And so Behdad Eghbali and Todd Boehly wept, not for there were no worlds left to conquer but because so much money had been spent trying while all the time getting a little worse.
Chelsea’s powerbrokers, we have long been told, arrived as smooth business operators with licences to disrupt, to shake the Premier League like a giant with a snow globe, to watch European football burn at the grandness of their ambition.
A record has indeed been broken: Chelsea posted the highest annual losses in Premier League history, blowing those plucky upstarts the actual United Arab Emirates out of the water. They also topped the list of fees paid to agents for the third consecutive year. Because nobody needs to be convinced on this super-massive super-project, but money sure does sweeten things.
Clearly this all passes comment on Chelsea themselves. It has been a tricky fortnight PR-wise, when you add in the revelations over secret payments (that somehow passed by without sporting sanctions) and former owner Roman Abramovich’s determination to spend the seized funds how he, and not the UK Government, sees fit.
This gold-plated, galaxy brain spend-a-rama under the banner of disruption is essentially subtitled “You’ve all been doing it wrong – we are the future”. And… maybe. But there is something about spending a billion quid on long contracts for young players to build a team with insufficient experience and weaknesses in key positions, and appointing your manager from a deliberately reduced shortlist of one, that raises the odd question.
This is also a defining moment for football too; a line in the sand for financial indecency. Despite the extreme annual loss, Chelsea will not exceed profitability and sustainability limits. They made a significant profit in the previous financial year, you see. Related: they sold their women’s team to a subsidiary company for almost £200m.
This is a real ‘game’s gone’ moment (Photo: Getty)How can any financial rules be worth the paper they are written on if losing £262m – north of £700,000 a day – does not trigger an automatic brake? And how can any outsider hope to break into this VIP party when a club with £491m in annual revenue can lose that much and still crack on?
You will remember that Nottingham Forest and Everton are the only two competing Premier League clubs to have received sporting sanctions for Profitability and Sustainability Rules (PSR) breaches. For Everton, it punished a clear overreaching by careless owners. For Forest, a demand to consolidate after a promotion earned with a large core of loan players.
So maybe Everton and Forest are the fools for failing to understand that the real sport is finding loopholes that increase your spending power. This week, Newcastle United sold St James’ Park to themselves for a reported £172m. Aston Villa have done that and their women’s team. Everton have now sold the women’s team too, proof that they are catching up to speed. It is the most common refrain you hear, plucked straight from primary school argument: well they started it.
If the ultimate aim here is to ensure competition within the Premier League without any club spending beyond a level that makes economic emergency possible or probable, how can these end results possibly make sense? If you pay the price for not exploiting loopholes that are soon to be barred, and if clubs suffer as a result of staying within their own lane, the system itself is bunk.
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We all have our own “game’s gone” moments; supporters celebrating their club losing ownership control of its own stadium because it allows greater spending on players is mine. Women’s teams used as pawns to enable the budget of the men’s team to grow is another. How did we get here, when long-termism and tradition are abandoned so quickly?
It can never stop: you spend more on transfer fees, wages and agents so the elite few clubs simply do the same to maintain their gap. So those fees are inflated to match the rise in demand and budgets. So those below the top division also spend more, desperate to be part of the same conversation. So the fragility of the entire pyramid grows exponentially.
The whole thing is gross, indicative of a Monopoly money culture and ballooning without anyone stopping to consider whether it’s for the best.
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