Chelsea are in danger of breaking UEFA’s financial fair play rules if the club miss out on Champions League qualification this season.
Chelsea dominated the headlines during the January transfer window as the west Londoners spent big on eight new additions, including the £88.5m capture of Mykhaylo Mudryk from Shakhtar Donetsk and the £106.8m British transfer record deal for Benfica’s Enzo Fernandez.
Todd Boehly has now invested more than £500m since last summer, with Chelsea’s individual spend last month more than the rest of Europe’s other top five leagues combined.
Chelsea have been placed on the watchlist of UEFA’s financial watchdog and, according to the Times, are in danger of breaching regulations if the club fail to reach the Champions League. Graham Potter’s side are tenth in the Premier League and ten points adrift of the top four.
Chelsea are expected to be big sellers during the summer window, with a number of big names set to depart the club as the Blues look to bring down an inflated wage bill and squad. Hakim Ziyech is expected to move on after seeing a January move to PSG collapse, while the club will also listen to offers for several stars which include Romelu Lukaku, Christian Pulisic, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Kalidou Koulibaly.
Football finance analyst, Kieran Maguire, has suggested that Chelsea could look to make ‘pure profit’ with the sale of academy products Callum Hudson-Odoi, Conor Gallagher and Ruben Loftus-Cheek in a bid to balance the books.
“Chelsea’s wage bill in 2021 was £333 million and that was before the club had made an investment in a myriad of players on long-term contracts who are also presumably very well remunerated,” Maguire said.
“I think failure to qualify for the Champions League this season will mean that they will be very much on Uefa’s watchlist.
“The thing that is most likely to be able to dig Chelsea out is that they do have players who have come through the academy who count as a zero cost in FFP calculations who could be sold for significant sums.
“Selling the likes of Callum Hudson-Odoi, Conor Gallagher and Ruben Loftus-Cheek could generate close to £100 million between them. That would be pure profit under the new version of Uefa’s financial sustainability rules and this more than anything else could prove to be the saviour of Chelsea in the future.”
