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Chelsea have made an £8.2m profit on Edouard Mendy but Ruben Loftus-Cheek’s sale to Milan is bloody useless. We’ve looked at the profit/loss of the players sold in 2022/23 and the book values of those up for grabs before the June 30 deadline…
‘They’ve got to balance the books’ is common football parlance these days, usually used with very little knowledge of the financial situations of the actual clubs. Essentially we assume selling clubs are book-balancing clubs.
We don’t really know what’s going on. Financial reports take years to emerge, meaning we’re always behind the eight-ball and, in reality, only the club bean counters have a true picture of just how f***ed they are or otherwise.
We can guess though, and do. Currently, if you’re a Serie A club you’re frantically balancing books, as are most La Liga sides, with Barcelona chief among them. And we don’t require a financial expert to tell us that that the Chelsea accountants have a hefty workload right now.
The Blues have until June 30 to sell players and offset some of the ludicrous money spent in the 2022/23 season. Unfortunately for Chelsea, most of the major European leagues aren’t open for transfer business until the start of July, but fortunately for Chelsea, Saudi Arabia are, much to the consternation of their understandably sceptical rivals.
We don’t know how much Chelsea need to make before the deadline but it must be a fair whack given their apparent willingness to sell their best players to Premier League rivals. Anyway, the clock is ticking, and we’ve looked at how much they’ve made through player sales this season so far and what they could stand to gain through further departures.
The ‘book value’ of each player is their remaining amortised value. For example, Timo Werner joined Chelsea for £45m on a five-year contract and left after two years, meaning he had £27m of remaining amortised value. In order to record a profit through a player sale, clubs need to sell them for more than this remaining amortised value. So although buying Werner for £45m and selling him two years later for £25m sounds terrible, in the books it went down as just a £2m loss.
Most of the players listed are either fully amortised or, in the case of the Cobham graduates, cost nothing to acquire. Subsequently their book values are listed as ‘n/a’ and their sales would count as pure profit.
We start with the players already sold, or very nearly sold, pending medicals…
Ruben Loftus-Cheek
Book value: n/a
Sale price: £15m
Profit/loss: +£15m
He’s currently in Milan undergoing a medical. Everything’s agreed, and Chelsea’s second longest-serving player is on his way. Unfortunately it can’t technically be completed until July, so won’t be included in the 2022/23 numbers.
Edouard Mendy
Book value: £8.8m
Sale price: £17m
Profit/loss: +£8.2m
The Best Fifa men’s keeper for 2021 leaves the club just two years later having somehow fallen bellow Kepa Arrizabalaga in the pecking order. He’s off to Al-Ahli.
Cesar Azpilicueta
Book value: n/a
Sale price: £0m
Profit/loss: £0m
Asked to be released from his contract, which had a year left to run, and Mauricio Pochettino has agreed to let the club legend go to Inter for nothing.
Kai Havertz
Book value: £24.8m
Sale price: £65m
Profit/loss: +£40.2m
Bought for £71m in the summer of 2020 and sold for £6m short of that after a Champions League winning goal but relatively little else. He may well be brilliant for Arsenal, but this is a big FFP win.
Mateo Kovacic
Book value: £8m
Sale price: £25m
Profit/loss: +£17m
It feels like Manchester City have got a bit of a bargain for a player of his quality but needs must.
Kalidou Koulibaly
Book value: £24m
Sale price: £17m
Profit/loss: -£7m
Chelsea surely could have squeezed the Saudis for Koulibaly’s book value but his ridiculous wages of close to £300,000 per week may have been a sticking point and a good reason to get rid.
Hakim Ziyech
Source:365