London is Blue Dispatch #051

As one of many Chelsea fans that has little to no love for the Premier League as an organization (spineless on Man City’s severe rule flouting, rejecting Paramount+ as a Chelsea sponsor being two of a thousand reasons) I admit to taking much joy at their every embarrassment.

One thing Chelsea’s owners have consistently shown do know how to bend the rules to the point that those that designed the game ask themselves if they were correct in the first place. Take for example, amortization, a word Chelsea fans are quite familiar with by now. Had Enzo Fernandez been signed on a 4-year deal, his ~100m fee would have cost the club 25m over four years. Instead, they signed him on a 7+1 year deal. They did the same with Nicolas Jackson, Moises Caicedo, Romeo Lavia and more, until the Premier League themselves had to stop in and close the loophole.

The owners didn’t stop there, selling Chelsea’s hotel to themselves to circumvent profit and sustainability rules by exploiting another loophole. They key part of the equation here isn’t “exploiting another loophole” but that “the owners didn’t stop there.”

After Borussia Dortmund’s refusal to go above the £25m mark for Ian Maatsen, despite a £35m release clause inserted into his loan agreement, Chelsea sold the young Dutchman to Aston Villa for a staggering £37.5m – not just £12.5m more than Dortmund, but curiously £2.5m above the release clause. This sum reportedly, excludes add-ons which could take the deal to above £40m.

How did Chelsea manage that? The answer was revealed quite quickly. They moved to sign Villa’s Omari Kellyman for £19m. He was signed by Villa just over two years ago for a compensation fee around £600,000, paid to Derby County. In those two years, he has played 37 minutes for the first team. Chelsea paid more for Kellyman than they did for Brazil’s U20 Copa America winning captain and top scorer Andrey Santos, who was heavily linked with Barcelona. Something doesn’t add up.

But add up it does. Aston Villa and Chelsea have been widely reported to be close to running afoul of the Premier League’s notorious PSR guidelines this season. Villa’s over-inflated splurge on Maatsen will be spread over five years of Maatsen’s 6-year deal on their books (the new rule on amortization, brought into force after we exploited the old one to oblivion.) Chelsea receive £37.5m, all of which is reflected in this year’s accounts helping us significantly.

For paying £2.5m over the release clause, Villa get £19m that they can immediately register this year, for a player who, despite being very highly rated by manager Unai Emery, had virtually no suitors. Chelsea, of course, only suffer a “minor” hit of £3.8m a year on their books for signing Kellyman. Both clubs leave with players that fit their plans – Chelsea with an 18-year-old who was considered a prodigy at Derby and excelled at academy level, Villa with a player that did really well in the Champions League and will slot in to an asymmetrical system that affords the left fullback attacking freedom. Genius, yes?

Except it isn’t. What Villa and Chelsea did, shares some parallels with the infamous plusvalenze scandal that rocked Serie A recently. Plusvalenze, Italian for watermelon gelato, sorry, “capital gains,” involved Juventus being named in 42 dodgy player transfers in which the Italian club had “swapped” players with other clubs, vastly overinflating the value of players and essentially registering a healthy incoming cost on their books. The most prominent ones were swapping City’s Danilo for Joao Cancelo and Barcelona’s Arthur for Miralem Pjanic. Barca signed Pjanic for €60 million, and Juventus took Arthur for €72m.

Juventus, being a publicly traded company, was investigated by Italy’s regulatory body and were found guilty. They were docked an initial 15 points, and their entire board of directors, including chairman Andrea Agnelli resigned. The criminal case opened against Juventus was for “false accounting, market manipulation, obstructing inspectors and fraudulent financial statements,” according to The Guardian. Every club in football does number one. The prices we paid for Mudryk, Caicedo, Enzo and Willian Estevao of many, have almost certainly helped distort the market. The club is already under investigation for “financial irregularities” committed under the Abramovich era. Just because it is legal in England doesn’t make it right.

During the Plusvalenze investigation, one Juventus executive famously remarked – I feel like I’m selling my soul. And while our owners have been slick and wily in leaping through financial loopholes before they close behind them, the larger picture becomes hazier by the minute. Perhaps it is crystal clear for those who put together the vision for 2030, but to those it isn’t, it should be questioned, critiqued and appraised with a lot more apprehension.