Chelsea's Never-Ending Math Equation 🧮

It’s always struck me as strange that the football season starts while the transfer window is still open. It’s such an obvious oddity, and has such an easy solution, that you can only really assume it’s a deliberate choice. I’ve never been able to work out quite what the benefit is, so if you have any suggestions, I’d be delighted to hear them.

Regardless, the discrepancy tends to lend the first few rounds of games a slightly uncanny air. The teams that take part in these early exchanges, after all, might look quite different come the start of September. Manchester United might have a new goalkeeper. Arsenal might have snatched another player from Tottenham’s grasp. Alexander Isak might be a footballer again. It makes it all seem like a phony war.

There are two things, though, that we can already say for certain. One is that any pretense of parsimony on the part of the Premier League has fallen away (Dango Ouattara for how much money?). And the other is that nobody seems more comfortable in the middle of the frenzied churn that English football creates than Chelsea…

It is hard to say which is the most impressive piece of business. At first glance, perhaps, it is convincing Burnley to commit $30 million of the club’s precious promotion windfall to sign Lesley Ugochukwu, a French midfielder who spent last season as a regular fixture in a Southampton team who will be remembered, statistically, as one of the worst sides ever to grace the Premier League.

Still, perhaps there are mitigating circumstances. Ugochukwu is young. He was one of Southampton’s better players, even if that is quite a low bar. He is industrious, dynamic, a rough outline of a very modern midfielder. Maybe that price tag is not so surprising. 

How about Armando Broja, then, a striker who has scored two Premier League goals in three seasons? The 23-year-old’s most recent loan spell, at Everton last year, saw him resolutely fail to win a consistent place at a side that was so lacking in cutting edge it eventually decided Beto was a viable option. 

But then: Broja has had injuries. He is an Albanian international. There are not – famously – that many strikers around. Maybe the $30 million or so that Burnley paid for him, too, is not wholly ridiculous.

There are alternatives: convincing the Spanish team Villarreal to pay $35 million for Renato Veiga, apparently based on a dozen or so appearances in Serie A for a desperately disappointing Juventus team; persuading Bournemouth to pay $32 million for the goalkeeper Djordje Petrovic, a player good enough to be voted Strasbourg’s best last season but at the same time apparently not good enough to dislodge Robert Sanchez; turning a profit on Carney Chukwuemeka, sold to Borussia Dortmund after an initial, slightly underwhelming loan spell last year.

Perhaps an even better deal will appear in the coming days. Perhaps Chelsea will sell Nicolas Jackson for a premium fee, despite making it abundantly clear all summer that he is no longer required. Perhaps the club’s many sporting directors will be able to elicit a huge sum of money from Bayern Munich to dispose of – not like that – Christopher Nkunku. 

All of those deals can be justified based on their own particular, peculiar characteristics: the profiles of the players, their undoubted or their potential qualities, the specific (and variously urgent) needs of the clubs to which they have been sold. What is most impressive, instead, is the aggregate: the sheer amount of money Chelsea is apparently able to command for players it manifestly does not need.

In one sense, Chelsea’s brave new world is nothing of the sort. If clubs have not always flipped players for profit, then they have certainly been doing it for some time: Premier League teams have been cherry-picking young players from Europe for the better part of two decades, officially in the hope of turning them into first-team stars but really in pursuit of a generous payday somewhere down the line. 

In another, though, the model adopted by Chelsea since the club’s 2022 takeover by an uneasy consortium involving Todd Boehly, of Dodgers fame, and Clearlake Capital is a novelty; it is sufficiently unprecedented that our understanding of its mechanisms and motivations is probably best regarded as developing. 

This summer, though, has brought some elements of it into particular focus. As much as Chelsea’s accounting chicanery – selling a couple of hotels, as well as its stellar women’s team, to a sister company in order to comply with the Premier League’s ever-popular financial rules – has attracted plenty of focus, the main loophole the club’s owners have spotted had previously gone unnoticed.

PSR, Chelsea has very clearly realized, is a cashflow game. As long as there is money pouring in, then it is possible to keep money flowing out. (This is because of the way the rules are weighted to allow Premier League teams to continue spending.) Ethically, this feels more than a little queasy. Technically, there is nothing wrong with it.

Chelsea is, effectively, running two businesses: a soccer team and a trading operation. The $150 million or so it has raised from the latter this summer, selling off its afterthoughts, allows the former to continue to invest eye-watering amounts in players. It is entirely possible that Petrovic, say, was not necessarily bought in the hope that he would play for Chelsea in the long-term. (Which is odd, because he is better than Sanchez.) 

It is here that Chelsea’s trading approach is breaking new ground: it is unprecedented in terms of scale, both in the sense of volume and cost. Chelsea is not (just) paying half a million dollars for teenagers and seeing how they develop. It is paying substantial fees for senior players at fairly major clubs – Aston Villa, Rennes – and then allowing them to appreciate in value, often by sending them out on loan to other Premier League teams. That experience, no matter how harrowing, acts as a stamp of quality. At that point, Chelsea can flip them, often at a profit.

The curiosity is that the whole model subverts the traditional rules of the transfer market. Chelsea is, in a sense, a distressed seller. It needs to shift these players in order to fund its recruitment. It does not want to be lumbered with their salaries. That should give buying clubs an edge. They should be lowballing Chelsea as they would Manchester United.

That they are not is because of the aspect of Chelsea’s approach that is only now starting to become clear. The weight of players Chelsea has on its books gives the club a degree of control over the supply of talent. If a team needs a central defender, Chelsea has one on offer. 

