Chelsea Transfers

[Liuxas 124]

Does someone from serious journalist reporting about our interest in Scalvini from Atalanta? 

Report Scalvini watched by Newcastle scouts after Chelsea interest

https://football-italia.net/report-scalvini-watch-newcastle-scouts-Chelsea/

[Vesper 30,072]

Chelsea agree deal to sell defender Ishe Samuels-Smith to Strasbourg

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6523605/2025/07/29/Chelsea-ishe-samuels-smith-strasbourg/

Chelsea have agreed a deal to sell under-21 defender Ishe Samuels-Smith to Strasbourg for an undisclosed fee.

Samuels-Smith went to the French club for talks earlier this month and has now joined on a permanent basis.

The 19-year-old was signed from Everton in 2023 for £4million but despite being highly rated at the club, did not make an appearance for the senior side.

His expected chances of playing next season would be further reduced with Chelsea closing in on the signing Jorrel Hato from Ajax for a fee in excess of £40million.

The Netherlands international will be primarily used at left back, which is where Samuels-Smith plays.

Samuels-Smith, who signed a new deal at Stamford Bridge in April until 2031, is the latest player from Chelsea to go to Strasbourg, who are both owned by parent company BlueCo, this summer.

Strasbourg bought midfielder Mathis Amougou for an undisclosed fee, while Mamadou Sarr and Mike Penders have joined on a season-long loan.

Kendry Paez is also expected to move there on loan for the 2025-26 campaign.

[Vesper 30,072]

How Liverpool can afford to buy Alexander Isak even after committing over £500m in two months

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6520277/2025/07/29/liverpool-afford-alexander-isak-transfer/

Liverpool’s largesse this summer has taken plenty aback, not least as it arrives following a dominant domestic showing last season.

Having won the Premier League title in Arne Slot’s first year in the Anfield dugout, there’s been little suggestion of the club resting on their laurels. Wider dominance is the clear and stated aim, with heady transfer spending to go with tying down top goalscorer Mohamed Salah and captain Virgil van Dijk to contract extensions to replace their deals that were going to expire this summer.

Including appropriate estimated fees and levies, alongside the £25million signing of Giorgi Mamardashvili from Valencia, who officially joined on July 1 after the deal was done last August, Liverpool’s spend in the past two months sits north of £300m ($400m). Even in the madcap world of modern-day transfers, that’s a huge sum. Using accounting years, only two clubs have previously exceeded that mark in single-season spending: Chelsea, twice, in 2022-23 and 2023-24, and Manchester City in 2017-18.

Signing Alexander Isak too would take Liverpool beyond the £400m barrier, a realm only Chelsea have dared venture into. The latter have become almost synonymous with, shall we say, thinking outside the box; in each of the two seasons referenced, they avoided breaching Premier League profit and sustainability rules (PSR) through selling assets to fellow companies within the broader ownership group.

Liverpool haven’t employed such tactics, so there’s naturally been plenty of wondering how exactly they can afford to do what they’re doing. Their owners at Fenway Sports Group (FSG) have long fielded accusations of frugality during their time at Anfield, pouring in money at a rate well below the level of peers. Across almost 14 years of ownership to the end of May last year, FSG provided £263.6m in funding to the club; Chelsea received £315m from their owners in 2023-24 alone. What’s more, much of FSG’s funding has been directed toward infrastructure projects, rather than squad improvements.

To sign Isak, Liverpool will have to part with the third-highest fee ever paid for a footballer. Newcastle United would like conversations to start at about £150m for their Swedish striker, which might not prove attainable given he wants to leave and the list of realistic suitors is short. Yet even the £120m starting point Liverpool have previously communicated they are willing to make a deal at would only trail Paris Saint-Germain’s signings of Neymar and Kylian Mbappe when it comes to football’s richest transfers.

To understand how Liverpool buying Isak is even a possibility, never mind his most realistic option from this vantage point, requires looking both forwards and backwards, as well as considering PSR and cash limits which, as we’ll see, can be very different things.

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What is their PSR position?

Even before looking at their activity to date, it’s worth detailing where Liverpool stood at the onset of the summer. In 2023-24, they recorded a £57.1m pre-tax loss, the worst financial result in the club’s history. Yet, as The Athletic detailed in March, the big deficit was an exception: we projected Liverpool would be comfortably profitable last season.

Premier League PSR is assessed over a rolling three-year period, meaning strong performance in a preceding financial year can set a club up nicely to spend in the following one. As with any club, Liverpool’s PSR loss figure is lower than their pre-tax one, as clubs can remove ‘allowable’ costs such as spending on youth development, or the club’s women’s team.

