Louise walked into the newsroom with her notebook open at the tab marked « numbers that are beyond me ». She had copied out the list: €2.07bn spent on incoming transfers at Chelsea in four years, a net loss of €698m across 2022-2026, and two trophies, the Conference League and the 2025 Club World Cup.
First she wanted to check she had read it properly. Enzo Fernandez, €121m from Benfica, sold to Manchester City for €145m last summer, which makes him the club’s biggest ever sale. Moisés Caicedo, €116m from Brighton. Roméo Lavia, €62m from Southampton. Morgan Rogers, €138m this summer from Aston Villa, the record of the Boehly era. And Romelu Lukaku to Napoli for €30m, a line she circled because she had to go back up two pages to find a plus sign.
Silly question, but we spend €2.07bn, we get less back, and the word everyone uses is « investment ». Basketball has that too, I looked, except there they tell you how long it runs for. Here I’m told « long term ». Long how?
Then she counted the managers. Nine since May 2022: Thomas Tuchel, Graham Potter, Bruno Saltor, Frank Lampard, Mauricio Pochettino, Enzo Maresca, Calum McFarlane, Liam Rosenior and Xabi Alonso. She counted again, she still gets nine, and two different people explained that some of them « don’t really count ». She asked which ones. She got two different answers.
The last item in her notebook is about contracts. To stay inside the financial fair play limits, Chelsea stretched the deals out, up to eight years for Mykhaïlo Mudryk.
So you spread the fee over eight years to make it fit the rules. I checked, it’s allowed, nobody hid it from me. It’s still the only job where you sign for longer than the lease on my student flat. Anyway, I still have a lot to learn.
The 124 arrivals and 132 departures of the Boehly era take up three pages of her notebook.
It’s true, we checked: RTBF Sport.
