I mean considering we can only register 3 new players for the CL and he has 4 in there, that's somewhat problematic. Also apparently no one will ever get injured again ever? The drop off between the first and second names listed there is enormous in most cases.
Chelsea 2022/2023 | THIS IS LAST YEARS THREAD YOU NUMPTIES
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Not being able to register all of those for the CL probably Steve.
Yeah. Like how many of that group actually get into our side for example? One of Enzo or Kovačić, sure, James if he can get fit. That's it though? It's not like we have a complete side but they've only got 2 players who would get into our 11, before looking at City/Liverpool/Arsenal. They've spent 600m and it's a top 4 challenge team at best, if they get the manager for it (which they currently don't have, or remains to be seen but early signs are quite bad).
I mean he's had a good start but Martinez over Silva already is
They now have over 30 players, good strategy in case 10 get injured you still have solid back-up.
What happens when 20 will get injured all at once?
What happens when 20 will get injured all at once?
Silva is class but is 37 and this season only (which is all that really counts for Silva), i'd say there is very little to split them? Martinez has been one of the top 4 CBs with Varane, Saliba and Silva. It's fair for any of those to not want to swap them for an equivalent level (with the benefit here of Martinez being left footed obviously so fits the system better than the others, and 24/25).I mean he's had a good start but Martinez over Silva already is
Todd has got his checkbook at the ready. Another 20 incoming in the summer.
Martinez has a good claim for centre back of the season thus far, in the top few at worst. It's notI mean he's had a good start but Martinez over Silva already is
worthy, really.What's stopping? If we could actually get that lineup fit (or even anything close to it) and available for a single game! That would be a start.
Seriously though, Clear Lake and Boehly either going to be geniuses and we'll take the football world by storm, or they'll be the poster boys for reckless spending and football's financial crisis.
Seriously though, Clear Lake and Boehly either going to be geniuses and we'll take the football world by storm, or they'll be the poster boys for reckless spending and football's financial crisis.
Who’s going to tell him that you can still only have 11 players on the pitch at one time. You don’t need 35 players to win the Champions League.
At this point I’d almost rather see Liverpool finish in the top four due to how hilarious it would be.
That's insane. Awkward moments at training today you'd imagine.
The crazy thing is, despite spending all this money they still don't have a very good goalkeeper, their best fullbacks are injury prone and I don't see many goals in this team either!
The team that FPL Steve put up is a top four team at best team, and in Potter its not like they have a world class manager that is going to take players up a level either?
The team that FPL Steve put up is a top four team at best team, and in Potter its not like they have a world class manager that is going to take players up a level either?
Felix, Mudryk and Enzo all played in the CL group stage for their previous clubs but the current rules don't prevent them from playing with us if we want to register them all. No such thing as cup tied anymore, hasn't been a thing since about 2018 or something like that.
When they changed the rules they ditched the cup tied thing but added the restriction that allows only three new additions mid-season.
When you see it all written down like that it makes the management and recruitment look even poorer. Still glaring weaknesses and not a team that can challenge for major honours. At least the selling clubs have done well out of Boehly.
Chelsea fans - is the plan to stick with the back five?
What's stopping them he says
PSG, City, Bayern and Napoli maybe?? Sure the depth is crazy but this first team isnt all that great. Maybe 3-4 years down the line if none of them flop.It's more how high I rate Silva.Martinez has a good claim for centre back of the season thus far, in the top few at worst. It's not
They don't have a plan and I'd bet Potter isn't even there next season
Lack of center forward.
They really did Ziyech and PSG dirty
Well, I’m fairness, Clearlake’s statement about the Premieire League and the sport in general said there SHOULD be that much money in the game …. things are just a wee few decades behind other sports in terms of monetization.
United will have new owners soon, and I’m sure there will be big money coming in to transform a few other clubs fairly soon.
Again, you guys see this as huge money, but compared to what they have to spend on baseball, as an example, it’s almost dirt cheap.
With the money spent, there’s absolutely no excuse for them not to win every trophy going for the forseeable. Anything less than League + CL next season will be a failure. They should be the dominant team in football for next five years minimum with this spend, it’s the most insane football has ever seen. Whole new era really, be fascinating to see where it all ends up.
What's interesting is that Clearlake's thesis about the business of football is actually not shared by very many other people right now.
Even in the PL, the only financially healthy league, the owners of United, Liverpool, Spurs, and Everton - four of the biggest club brands in the English game - are trying to sell whole or partial stakes. So far, the evidence is that there isn't exactly a horde of would-be buyers lining up either.
