Chelsea sporting administrators defend Boehly’s £1.2BN spend and contracts

Chelsea‘s sporting directors have staunchly defended the club’s eye-catching transfer and contracts policy, insisting it will help them ‘win trophies consistently’. 

The Blues have spent around £1.15billion on transfers but have only finished as high as sixth since the Todd Boehly-led consortium took over the club in May 2022.

One of their policies under sporting directors Paul Winstanley and Laurence Stewart has been their dishing out of long-term deals to often unproven stars, a strategy seen as risky. 

In August it emerged their players had a combined 191 years remaining on their contracts – almost double that of any other team. 

While fans might welcome that strategy for an elite talent like Cole Palmer – tied down until 2033 – it is often questioned for others. But Winstanley and Stewart stand firmly behind it, seeing it as a statement of faith in players they believe will develop.

Chelsea’s sporting directors Paul Winstanley (left) and Laurence Stewart (right) have defended the club’s exorbitant spending and policy of dishing out long-term contracts to players

The Blues have spent around £1.15billion since Todd Boehly took over back in May 2022 

Mykhailo Mudryk was given an eight-and-a-half year contract when he signed for £62million

‘The players, the talent and the value they have over the long term is really important to clubs. Really, it is the biggest nod towards the ability to identify talent,’ Stewart told The Telegraph.

‘This is a club that needs to be in the Champions League, it’s a club that needs to be competing to win trophies consistently and we want to do that with a certain way of playing football as well. So that absolutely is the ambition. 

‘And then the plan has been how do we go on a path to make that possible. And that’s been around investing in talent, committing to develop talent and developing a way of playing, the way we want our teams to play. 

‘Without forward thinking and progression, everyone will stand still. So it’s a clever concept the owners implemented in the beginning and what they believed in. Once we looked at it together in isolation, we were like “yeah, you can definitely see how this can work.” And we believe in it.’

There have been accusations that Chelsea implemented the strategy as a workaround against the Premier League’s Profit & Sustainability Rules. 

In order to comply with PSR, Premier League clubs cannot lose more than £105million over a three-year period.

By giving players extremely long-term deals, the Blues have been able to spread the cost of their transfer fees over the length of the contracts. Take Ukrainian winger Mykhailo Mudryk, for example. He signed on an eight-and-a-half year deal, meaning his £62million is amortised at £7.3m per year on the accounts submitted for PSR. 

In December last year, the Premier League cracked down on this slightly, banning clubs from amortising the transfer fees over more than five years. Winstanley points to Chelsea’s continuation of their policy since then as proof they were never motivated by circumventing PSR. 

Giving out long-term deals is a way of showing commitment to developing talent, says Stewart

Selling homegrown talents such as Conor Gallagher is ‘not’ simply a move to satisfy PSR

‘Well, you’re not getting any benefit from a PSR position on it anymore and we’ve still continued with it. So if it was just for PSR, we’d have stopped doing it. That was never at the forefront of the owners’ minds when we spoke to them about how we see it working, how we all see it working as a club.’

Over the summer, there was a strong reaction to selling Conor Gallagher to Atletico Madrid for £34m, also seen as an effort to satisfy PSR, as homegrown players’ sale fees can be banked as ‘pure profit’.

Winstanley told The Telegraph this was not the case as they had rejected a ‘significant offer’ for an academy product this summer. 

He added: ‘We’ve had two debuts this year. There’s three or four more players in behind who we think we can push through this year as well that we’re keen to do. It’s not just about PSR, it’s contractual statuses, it’s circumstances. The two players you referenced, there were contractual problems that we walked into. It’s really important for us to bring through players.’