For a while now, and to our enormous surprise, we’ve found ourselves coming round to the idea that Chelsea’s transfer model is actually good.
But what’s key is how, precisely, we frame ‘good’. Good for the game? For players? For competitiveness within and across leagues and countries? Oh, dear me no. For all those things it is absolutely dreadful.
But for Chelsea? And as a model in the specific transfer market and football economy that we have today? It is absolutely good.
What you have to do with Chelsea is to stop viewing them as a football club altogether. It’s a stretch to say the football is incidental, but only a stretch rather than an absurdity.
Chelsea obviously aren’t alone in placing significance on the future value of an asset (or ‘footballer’ as they used to be called) but are the only club where this at times appears to be the only significance. Or certainly the primary one.
Everyone else is trying – some not as hard as others, looking at you, Aston Villa – to be financially responsible but the obvious primary goal is to build a successful, coherent and functional squad of football players to play actual football matches with an acceptable degree of success.
That’s not really the model Chelsea are now pursuing. They will have good teams and good squads and the ensuing on-field success, such as claiming Trump-tainted Club World Cups and such, but that feels more and more like a by-product of the primary business. Which is player trading.
What Clearlake have done is taken what was the necessary evil of player trading and made it the core business. And it’s worth noting that all they’ve actually done is to just go further along a path Roman Abramovich had already started down.
Chelsea now acquire players the way other businesses acquire assets. They might be useful to the side-hustle of trying to win football matches, they might not. It’s almost stopped mattering – to the business, if not the fans.
The long contracts Chelsea tie their players down to are something we were all guilty of misunderstanding in the early stages. They weren’t just a ruse to help with amortisation but that would ultimately stitch them up down the line; they were key to the whole caper.
If you’re signing players as tradeable assets, it’s no use if they’re just going to be available for free four years later.
Sure, you’re going to run into problems with this approach from time to time and end up paying Raheem Sterling £300k a week to train with the youth team, but in the main what Chelsea are doing is protecting the resale value of every player they sign.
It’s already visible on the balance sheet. The absurd front-end outlays and selling-hotels-to-themselves machinations of the early windows have gone. They have broken even this summer despite another vast outlay running into the hundreds of millions.
They’ll take a loss here and there, but they make a profit in the round, and every now and then accidentally sign a Cole Palmer who turns out to be a generational talent, so that’s nice.
It’s also why blasting players for perceived lack of loyalty is only becoming more and more futile. You can shake your head sadly at Viktor Gyokeres or Alexander Isak doing what they did to ‘get their move’ but Gyokeres was entirely right to point out that this is a two-way street and clubs show no loyalty of their own to players they no longer want.
It’s not a pleasant reality, but this is 2025. We don’t do pleasant realities any more.
Chelsea’s multi-club structure helps provide further space to accommodate all the players they acquire, and potential shop windows via loans. And Chelsea know the reality of football right now and the sheer scale of the Premier League’s financial heft means there will (almost) always be takers when it’s deemed time to cash in.
We’re already at a stage where even Bayern Munich aren’t above rummaging around in Chelsea’s garbage and handing over eye-watering sums for the privilege.
It’s not the transfer model football needs, but it is the transfer model football deserves. One where players are treated not like athletes or even human beings but simply another commodity to be bought and sold.