Lots of other people - including some very savvy investors like John Henry and Joe Lewis - seem to think that the low-hanging fruit has been picked over the last 10-15 years in terms of driving revenues and asset valuation and want to get out or reduce their stake. Boehly/Clearlake, on the other hand, think we're heading for a huge bonanza in which revenues and asset valuations of big clubs will double over the next 5-10 years.
Who is right? We will have to see.
For me, a big question is whether Boehly/Clearlake have really come to grips with the ways that the regulatory structure of football - at both national and European level - limits the revenue growth potential of clubs. They are used to sports where teams have huge control over their own revenue streams, including broadcast and digital, and where owners collectively call all the shots in terms of the league's financial strategy, with Commissioners just doing their bidding. But that's not how football works - you don't get to sell the rights to broadcast or stream your own games, you don't even get to indirectly control the negotiations over those rights. You can't get together with other owners, come up with strategies for growing the pie, and then give the Commissioner his marching orders to put those strategies into place. Instead, you hope that entities like the Premier League, the FA, and UEFA do smart things but in all of those situations you're actually outvoted by smaller clubs (or national associations) that have different interests and are very wary of you. An ownership group like FSG was bullish on football right up to the point where their gambits to wrest more control over revenue streams and the regulation of the game - in the form of both the Super League and Project Big Picture - failed. As soon as those initiatives blew up, they decided to get out.
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I DO feel really bad for him. But if they had interest in him and wanted someone other than the kit man to stay behind and see to the paperwork, they could have met us know if their interest sooner. We had more contact from Arsenal, who hate us.
And why did it take them 3 different times to tell us all the errors? Why couldn’t they send it back with all the tries highlighted once? Apparently they sent it 3 different times and they found a different issue each time.
I also looked into it and that LFP? Has made exceptions for similar clerical errors MANY times if the bulk of agreement was satisfied, and they just chose not to listen on the occasion that involves PSG and Chelsea? Not suspicious at all.
We get almost nothing out of loaning him. We were only supposed to be listening to purchase propositions. They agreed to make an exception just to make the player happy, and French officials wouldn’t help due to like 18 minutes … after telling us 3 different stories. I was pretty livid
I was pretty livid, and honestly thought they were doing it on purpose because they thought they were “getting” us somehow on something we needed for FFP… which they weren’t.
But, at the end of the day, PSG wouldn’t even consider a buy option (not obligation), so how much did they really want him and would he have played any more there than here. With the speed of some of our people running in behind, James back on the pitch to cover defensively, and Enzo’s ability to find long diagonals to players like Enzo … I don’t see why he couldn’t be a factor for the run in to summer.
I hope they give him an opportunity to showcase considering the circumstances. We still lack creativity up top on the right.
When people still mention Boehly in relation to the market it's the give away that they're simply not paying attention and are just plumping for the party narratives.
Even the slightest bit of research will tell you it's been Eghbali and the new recruitment team as the main drivers in the window just gone.
They have spent an unbelievable amount but I am not sure their squad is that amazing still. Who is their main goalscorer?
But they still have significant weaknesses. Felix is only on loan and isn't a great goalscorer. Mendy seems to have lost form and Kepa has weaknesses. James, Chilwell and Fofana are all injured so they don't look strong at the back.
Tbh you make good points. It's not just Chelsea, PSG were very amateurish in their decision making. Ziyech wanted to leave a while ago. I feel bad for him, at his age, he should be playing regularly
That's not how football works.
Don't know much about baseball but a quick google search says baseball teams make around 300m$ in revenue on average. So it's impossible that this kind of spending is taking place there.
I'd love for the new United owners to invest obviously, but I want it to also make sense to avoid impacting the future of the club. In the past 10 years we've had a lot of players that didn't contribute much and we've always found it very hard to sell due to their high wages, and based on that I don't want the club to commit to these crazy long contracts even for top players. Another thing is that in football as we've seen through the years, record signings tend to flop more than succeed for whatever reason. Imo there's a bit if impatience surrounding Chelsea and it could be harmful even if the money is there. If the new United owners commit to spending 600m over the next 3 years I'd feel much better about it more than spending 600m in one season.
Boehly is still responsible overall though, no? Does he not get a say at all now, or final say on outgoing spending? Why was Ziyech contacting him directly to try and get his deal through otherwise?
And to be fair, I don't know as much about Chelsea's workings as United's (mainly why I spend so much time in Chelsea threads to try and get a bit of a grip on what I consider to be madness). Do you think the plan is to stay with playing a back five, or moving to a different system?
I think it's likely a 4. Although that said in the short term atleast I think 3/5 is the best formation when James and Chilwell are fit.
When they bought the club, they said they wanted to invest an additional 1.75 billion on players and the stadium over 10 years. The stadium renovation itself is going to cost at least a billion so unless they have decided to invest more than originally promised its seems unlikely they are going to keep spending 700m per year on new players.
