to sign his representative. After that first contact in the capital of Spain, a second meeting that will have a greater depth is scheduled soon. The owners of the English club will be at that meeting, led by Todd Boehly, and it is expected that the soccer player's parents will also attend, accompanied by Iván de la Peña. The Chelsea owners want to convey to Gavi's parents the importance of the player in his ambitious project, as well as answer any questions they might have.The leak of the news given this Tuesday by AS about the start of contacts between Chelsea and Gavi's entourage has not changed the roadmap set by the English club to get the signing of the current Golden Boy and Kopa Award winner. The operation continues...

Gavi, for his part, is calm. He does not close doors, although his initial desire is to continue at the Camp Nou. For this reason, on September 15 , he renewed as a professional footballer with Barcelona until 2026. However, the bizarre contractual situation that he is experiencing and that is derived from the economic problems of the Barça club, is what has opened the way for Chelsea. And it is that if Barcelona does not manage to release 200 million of his salary limit before June 30 , his current professional contract would not be valid and he would be free, being able to sign for the blue team at zero cost. Chelsea, just in case, continues with his strategy. So,while Barcelona is unable to sign him up and he has had to see how he 'loses' the number '6' to put on the '30' again, the London team is willing to make him one of the highest paid players on the team, surpassing highly the salary signed in Barcelona.

In the strategy designed by Chelsea, not only the economic trick is played, but the signing of Luis Enrique for the next season is also being considered. The presence of the Asturian coach at Stamford Bridge would be one more incentive for the midfielder to take the step of leaving Barcelona and heading towards the Premier League. Not in vain, Luis Enrique is the coach who has bet the most on him, taking him to the National Team when he had still made very few merits in the First Division and in the face of widespread criticism from public opinion. Among the various controversial decisions made by Luis Enrique as head of the National Team, the commitment to Gavi was possibly the most successful. Both could meet again at Chelsea next season.

 

https://as.com/futbol/primera/las-razones-de-gavi-para-plantearse-fichar-por-el-Chelsea-n/?ssm=TW_CC

[Vesper 28,795]

20 minutes ago, ZAPHOD2319 said:

I think he is quite the talent, and would love to see it.... but how can we afford all of this plus a striker?

maybe they are just going to say fuck FFP, lolololol

Super League here we come

🤪

[DDA 9,690]

38 minutes ago, ZAPHOD2319 said:

I think he is quite the talent, and would love to see it.... but how can we afford all of this plus a striker?

I really think we should consider getting Hojlund... he would suit Enrique more that Osimhen??

Edited April 14, 2023 by DDA

[Vesper 28,795]

we still desperately need a world class CF, a world class GK, and a true DMF (unless we are going to pull a massive surprise and roll with Zakaria, who I so wish was given more playing time, he has look quite decent when he has played)

this is out of left field, BUT I would love to see Noni tried at LB/LWB, I said that before we even bought him

he is a superb athlete, is quite large and strong, great pace, and surely cannot be worse than CuCu

plus he is HG

the only LB we do not have who remotely interests me is Nuno Mendes 

I say that if we do not even try Noni there, and we (very likely) do not drop insane money on Nuno, we just roll with Maatsen and take the big loss on CuCu-shite 

what a disaterclass but he was

same for KK 

Muddy can still turn it around, and Sterling needs a proper manager to get him a system that works for him

DonkeyKaku needs to be shipped

hopefully (if we lose to Real) he leads Inter to the CL title and we can get a nice chunk of change for the plonker, LOLOLOL

[Vesper 28,795]

15 minutes ago, DDA said:

I really think we should consider getting Hojlund... he would suit Enrique more that Osimhen??

THIS!!!!!

Viking time!

[Vesper 28,795]

 

[Pizy 18,368]

Still don’t buy the Gavi stuff at all. Not unless Luis Enrique has told the board that he is an absolute priority that he NEEDS in order to implement his style. Even then I can’t see Barca allowing a teenaged “wonderkid” walk on a free. They’ll pressure him, promise him the moon, and have all the Spanish media on him. Players that come through their youth system and become stars in the first team just don’t leave. Not when the club actually badly want to keep him. That fan base would riot if he walked.

And as for the reports on the Chelsea side, they’re pretty outlandish as well. Talk of us paying an 18 year old hundreds of thousands a week sounds like bullshit. 

[Gundalf 804]

7 minutes ago, Pizy said:

Still don’t buy the Gavi stuff at all. Not unless Luis Enrique has told the board that he is an absolute priority that he NEEDS in order to implement his style. Even then I can’t see Barca allowing a teenaged “wonderkid” walk on a free. They’ll pressure him, promise him the moon, and have all the Spanish media on him. Players that come through their youth system and become stars in the first team just don’t leave. Not when the club actually badly want to keep him. That fan base would riot if he walked.

And as for the reports on the Chelsea side, they’re pretty outlandish as well. Talk of us paying an 18 year old hundreds of thousands a week sounds like bullshit. 

Just another De Jong saga. Expect United to be all over him as well 😅

[Clockwork 1,794]

I don’t get the hype over Cecideo, what makes him better than spuds flop Yves Bissouma?

[LAM09 6,744]

4 hours ago, DDA said:

I really think we should consider getting Hojlund... he would suit Enrique more that Osimhen??

We don't need another "project".

[OneMoSalah 8,776]

1 hour ago, LAM09 said:

We don't need another "project".

Yep regardless of his potential, we need somebody who is able to come in, lead the line and deliver consistently right now because we have been lacking a regular top goalscoring CF for years now.

After January, I hope we don’t seem intent on buying/wanting every second u23 player in the world again. I mean if this is the strategy this summer, questions have to be asked again of the football strategy, especially considering the doubts or concerns around Mendy, Kepa, Aubamayang, Koulibaly, Kovacic’s futures amongst others.

Squad building needs to be done carefully. Personally I feel you need to have groups of players in different age brackets so you have a mix of lesser experienced, young guys breaking through/trying to establish themselves say under 23s. Then more established players who are proven and experienced in that bracket from say 24 to 29 and then some more senior pros say guys 30 and above. These last two groups, you need to retain a certain number of these guys just as much as anything else. 

If we just keep signing kids and don’t retain or maintain a good mix of established/experienced persons then you don’t really get continuity in the culture and standards around the club.  Or so I feel.

I get Arsenal are maybe showing that theory isn’t necessarily true but for me, I look at City under Pep and they’ve always had great squad building.