In Liverpool’s case, those allowable costs are sizeable. We estimate they exceed £40m per season. In other words, that £57.1m pre-tax loss was far smaller within Liverpool’s PSR calculation. Correspondingly, the pre-tax profit we were already projecting for Liverpool in 2024-25 represents an even greater PSR profit. Across the past two seasons, the club’s combined PSR result is expected to be highly profitable — opening the door for them to post a large loss in 2025-26, if they chose to, while still remaining within the rules.

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How do they have so much cash?

Separate to PSR is Liverpool’s cash position, which can be an obvious but underreported impediment to a club being active in the transfer market. FSG have long been keen to manage Liverpool sustainably, and that’s borne out in the strong cash position the club appears to have entered the summer with.

To the end of the 2023-24 season, Liverpool owed a net £69.9m in transfer fees to other clubs, by far the lowest transfer debt of the Premier League’s ‘big six’ and pretty much middling across the division. That figure only fell last season, leaving Liverpool without large historic commitments hampering their ability to spend now. Compare that with Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s March lamentation about Manchester United’s transfer debt — £271.6m at the end of last season, and even higher now — and you get a sense of how Liverpool are less restrained than others.

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Completion of works on the Anfield Road End in early 2024 brought an end to a significant period of infrastructure investment, releasing the club from sizeable cash commitments. Further ensuring plenty of cash to be tapped was the extension of a revolving credit facility (RCF) from £200m to £350m in September 2024. At the end of May that year, only £116m of the RCF had been drawn down. All of this is without getting into the fact Liverpool enjoyed record revenues in 2024-25, projected at over £700m, ones which are only expected to grow further this season.

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How much have Liverpool spent so far?

Having established Liverpool’s strong PSR and cash positions, we can move onto determining just how much they’ve spent to date. Or, more pertinently, how much they’ve committed to in total spending.

On transfer fees, agent fees and transfer levies, Liverpool’s estimated spend on Florian Wirtz, Hugo Ekitike, Milos Kerkez, Jeremie Frimpong and Mamardashvili totals £314m. We don’t know the terms of when the various fees will be paid, but it seems a safe bet Liverpool’s transfer debt has jumped from lowly beginnings.

Transfer fees tend to be widely reported at this level, but reliable information on how much players are paid is difficult to come by, and not only because there’s often little benefit to the involved parties in disclosing such figures. Clubs increasingly reward players with an array of performance bonuses which, if achieved, can mean the player’s actual annual wage strays far from the basic salary which might have leaked out back when they signed.

 

Taking that crevasse-sized caveat into account, we’re necessarily limited in how accurately we can project what Liverpool have committed to in terms of paying their new recruits over their respective contracts, all of which run for a minimum of five years. Even so, estimates by The Athletic put the sum committed to those five new signings in excess of £250m over their contracts. Add that to the transfer fees above and we arrive at a commitment from Liverpool this summer to spend well in excess of half a billion pounds on new players.

Even for a club with £700m-plus revenues, that’s a lot, especially when coupled with a wage bill which only trails Manchester City’s in England.

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How can they afford Isak too?

As we’ve detailed, Liverpool have plenty of PSR headroom in 2025-26, and could stomach a big loss if they fancied it. The problem with that tactic is it does require mitigation further down the line. Come the 2027-28 season, the profit of last year falls off Liverpool’s calculation. That’s without getting into the intricacies of UEFA’s squad cost ratio (SCR), a measure which limits the proportion of income clubs can spent on transfer fees, wages and agent costs.

Notably, income for SCR purposes includes a club’s profit on player sales (albeit a pro-rated version, which we won’t get into here). It is player sales which now hold the key to much of Liverpool’s financial strategy. Such sales will boost the bottom line in the current season, aiding both domestic and European PSR, as well as provide a cash boost and limit transfer debt from soaring too high.

In fact, remarkable as it may seem, player sales in this window could prove enough to offset the in-year impact of Liverpool’s huge spending on incomings. They have probably already done so.

To understand how that can possibly be the case, consider the sale of Luis Diaz to Bayern Munich. Diaz is to join the German champions for €75m (£65.6m; $87.4m). He arrived on Merseyside three and a half years ago for a fee which eventually saw £43m flow from Liverpool to Porto. That fee was expensed (amortised) across Diaz’s five-and-a-half-year contract, meaning his book value at the point of sale equated to roughly 36 per cent (two years out of five and a half) of the total fee spent on him.

After adding on assumed agent fees and levies, that left Diaz’s book value at around £17.5m. Liverpool are selling him for £65.6m, thus crystallising a £48.1m profit — one which they book immediately into their 2025-26 accounts.

