Todd Boehly is either a genius or a gambler when it comes to his relatively short period of ownership of Chelsea.
The club has now spent £600million in the two transfer windows since Boehly took over in May 2022 and that excludes the estimated £22m they paid to Brighton for compensation when installing Graham Potter and his backroom team as coaching staff.
Part of the reason why Chelsea have been able to achieve this is by amortisation method on player transfers which, as previously discussed in Sportsmail, spreads the cost of a transfer over the contract length.
Therefore although Enzo Fernandez cost a £107.6million transfer fee in moving from Benfica, Chelsea in their accounts will only show an annual cost of £12.6m (£107.6m divided by 8.5).
If Fernandez is as good as Chelsea believe the 2022 World Cup young player of the tournament to be, then the total cost – which will be included in their income statement until 30 June 2031, when his contract expires – will seem to be a bargain.
Chelsea, under owner Todd Boehly (right), splashed out £323m in the January transfer window
Chelsea paid a British record-£107m for Benfica’s Argentina World Cup winner Enzo Fernandez
The Argentine played an integral part for his country as they defeated France in the Qatar final
He has signed a mammoth eight-and-a-half year deal which aids Chelsea’s amortisation issues
The club has spent £600m in the two transfer windows since Boehly took over in May 2022
Furthermore, if Fernandez improves and catches the eye of big clubs such as Real Madrid in future years, Chelsea will have a player with many years left on his contract. They then will be able to extract maximum value from selling the player for a large fee.
Had Fernandez only signed a three or four year contract then they may have had to accept a discount as player values tend to tumble as they move closer and closer to their contract expiry date when they can leave for nothing on a Bosman deal.
Chelsea’s amortisation charges have grown over the last decade from £59m to £163million. They were already the highest in the Premier League at £163m before Boehly arrived.
The gap between Chelsea and the rest of the Premier League is likely to grow, but spending £600m in 2022-23 on an average of six-year deals will result in an annual £100m amortisation cost, whereas if the deals had only been for four years it would have been £150m.
While all the focus has been on Chelsea…