Chelsea’s transfer strategy under Todd Boehly raises questions about talent rather than money

As expenditure approaches £1 billion in the Todd Boehly era, those familiar questions from the previous regime are being asked of Chelsea. How can they spend so much? When will football’s financial guardrails close in on Stamford Bridge?

And yet the outlay itself might not be the biggest question Chelsea face. After all, their rush of spending in January of this year was done prior to UEFA changing its rules on amortization, an accounting technique that football clubs use to spread the value of a transfer fee across the contract of any new signing. Enzo Fernandez’s £107 million fee might constitute quite the hit on anyone’s books but that becomes less pronounced when it is spread over eight and a half years.

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That particular wheeze was not available this summer, European football’s governing body now stating it will judge all transfer fees as being amortized over a maximum of five years even if the contracts are longer. The £300 million the Blues have spent might be divided by a small number but they can still book £265 million in sales from the likes of Mason Mount, Kai Havertz and the Saudi Arabian contingent. Meanwhile, Chelsea’s approach has remained resolutely to stick to contracts approaching a decade in length. Moises Caicedo is already signed up until at least 2031, his new employers able to take that deal a further 12 months into the future should they so wish.

This isn’t really an issue of financing, at least not just yet. The great conundrum for Chelsea to address is more fundamental than that. After all those signings, are they actually anywhere near good enough to achieve their expectations, not just this season but into the future? 

On the plus side, they have several building blocks that should at least insure them against a repeat of last season’s travesty of 12th place. In an extremely limited sample size of Premier League minutes, Fernandez and Caicedo have excelled. The theoretical fit of these two is invigorating. The former is the conductor, already one of the English game’s top progressive passers. The players who averaged more than his 0.64 through balls per 90 minutes last season are uniformly the best of the best creators. Alongside him, Caicedo brings plenty of passing too but propulsion to go with it, averaging 4.4 tackles and interceptions per 90 and more ball-carrying than any defensive midfielder that doesn’t play for Manchester City.

If club captain Reece James can stay consistently fit then he is a walking guarantee of a productive right flank, whatever system Mauricio Pochettino deploys. When summer signing Christopher Nkunku gets fit then he is, based on the evidence of his last two seasons in Bundesliga, an exceptional attacker who can create shots for himself and others while also doing the hard part of getting the ball into the penalty area in the first place. If that quartet, coupled with the experience of Thiago Silva and Raheem Sterling (perhaps the most encouraging aspect of the opening day draw at Liverpool was how sparky the former Manchester City man looked), could get a full season on the board then the Chelsea baseline would be adequate.

Perhaps not much more when the talent around them comes with so many question marks. Nicolas Jackson got in good shooting positions at Stamford Bridge on Sunday, whether he can do so through the course of 38 English games is inherently unknowable considering he has just 16 La Liga starts to his name. Much like Noni Madueke and the oft-debated Mykhailo Mudryk, Jackson flashed promise in that small sample size — the few shots he took in La Liga were largely good ones — but you have to engage in a fair bit of projection to assume that he could be the starting center forward for an English team that qualifies for the Champions League.

Nicolas Jackson’s shots in the 2022-23 La Liga season, sized by expected goal value TruMedia

The same is true of Romeo Lavia. Interest from Liverpool and Chelsea in the midfielder, coupled with Manchester City’s placing of a buyback clause in their agreement to sell him to Southampton, suggests some degree of consensus within the top levels of the game that the Belgian is going to be a good player. The reality of his sole season in the Premier League so far is that he isn’t a good player yet, no great surprise for someone still in their teens but a warning sign for any club that has spent over £50 million on a player who will act as the primary backup to Caicedo and Fernandez. With the caveat that he was playing in one of the worst teams in the Premier League, Lavia ranked in the 35th percentile or lower among defensive midfielders in a string of key passing, carrying and creating metrics. Even a player who improves significantly from what he was in 2022-23 has a fair way to go before he is of a Champions League level.

The fear would be that Lavia and indeed several others among the expensive bets on potential don’t pay out. After all, look around this squad and there are still holes aplenty to be poked in it. With Kepa Arrizabalaga bound for Real Madrid, the only goalkeeper on the books is £25 million Robert Sanchez, who lost his place at Brighton last season to Jason Steele. If Jackson doesn’t hit then Armando Broja is the only other striker on the books who seems intent on playing for Chelsea even if there is no exit in sight for Romelu Lukaku. The attack as a whole does not seem primed to deliver the 70-plus goals that is generally required for a top-four finish. A year or two more with sedate progress and that would be when you start to poke around in the finances a bit more.

Chelsea might have shifted down a gear in terms of the wages they pay, thanks in no small part to the intervention of Saudi Arabian clubs, but a Stamford Bridge salary packet still eclipses that on offer across most of Europe. A player such as Madueke might be on one of the more cut-price deals in west London but the £50,000 a week he takes home would put him among the top earners at some Bundesliga clubs. That is no less true of Benoit Badiashile, reported to be on £90,000 a week. For a starter in a big six Premier League side, that is a decent salary package — though best of luck locking that sort of salary in for long if anyone starts to outplay it — but Chelsea don’t need to look far to see the downside risk, still exemplified in Malang Sarr, a center back who might still have age on his side but who few potential suitors could afford to take on a long term deal.  

Longer deals might make it theoretically easier to weather the storms of the transfer market but the risks inherent in any contract are only amplified if you’re committed to a player for most of their 20s. What if the worst transpires with Wesley Fofana, who has been battling injuries throughout recent years? He has six years left to run on a contract worth a reported £200,000 a week. What about if Mudryk never allies his searing pace with the technique required for the Premier League? It is far from a given that Chelsea have got their assessments right with any great frequency.

Nor can it be taken for granted that management will wait to find out. Impatience is hardwired into Stamford Bridge. The Boehly-led consortium might have taken over a year ago preaching a new age of patience. They then sacked two managers, the latter of whom was the project guy to develop talent over several years. Pochettino is another coach who has relished building a young squad but until we see these owners show patience in any way, it is hard to assume that they will simply accept this group topping out at somewhere around sixth with room to grow over the years ahead of them.

Every question raised above dissipates in a moment if Chelsea have got the biggest thing right. If their talent identification is exemplary then boxing themselves into long contracts is no bad thing. For now, however, fans have to take them on trust rather than results, hoping there’s more Fernandezes than Mudryks in the recent crop of recruits.