An opinion piece in the London Times over the weekend lamented that the Premier League has fallen off the perch it has occupied for the last few seasons because of the “self-sabotage” of profit-and-sustainability rules.
The piece pointed out that excellent players such as Michael Olise and Julian Alvarez have gone to clubs in Germany and Spain, while the Premier League’s top incoming signing was arguably Niclas Füllkrug, the 31-year old Germany centre forward who has joined West Ham.
Meanwhile, Real Madrid have signed Kylian Mbappé, confirming their return to the top of world football’s food chain.
“Clubs here are just frozen in fear” of breaching the spending restrictions, the piece argued. “Richard Masters, the Premier League chief executive, braves it out publicly but if he is not concerned privately he is a complacent fool. This is now a depressed market in a competition that had nothing to be depressed about. We have caused our own depression.”
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The underlying logic appeared to be that big-money signings are the lifeblood of any club and any league. If you’re signing, you’re thriving; if you’re not signing, you’re dying.
In which case, the Premier League’s healthiest and most exciting club should be Chelsea, who have spent more money on players since the 2022 Clearlake takeover than any club has spent on players in any two-year period, ever.
Even the great Real Madrid must bow down in awe before the money power of Stamford Bridge’s masters of the universe.
Madrid’s biggest-ever season for transfers was 2019-20, when they spent €361 million on new players, including €183 million on Eden Hazard and Luka Jovic (two of the biggest flops in the history of the club).
But there’s no doubt which was Madrid’s most legendary year for transfers, and also proportionally their biggest once you take inflation into account. That was 2009, when Cristiano Ronaldo, Xabi Alonso, Karim Benzema and Kaka arrived for a combined outlay of €258.5 million. Madrid’s annual revenue at the time was €401m, a little under half of their current €831m, so let’s double that 2009 transfer expenditure to get a better sense of it in today’s prices: €517 million.
It took Clearlake Capital to expose the true puny proportions of Madrid’s supposed “galactico” spending.
The first season they owned Chelsea, they spent €630 million on new players. Madrid could never. The next season Clearlake spent €464 million, again, more than Madrid have spent on players in any year in their illustrious history. This season, with two weeks of the transfer window still remaining, Clearlake have already spent €189 million – four times as much as Madrid. Remarkably, Clearlake have even managed to already spend €52 million out of the 2025-26 season budget, on two 17-year old forwards: Estevão of Palmeiras and Kendry Paez.
The fans of Chelsea football club have therefore been blessed beyond measure. On Sunday evening we got to see this happiest of all clubs play its first game of the season.
The day’s drama started before Chelsea had even posted their teamsheet, with Raheem Sterling’s representatives publishing a statement on behalf of their player, who, it turned out, had failed to make the squad, demanding clarity as to the reasons for his exclusion.
Some clarity: Sterling is 29 and makes £15 million (€17.6 million) a year. He’s scored just 19 goals in 81 matches for Chelsea, and they have 42 other first-team players, 17 of whom are wingers and forwards like Sterling. It’s quite easy to work out why he was dropped and why the club might want him gone, though it is difficult to know who is going to take a player with £45 million left on his contract off Chelsea’s hands.
The teamsheet revealed that Enzo Fernandez had been named as captain. Chelsea’s captain, vice-captain and second vice-captain are Reece James, Ben Chilwell and Conor Gallagher. Chilwell and Gallagher have both been told to find new clubs, while James is serving a four-match ban for violent conduct. So Fernandez got the call.
In defence was Wesley Fofana, who last month accused Fernandez of “uninhibited racism” after the Argentinian posted a video of himself with international team-mates singing a racist anti-France song.
It was the first game for Chelsea’s new coach, Enzo Maresca, one of the many starry-eyed acolytes of Pep Guardiola who populate the ranks of upcoming coaches. Maresca’s teams play a kind of cargo-cult Pep-ball, which unsurprisingly proved no match for the real thing.
The Chelsea fans were already audibly seething at their side’s painfully slow build-up play – their defenders trying to bait City into a press they plainly had no interest in being baited into – by the time Erling Haaland rampaged through the middle to score City’s first goal.
A few minutes later the home fans were singing the name of Gallagher. The midfielder, who played more matches than any other Chelsea player last season, last week spent four days in a Madrid hotel while Chelsea tried and failed to sell him to Atletico Madrid. This, after all, is a club that cannot even negotiate a shirt sponsorship deal.
City, who had left out top players such as Rodri, John Stones, Phil Foden and Nathan Ake, were playing at about 60 per cent of capacity, but this was still too much for Chelsea, who struggled to create much and wasted what they did create. A team that plays as patiently and methodically as Maresca wants Chelsea to play needs a more clinical striker than Nicolas Jackson.
The new captain flitted at the edges of the game in a new number 10 role. Fernandez seems a strange choice as a 10 – he has vision and can hit a pass, but he’s also slow and seldom scores. He would surely be better as one of the deeper-lying midfielders, but Maresca may have felt that the combination of the efficient Romeo Lavia and the powerful Moises Caicedo offers the team more in that position.
There should at least be buyers for Fernandez next summer in Spain and Italy, though the fee will be less than the £105 million Chelsea paid for him in January 2023.
Five minutes from the end Mateo Kovacic – sold two years ago by Chelsea to make way for the Clearlake superstars – strolled past Caicedo and Fernandez and beat Robert Sanchez from 20 yards. Todd Boehly, attending a home game for the first time since March, abruptly rose and retreated to his box. Most of the rest of the Chelsea fans also got up and left. Ten minutes later, when the final whistle went, the stadium was already mostly empty.
The biggest-spending club in the world is also one of the most miserable. In fact, just spending a day in Chelsea’s company is almost enough to put you off football. Maybe, after all, there’s more to the game than signing players.