The same is true of some far simpler sales. Pretty much all of the £30m generated from Jarell Quansah’s move to Bayer Leverkusen last month was also booked immediately as profit, likewise £8.4m received from Real Madrid for Trent Alexander-Arnold and £3m from West Bromwich Albion for Nat Phillips. A further £10m in profit came from selling Caoimhin Kelleher to Brentford. In all Liverpool have banked an estimated £99.5m profit on player sales already this summer.

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So Liverpool are in profit this summer?

That £99.5m is just the transfer fees. The wages of those outgoings aren’t well-known but will all add up. Alexander-Arnold, for example, earned around £200,000 per week before bonuses, costing Liverpool a minimum £12m per year after employment taxes.

While sales are booked immediately, transfer fees are spread across contracts. Liverpool’s May 31 accounting date offers a further disconnect, as player contracts run to 30 June, meaning a month’s worth of transfer fee at the end of a player’s contract will fall into the accounting period ostensibly covering the season after they’ve left the club.

That has the corresponding impact of lowering the immediate hit. Ekitike, announced on July 23, will see just over 10 months of his fee and wages accounted for in 2025-26; it would have been 11 months if Liverpool’s financial year ran to the end of June. It might sound inconsequential, but at the level of fees involved here it makes a difference.

On amortisation costs alone, we estimate Liverpool’s quintuple of new faces will hit the 2025-26 books to the tune of £56.3m. In other words, on fees, the combined £99.5m in player profits this summer comfortably outstrip this year’s amortisation cost stemming from new signings.

That ignores wages, and Liverpool are paying big amounts to their new recruits, particularly Ekitike and Wirtz. Yet they’ve also shifted a chunk off the wage bill, principally through the departures of Alexander-Arnold and Diaz. Exact amounts are unknown but this summer’s sales could reasonably total around £25m in annual wages saved.

The wages added via the new signings easily outweigh that sum but, as we’ve seen, player sales to date cover the new amortisation costs with over £40m left to play with. Our estimate of the total 2025-26 cost of Liverpool’s five new signings, across both fees and wages, is a little over £100m. That’s just a smidge more than the player profits Liverpool have generated this summer. Add in the wage savings and, as ludicrous as it may sound, Liverpool’s transfer activity has generated a profit in 2025-26.

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What would signing Isak mean for Liverpool’s future windows and current big-earners?

Understand all that and you go a long way to understanding how, at least in the here and now, signing Isak even for the mooted £150m transfer fee (2025-26 amortisation after assorted costs: £28.6m) and £300,000 per week wage (2025-26 salary cost: £14.8m) wouldn’t blow Liverpool’s current finances to smithereens. Far from it.

Signing Isak would add an estimated £43.4m in costs this year, but by our estimate that would only just tip the impact of this summer’s transfer dealings into a position of adding costs comparative to 2024-25. Owing to the timing of his signing, Isak’s annual cost would then increase to around £53m from next season.

That highlights a rather glaring omission in all this. So far, we’ve only really considered 2025-26. Sales made this summer have generated £99.5m in profit but will garner precisely nothing next year; meanwhile, the new signings continue to cost the club a huge annual sum. Twelve months of costs for each of their new recruits will hit Liverpool’s books in 2026-27, and for several years after. We estimate business to date has loaded £109m onto Liverpool’s annual costs — a figure which rises to £162m if Isak is signed on a deal that would ultimately cost Liverpool over £250m across his time at Anfield.

Predicting where Liverpool’s wider finances will go in the future is a fool’s errand, not least those elements linked to on-field performance. But by any stretch, an extra £109m-162m in annual costs, recurring for several years, is a big bill to pay. We outlined our estimation Liverpool’s business to date has committed them to well over half a billion in spending over the next five or six years; stick on a further £250m-plus for Isak and you’re at a sum in the region of £840m.

That’s been offset by £99.5m in sales profits so far, alongside whatever wages have departed. There’s also the point that, in the case of Diaz, Liverpool benefit from not having to amortise his fee now he’s gone (the other departures had negligible amortisation costs). That’s around a further £9m saving on last year. All told, outgoings have probably generated income or produced cost savings this coming season totalling £136m, while adding the signing of Isak to existing business would see a total increase in this season’s costs of around £144m. In other words, the net impact of the summer’s activity would be to add just an extra £8m in costs in 2025-26.

 

Isak would add a heavy future burden but Liverpool can afford him this summer (Photo: Stu Forster/Getty Images)

That does also ignore any impact from those new contracts handed to Van Dijk and Salah. Those two could become of greater significance to the matters of today in two years’ time. Their new contracts expire in 2027 and, while its unknown if they’ll stay beyond then, it’s a distinct possibility they won’t. Given the size of their pay packets, that would provide a significant reduction in Liverpool’s wage bill — thus helping to offset the costs this summer’s new signings are continuing to incur.

