A London Times commentary over the weekend lamented that the Premier League had fallen from its top spot of recent seasons due to the “self-sabotage” of its profit and sustainability rules.
The article pointed out that outstanding players such as Michael Olise and Julian Alvarez have moved to clubs in Germany and Spain, while the Premier League’s top signing was arguably Niclas Füllkrug, the 31-year-old German centre-forward who has moved to West Ham.
Meanwhile, Real Madrid has signed Kylian Mbappé, confirming his return to the top of the world football food chain.
“Clubs here are simply paralysed by fear” of exceeding spending limits, the article said. “Richard Masters, the Premier League chief executive, defies in public but if he is not worried in private he is a complacent fool. This is now a depressed market in a competition that had no reason to be depressed. We have created our own depression.”
The underlying logic seemed to be that high-profile signings are the lifeblood of every club and every league. Those who sign thrive, those who don’t, die.
If that happens, Chelsea may be the healthiest and most exciting club in the Premier League, having spent more money on players since Clearlake took over in 2022 than any other club has ever spent on players in a two-year period.
Even the great Real Madrid has to bow in awe before the financial power of the “Lords of the Universe” at Stamford Bridge.
Madrid’s peak transfer season was the 2019/20 season, when €361 million was spent on new players, including €183 million on Eden Hazard and Luka Jovic (two of the biggest flops in the club’s history).
There is no doubt, however, which was Madrid’s most legendary transfer year, and also its biggest proportionally when inflation is taken into account. That was 2009, when Cristiano Ronaldo, Xabi Alonso, Karim Benzema and Kaka arrived for a total outlay of €258.5 million. Madrid’s annual revenues then were €401 million, just under half of the current €831 million. So let’s double the 2009 transfer spend to get a better sense of how much it is in today’s prices: €517 million.
Only Clearlake Capital was able to reveal the true, paltry extent of Madrid’s alleged “Galactico” spending.
In the first season they owned Chelsea, they spent €630 million on new players. Madrid never could. The next season, Clearlake spent €464 million, again more than Madrid has spent on players in any year in its illustrious history. This season, two weeks before the end of the transfer window, Clearlake has already spent €189 million – four times more than Madrid. Remarkably, Clearlake has even managed to spend €52 million from the 2025-26 season budget on two 17-year-old strikers: Estevão from Palmeiras and Kendry Paez.
So the fans of Chelsea football club were blessed beyond measure. On Sunday evening we were able to see the luckiest of all clubs play their first game of the season.
The day’s drama began even before Chelsea had released their team line-up, as Raheem Sterling’s representatives released a statement on behalf of their player, who, as it turned out, had not made the team, demanding clarity on the reasons for his exclusion.
To clarify, Sterling is 29 and earns £15 million (€17.6 million) a year. He has scored just 19 goals in 81 games for Chelsea, and they have 42 other players in the first team, 17 of whom are wingers and strikers like Sterling. It’s pretty easy to understand why he was left out of the squad and why the club might want to get rid of him, but it’s hard to say who will take a player from Chelsea who is still worth £45 million on his contract.
The team line-up revealed that Enzo Fernandez was named captain. Chelsea’s captain, vice-captain and second vice-captain are Reece James, Ben Chilwell and Conor Gallagher. Chilwell and Gallagher were both ordered to find new clubs while James is serving a four-match ban for violent conduct. So Fernandez was named.
Coming to the defence was Wesley Fofana, who accused Fernandez of “unbridled racism” last month after the Argentine posted a video of himself and his national team-mates singing a racist, anti-French song.
It was the first game for Chelsea’s new manager, Enzo Maresca, one of the many dreamy acolytes of Pep Guardiola who fill the ranks of incoming managers. Maresca’s teams play a kind of cargo-cult Pep-ball that, unsurprisingly, couldn’t hold a candle to the real game.
Chelsea fans were already audibly angry at their team’s painfully slow build-up play – their defenders trying to pressure City into a situation they clearly had no interest in – when Erling Haaland burst through the middle and scored City’s first goal.
A few minutes later, the home fans were chanting Gallagher’s name. The midfielder, who played more games than any other Chelsea player last season, spent four days in a Madrid hotel last week while Chelsea tried unsuccessfully to sell him to Atletico Madrid – after all, this is a club that can’t even negotiate a shirt sponsorship deal.
City, without top players such as Rodri, John Stones, Phil Foden and Nathan Ake, played at around 60 percent of capacity, but that was still too much for Chelsea, who struggled to create much and wasted what they did create. A team that plays as patiently and methodically as Maresca demands Chelsea do needs a more determined striker than Nicolas Jackson.
The new captain scurried around the fringes of the play in the new number 10 role. Fernandez seems an odd choice as a number 10 – he has vision and can play a pass, but he is also slow and rarely scores goals. He would certainly be better as one of the deeper-lying midfielders, but Maresca perhaps felt that the combination of the efficient Romeo Lavia and the powerful Moises Caicedo offered the team more in that position.
There are likely to be buyers for Fernandez next summer, at least in Spain and Italy, although the transfer fee will be less than the £105 million Chelsea paid for him in January 2023.
With five minutes left, Mateo Kovacic – sold by Chelsea two years ago to make way for Clearlake’s superstars – strolled past Caicedo and Fernandez and beat Robert Sanchez from 20 yards. Todd Boehly, attending a home game for the first time since March, abruptly stood up and retreated to his box. Most of the other Chelsea fans also stood up and left the stadium. Ten minutes later, when the final whistle sounded, the stadium was already almost empty.
The world’s highest-spending club is also one of the poorest. In fact, spending a day in Chelsea’s company is almost enough to spoil one’s appetite for football. Perhaps there is more to this game than just signing players after all.