And, more appealing still, it is willing to sell; there will be no protracted negotiations, no desperate attempts to cling on to an asset (the language, like the thought behind it, is kind of gross). Chelsea offers certainty that there is a deal to be done. The only proviso is that Chelsea sets the price.

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You probably experienced Liverpool’s win at Newcastle on Monday as an early pacesetter for the Premier League’s game of the season, a roiling thunderstorm captured by floodlight, a manifestation of English football’s traditional, martial virtues, its much-cherished id, a thrilling glimpse of a lost past broadcast in crystal clear Ultra HD.

I absorbed it as a unique form of torture. I still have not seen the game in its entirety – as podcast listeners will know, I spent the (long) weekend in the Alps – but I heard every second, the ceaseless noise of St James’s Park piped into my headphones during the BBC radio show that has long occupied my Monday evenings.

It is worth taking my interpretation of the game with a pinch of salt, then, but it was hard not to be struck by how it sounded. St James’s Park is always boisterous, and wonderfully so, but this was of another order altogether. It sounded wild, untethered, somehow feral. There were tackles greeted with the sort of roar more usually reserved for goals.

And, from the descriptions offered by those who were there, it seemed like that transferred to the players: Eddie Howe’s Newcastle is never anything less than physically intense, but against Liverpool his team ran and chased and charged around the field, refusing to allow their opponent so much as a moment’s peace. 

This is, of course, something that English football is pre-programmed not just to appreciate but to encourage; the fire and the fury that Newcastle conjured has been credited not only with rattling the champions, regardless of the result, but with creating such heat that it served to bond Newcastle’s players even closer together.

That is all doubtless true. But there is another side, one which encompasses Anthony Gordon getting sent off for a genuinely foolish tackle, Sandro Tonali playing for 10 minutes with one arm clasped close to his chest, and Joelinton, the player who best embodies Howe’s Newcastle, over-extending his hamstring. 

All of that deserves praise. Players should run themselves into the ground for their team. They should, within reason, withstand physical pain. It is hard not to be impressed, even inspired, by their commitment. But at the same time it is worth asking whether there should perhaps be just a slight asterisk next to those accolades.

It may not have looked this way, but it sounded like Newcastle allowed their emotions to get the better of them, particularly after Liverpool had taken a fortuitous lead. Perhaps – and this is easy to say in hindsight – the occasion might have warranted just a little bit more control.

Rog and Rory breakdown all the drama from the second weekend of the Premier League and discuss Eberechi Eze's emotional return to Arsenal, the Gunner's dominant performance against Leeds, Pep's struggles against Thomas Frank and Tottenham, and Everton's warm welcome to their new stadium. Watch on YouTube or listen here.

My trip to the Alps has produced at least one extra recommendation for our public service map: Ground Control, not far from the Gare de Lyon in Paris, which is both a great place to have a pizza and a drink, and the perfect spot to introduce a seven-year-old to the delights of Virtua Striker 2002 on an actual, old-school arcade machine. Also, Roti King in London, where Rog and I visited just a few weeks ago.

Like a surprising number of unimpressed Newcastle and Aston Villa fans, Pranay Mathur found that my piece on PSR left him with a couple of questions. Fortunately, he did not feel the need to express them in the same tone of voice that a detective might interview a suspect for some hideous crime. 

“What proposals exist for viable alternatives, [ones] that accomplish the goal of leveling the playing field without the second-order effects that we see now?” he asked. “Based on your knowledge of folks around the game, are there any proposals out there with a lot of support? Or do you yourself have a suggestion to share with the world?”

There are plenty, as I have found out over the last few days on my social media feeds, and only some of them happen to work perfectly for Newcastle, Villa and Manchester City! The most convincing are measures that get round the revenue trap – in which spending is linked to how much a club can make, which inarguably favors the establishment – or that allow owners to invest if they place other funds into escrow, acting as a sort of luxury tax. 

My sense is that you can’t pretend economic imbalance doesn’t exist in football. Some clubs make more money than others, some clubs are bigger than others, just like some owners are richer than others. The best way to create a sense of parity, then, is not with financial regulation but sporting rules. Limiting the number of players a team can employ, imposing quotas for homegrown or under-21 players would all have the same effect without nearly as many loopholes.

Sean Saxton, meanwhile, has an excellent question that comes from being a volleyball player, a sport in which (he writes) success is about “out-executing” an opponent, rather than surprising them. It is “in the running for the least creative or non-conformist team sport,” he said, but again: that’s his opinion, please don’t shout at me.

“I wanted to ask you why soccer is so much more system driven at the highest level,” he wrote. “[Why is it] that maverick players who don’t fit neatly into a box aren’t as desired when, at the game’s roots, players grow up trying to achieve that very thing? It seems to me that players of immense individual talent…need to “unlearn” certain aspects of that freedom at the highest level.” 

There is more than a kernel of truth in this, Sean – Jack Grealish, now a bona fide Everton icon, is a fine example – and it has to do with both money (clubs need to produce young players who can either play for them or be sold on, and the safest way to do that is to emphasize certain core principles) and the gradual shift that has turned football from a game defined by players to one defined by managers.

At the elite level, most games are a test of ideas: whose vision of how the game should be played will come out on top. For that, coaches need players of remarkable talent, but they need them to do a particular job. The latter, too often, stifles the former. This is a great subject, though, and one that could stand greater exploration, so I’ll add it to the list.

Thanks to Sean and to Pranay, and to all of you who sent questions in. Please don’t be discouraged if yours hasn’t been published; in many ways it just means it was too eloquent for me to cut. But everything is read and everything is appreciated, so please keep them coming to [email protected]. 

That’s all for this week – enjoy the weekend, and I’ll be back next week. Maybe Alexander Isak will be, too.

All the best,
Rory