That’s a while off, albeit Liverpool will already be thinking about how they foot the long-term costs they’re currently committing themselves to. As we’ve seen, remarkable as it may appear, this summer’s activity so far has actually generated a net profit in the club’s 2025-26 financial year. Any more big sales — like, for example, Darwin Nunez — would only further improve the bottom line. The potential problem comes later, when more sales are needed or other measures, like generating higher revenues or cutting costs, have to be undertaken.

Liverpool’s summer is signing them up to a hefty future commitment, though in the here and now their finances continue to look rosy. That will remain the case even if they take the plunge and make Isak the most expensive player in English football history.

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What role would Hato play for Chelsea?

Marc Cucurella led the Chelsea squad in minutes played across all competitions last season, and the lack of a natural alternative to him on the left side of defence exposes a thinner area of Enzo Maresca’s expensively assembled squad.

Malo Gusto has been deployed at left-back, but is more comfortable on the right. Veiga was slated to be Cucurella’s long-term understudy, but struggled to win Maresca’s trust before pushing to go on loan to Juventus in January. With the Portugal international expected to depart permanently this summer, there is plenty of space for Hato to walk into.

Despite being a very different physical profile from Cucurella (he stands at 6ft/182cm tall), Hato also possesses a remarkable number of similar qualities. As a left-back, he can overlap into crossing areas, invert into midfield to help his team control the middle of the pitch, or drive into the final third, where he is a more polished finisher than most defenders.

Hato can also provide a quality option at centre-back. His versatility is impressive, and he has registered 100 professional appearances despite only turning 19 in March.

Liam Twomey

[Bluepower777 31]

10 hours ago, mkh said:

OFFICIAL: Manchester City have re-signed goalkeeper James Trafford from Burnley for £27m on a five-year contract.

Wanted him here

[TheHulk 2,400]

These owners are fucking garbage refusing to pay money required for Hato and Simons yet get bend over like fucking losers for Gittens.

[TheHulk 2,400]

 

[TheHulk 2,400]

 

Edited Wednesday at 07:05 by TheHulk

[TheHulk 2,400]

21 hours ago, OhForAGreavsie said:

I like Rogers as an 8. I think he has great attributes for the position. Better than Enzo's in my opinion. If we made that swap my expectations for next season would become more ambitious.

I wouldn't sell Enzo unless we receive a 150m+ bid.

[TheHulk 2,400]

13 hours ago, mkh said:

Exclusive: Ishé Samuels-Smith will become a Strasbourg player on permanent basis. Everything now in place for 19yo defender to move to Stade de la Meinau after breakthrough in transfer fee + personal terms today. Samuels-Smith will fly to France imminently to finalise move.

(@BobbyVincentFL)

 

We should be including a 20-30% percentage to all players we sell to Strasbourg, in case they get sold to someone else we receive some money, in case we want to buy someone back we get them even cheaper.

Edited Wednesday at 07:12 by TheHulk

[Special Juan 28,087]

Both Hato and Simons will get done, no dramas

[TheHulk 2,400]

 

[TheHulk 2,400]

 

[Strike 7,474]

2 hours ago, TheHulk said:

These owners are fucking garbage refusing to pay money required for Hato and Simons yet get bend over like fucking losers for Gittens.

Garbage owners look like they’re gonna save 10-15 mil euros

[TheHulk 2,400]

13 minutes ago, Strike said:

Garbage owners look like they’re gonna save 10-15 mil euros

Yeah they like taking a risk every time and putting all eggs into no other clubs jumping in the last second. They did the same with Caicedo and once another team came in we ended up paying 20m more for him.

Edited Wednesday at 08:21 by TheHulk

[YorkshireBlue 3,264]

3 minutes ago, TheHulk said:

Yeah they like taking a risk every time and putting all eggs into no other clubs jumping in the last second. They did the same with Caicedo and once another team came in we ended up paying 20m more for him.

That wasn’t the case at all, Liverpool did that so we would back of lavia, and it backfired because we just bought both 

[TheHulk 2,400]

7 minutes ago, YorkshireBlue said:

That wasn’t the case at all, Liverpool did that so we would back of lavia, and it backfired because we just bought both 

Early on in the summer they wanted 100m for Caicedo and we kept lowballing with 80-90m because we assumed nobody else was going for him. Liverpool went all in for him but didn't expect Caicedo to reject them.

Edited Wednesday at 08:31 by TheHulk

[Strike 7,474]

10 minutes ago, TheHulk said:

Yeah they like taking a risk every time and putting all eggs into no other clubs jumping in the last second. They did the same with Caicedo and once another team came in we ended up paying 20m more for him.

So you want to overspend on every deal even before teams come in? Daft logic