Chelsea is more attractive now for sure, will they be in 12 months i am not so sure.
Where on gods green earth are they getting all this cash from?
they have spent circa £180 mill so far and are thinking of spending another £140/160 on FdJ and Fofana all i'd ask for is how and how will they pass FFP unless they are spending now and wont for 2 windows or so, i just cant see how the numbers work for them spending £290 mill net as it stands if they FdJ and Fofana too
How much you spend in “fees” in a window is irrelevant. We have offloaded and offset a lot of deadweight in salary, and are working on more, but the real key is that FPP is a three year average, and if you structure the money as a loan to yourself you can manipulate how it appears on the books however you want. If you have to borrow the money from someone else this changes. But our owners ARE the bank. They are contemporaries of the group buying Barcas rights. If Roman tried to expand Stamford bridge he would have had to setup a holding company to borrow the money from a major bank. He was worth billions, but he didn’t just have all that money at his disposal.
When Clearlake started their Stamford Bridge program last month they “borrowed” money from themselves, purely for accounting and tax reasons associated with capital asset investment. They had the straight cash right on hand.
This gives them the ability to do things even other super rich owners cannot. They won’t see it in terms of windows, they will look at it as value versus future markets and options. If you think inflation and scarcity of talent is only going to drive up the cost, then spend more now, and save money by doing so. 160 combined for Fofana and De Jong could seem like a steal by this time next year.You guys see it as a a ton of money spent, Boehly and Clearlake could see it as an opportunity.
“Billionaire” owners like the Glazers can’t do this the same way. Even Roman couldn’t do this with the same freedom, because while they may be worth that much, most of it is tied up in assets. They may have very little available funds, especially coming out of Covid.
The only real equivalent is the state funded teams. They can form businesses just to give their team added resources.