I'm sure they will keep spending but I doubt its at nearly the same level.
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Part of me (probably masochist related) would like for you to continue piling players and throwing insane money. Football has already gonna shit, so why not. You can have a " Squid Game" kind of training where you pick your first 11 before the match.
They expect the club be worth £9-10b in the next decade? Wow, no wonder they are treating it like an adult disneyland
But then compared to the guaranteed revenues in Baseball, soccer is much less guaranteed no?
They have set a benchmark. Every club will want crazy money from them now ................ at least I hope so.
I’m not sure this is accurate. Players like Bellingham were already valued at £100 million by their club. Good players were already valued at £50-60+million. Nothing has changed. The market is massively inflated for everyone and signings like Antony and Darwin Nunez have equally caused problems for others.
Yes - also the biggest difference is that baseball teams can negotiate broadcasting deals individually with local markets on top of the shared pool for nationally broadcasted games, which is by far the biggest source of income for smart teams in large markets.
The Dodgers for instance signed a 25 year, $8.35 billion deal that covers the 2013-2038 seasons. Chelsea obviously don't have that option as broadcasting rights are negotiated collectively.
Yes, but Clearlake’s ability to control alternate revenue streams is different and much more comprehensive than Fenways. Fenway is a “moneyball” organization based off the ideology of Billie Beane; use analytics to avoid spending huge amounts of money.
Clearlake will have looked specifically at what the technical margins of merchandising, digital rights, and things like that are. You don’t have to broadcast games to create content, for instance.
The two primary differences with Fenway and Clearlake are:
1. Clearlake only has to create FFP compliance. They HAVE the money already. They do not mind losing 500m or so a year or more on a development project … much less breaking even. Fenway makes their money through sports, and are downright paupers by comparison.
2. And the people on here completely laughed at me when I said this in Summer: Clearlake will aim to raise the financial profile of the entire league and have the means and connections to do so. Clearlake is the pool of sporting investment. There are completely different investment funds, controlled by the same players, that control the entities paying out things like broadcast rights. The modern economy is SO much different. PL fans keep harping on TV deals, game day sales, jersey sales, jersey sponsors… like it’s written in stone those are the only ways to make money. And I keep pointing out two guys on YouTube make twice as much per year as a United’s teamviewer deal just making videos of themselves playing a kids game.
I could create an extremely cool looking Chelsea blue lion as “buy only” pet in adopt me and make more than a shirt sponsor deal in a month if it’s a top 3 pet for that period.
This is literally just spitballing, but where there is creativity and resources there is a way.
Clearlake doesn’t have to beg entities to create these avenues, through various other funds and entities they own or control most of them. They control everything from Rolling Stone, to Fortnite, to TV channels.
Worth reiterating: Clearlake is just the money grouped together for sports, and those teams will provide marquee IP platforms from which all the IF’s can create many different revenue options, which can then be shared back in to the teams as needed, all while growing the long term value of the vehicle itself.
Until the Chelsea purchase, the insanely quoted “values” of many of these teams was purely hypothetical, and driven more by the following and passion and the “could be” than the reality of what teams actually bring in.
The PL’s broadcast rights contract is like 5b domestic, and maybe 13b total? The NFLs recent broadcast rights package was 110b … There is just a drastic chasm, but the demand is there, and the whole league is a desperately undervalued asset.
It gets a lot more complicated than that, especially when you get into the misguided attempts to create this artificially with the Superleague : where you had the owners of the two most important English teams being relatively poor and greedy, combined with the belief that certain “historic” teams, needing to be saved from their dying leagues, had to be included for real growth to happen. But none of that is necessarily true. The PL can make many of those leaps on its own. The other leagues need to get out of their own way, and are laying in beds they made over the last 4 decades. Big money doesn’t want to go to places like La Liga for a reason.
But, to take your team and the whole league to a new level you need an additional aspect which Eghbali covered in his Q and A: you need to be a winning flagship of the brand; multiple recent titles going into negotiations, yearly threat for European glory, etc.
They think, invest, and plan in terms of 7, 15, and 25 year periods.
Doing whatever necessary to create the elite team and structure they want is just the first phase, 7 year period of that plan.
Fenway and the Glazers don’t have financial ability to think and plan on that scale on European football. They wanted faster turn arounds and results to fund the things they care more about. Clearlake doesn’t look at it that way. And worth pointing out …. Again…. many of the main financial players in Clearlake are European, not American.
For whatever it’s worth, for Arsenal fans, the younger Kroenke (the one with more access to Walton money than his hanger-on dad) is very on board for this economic vision for the PL.
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