Chelsea found a little loophole in UEFA’s FFP regulations which allowed them a little wiggle room, but it looks as though that’s to be closed very quickly.
UEFA’s confirmation that they are to close the loophole over contract lengths which clubs – and one in particular in this last six months or so – have been exploiting to stockpile players while flying under the radar of current Financial Fair Play regulations, seems to have caught a lot of people off guard.
It’s not surprising to find that Todd Boehly of all people was the most ruthless in exploiting it. The ‘blue sky thinking’ promised when his consortium took over the club at the end of May has already stretched in radical directions.
To be absolutely clear, there is no ‘blame’ to apportion to Chelsea. In the last seven months, Mykhaylo Mudryk has signed an eight-and-a-half-year contract with Chelsea, while Benoit Badiashile and David Datro Fofana both signed for six-and-a-half years, Noni Madueke for seven and a half, Wesley Fofana for seven, Marc Cucurella for six and Raheem Sterling for five.
This is all fine within UEFA rules (indeed, this is effectively accepted in the fact that they’ve already confirmed that they won’t be retroactively applying the upcoming changes), but it does have one not-insignificant side-effect that is very beneficial to a club that wishes to spend a lot of money in the transfer market.
Signing players on these very lengthy contracts enables Chelsea to spread the cost of a player’s transfer fee over the length of their contracts when submitting their annual accounts, and these are the figures that feed into FFP calculations. Spreading the payment over longer frees up more money that can be spent on new players without breaking those rules, and that is the loophole that UEFA is set to close, with UEFA putting a five-year limit on player contracts.
Although apparently prompted by the transfer activity of this one particular club, and coming on top of a two-transfer window ban awarded against them in February 2019, this is no ‘vendetta’ against Chelsea on the part of UEFA. Firstly, the 2019 ban came about from FIFA rather than them. Indeed, FIFA regulations already state that contracts should be a maximum of five years unless a country’s law says they can be longer. And secondly, there are good and solid concerns that these long-term contracts aren’t necessarily such a good thing for anybody involved.
It is certainly…
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