SOCCER:WHEN MICHEL Platini unveiled his financial fair play agenda he held up the Chelsea owner, Roman Abramovich, as its unlikely standard bearer. The Uefa president claimed club benefactors had pleaded with him to find ways to control rampant wage inflation and stem spiralling losses.
And yet the publicity-shy Russian has gone on another spree. First there was the €5.6m compensation for Carlo Ancelotti. Then there was the €15m due to Porto to trigger the release clause for the new 33-year-old manager, Andres Villas-Boas. That took the amount spent on hiring and compensating managers and coaching staff alone to an estimated €77m since Abramovich bought Chelsea in 2003. During that time he has pumped €830m into the club.
Now back-page headlines scream of huge fees for Tottenham Hotspur’s Luka Modric, Anderlecht’s Romelu Lukaku, Porto’s Radamel Falcao, the Ajax right-back Gregory van der Wiel and the Santos striker Neymar.
Chelsea insiders say nothing has changed and that any signings must fit into an overall strategy that still has breaking even as its target. But outsiders could be forgiven for wondering how on earth they plan to get there.
The high-wire act that the club with the highest wage bill in the Premier League at €195m, running at 82 per cent of revenue, has to pull off is far from easy. It must try to get that wage bill down while overhauling an ageing squad, bringing down pre-tax losses that stood at €87.5m and considering the imminent arrival of FFP.
With a maximum squad size of 25 and Chelsea’s need to bring average age and salaries down, expect as many departures as arrivals. Many of the players the club will seek to move on will not attract big fees. Yuri Zhirkov, Jose Boswinga, Salomon Kalou, Mikel John Obi, Paulo Ferreira and Alex could fall into that camp.
Up to five senior players are expected to leave plus the sale of other fringe players. Then there is the cadre of established players that have been at the heart of Chelsea’s success but will represent Villas-Boas’ first big call. How he handles John Terry, Frank Lampard, Didier Drogba and Michael Essien could well set the tone for his tenure. If two new strikers arrive, it could be the end for Drogba while Essien was a shadow of his self for much of last season.
Of those in the first group the key from a FFP point of view is getting them off the wage bill. Chelsea then hope to attract younger players – whose fees, even if high, can be amortised over long contracts – on lower salaries than those they replaced.
The holy grail is to mix them with some promising youngsters from the academy and a sprinkling of superstars in the Fernando Torres mould. It is not an original model but for Chelsea the need is more pressing, because its losses and wages are higher and the potential for increasing matchday income is lower.
If – and it is a big if, given the owner’s craving for instant success and swashbuckling football – Villas-Boas can deliver on the pitch, while also balancing all of those competing financial demands, the €15m it has taken to bring him back to Stamford Bridge will represent Abramovich’s best investment yet.
* GuardianService
