A distinctive feature of Chelsea's transfer business under Todd Burleigh so far has been the length of contracts given to new signings.
Since Boehly took over from Roman Abramovich in May 2022, they have spent more than £900m in transfer spending and there is no sign of them stopping there. This level of spending is unprecedented in English football, with Chelsea already breaking the UK transfer record twice in 2023.
When they signed players, they adopted the strategy of providing long-term contracts to athletes, which is common in the North American sports world. Chelsea provided 7-year, 8-year and 9-year contracts to most of the new signings.
These include the bid king Caicedo, who rejected Liverpool's offer of 111 million pounds and joined Chelsea with a transfer fee of 115 million pounds. He signed an 8-year contract with Chelsea, and Chelsea can also choose to extend the contract 9 years.
There have been a lot of articles about Chelsea's finances in recent weeks. For those unfamiliar with the term, amortization is a way of recording asset purchases on the balance sheet, and in this case the transfer of professional players.
While the transfer fee required to bring in a new signing is not paid in installments over the life of the player's contract, for accounting purposes the cost of a guaranteed transfer fee is spread over the life of the contract. This also means that by spreading the transfer fee over a longer period of time, the annual portion of the balance sheet will be thinned out.
This summer is not the first year that Chelsea have done this, and UEFA has therefore formulated a restriction law. They have implemented new regulations at the beginning of this summer transfer window-now, the club can still provide players with Long-term contracts of more than 5 years, but the calculation of "amortization" can only be carried out for a maximum of 5 years.
However, it is embarrassing that although this bill seems to be specially set up for the current Chelsea team, it cannot control Chelsea. Because this rule only applies to clubs participating in European competitions, and in view of Chelsea's dismal performance in the 2022-23 season, they only rank 12th in the Premier League, so they miss any European competitions. In terms of conspiracy theory, this sounds like a deliberate act of controlling performance in order to evade supervision.
Chelsea are currently only bound by the Premier League's profit and sustainability rules, but such rules in the Premier League do not impose restrictions on the length of contracts or the method of calculating the amortization of transfer fees. So they only need to calculate "amortization" and sell one or two "own players" like Mount every year (the introduction cost is already zero, and all transfer fees can be recorded as transfer income of the year) to maintain the book Balance of payments above.
But that doesn't mean Chelsea's absolute impunity. If their move pans out on the pitch, it would be a good way to help them regain their dominance, and Boehly could also be described as a gifted boss with some strategic vision. But if they get nothing on the football field, then they will also face great risks, because they have issued almost all players in their team a contract covering the golden period of their careers, even if They don't perform well, and they get paid.
CAB사이트 pointed out that for a long time, Liverpool has been the club with the longest player contract period among Premier League clubs, and Fenway Group is willing to seek a long-term and stable team status, rather than wanton rotation in each transfer window. Thanks to the renewal of players such as Salah, Alisson and Alexander-Arnold in the past 12 to 18 months, as well as the addition of players such as McAllister and Soboszroy, this season, Liverpool has the remaining time in the player's contract. Ranked third in the Premier League, the average remaining time of club player contracts is 2.92 years.
Treble winners Manchester City are second on the list for this statistic, with an average contract remaining at the Etihad Stadium of 3.12 years. The average remaining time of contracts across the Premier League is 2.61 years.
Chelsea undoubtedly top the list in this data, their average remaining contract time is as high as 4.59 years, which is 76% higher than the average level of the Premier League. What's more, this number may continue to rise, because there are still redundant players in the Chelsea team that have not been cleaned up, and they are still targeting more players. gap between levels.
From Chelsea's perspective, this represents a huge commitment to the future. But if they can't get their plan to work and follow through on their goal of returning to the top four and qualifying for the Champions League, that number will pose a huge risk for them.