Frantic days lie ahead for Chelsea co-sporting directors Laurence Stewart and Paul Winstanley — who enjoyed some temporary respite as they took in Sunday’s 6-2 win over Wolves at Molineux alongside co-owner Behdad Eghbali — in the final week of the transfer window.
As he was keen to point out in a press conference at Cobham on Wednesday, head coach Enzo Maresca is not working with more than 40 players. His training group for the first leg of Chelsea’s Europa Conference League qualifying tie against Servette numbered 24 including goalkeepers, minus the injured Reece James, rested centre-back Wesley Fofana or new signing Joao Felix.
“The other 15-20 are training apart,” Maresca said. “I don’t see them. It is not a mess that it looks like from outside.”
Whatever your personal threshold for “a mess”, having an entire match-day squad-sized group training apart with no prospect of playing first-team football for Chelsea is not a viable situation beyond the August 30 transfer deadline.
A number of sales and loans have been finalised since The Athletic provided an update on a remarkable 53 players on Chelsea’s books, headlined by Conor Gallagher completing a protracted €42million (£35.8m, $54.7m) move to Atletico Madrid. The group of exiles is smaller than it was a week ago, but there is much more work to do.
Here, in no particular order, is a (by no means comprehensive) list of players who still need permanent or temporary new homes: Romelu Lukaku, Kepa Arrizabalaga, Ben Chilwell, Raheem Sterling, Trevoh Chalobah, Djordje Petrovic, Carney Chukwuemeka, David Datro Fofana, Armando Broja (provided his loan move to Ipswich Town cannot be revived), Angelo Gabriel, Deivid Washington, Alex Matos, Harvey Vale and Lukas Bergstrom.
Kepa spent last season on loan at Real Madrid and could be heading to Bournemouth (Juan Manuel Serrano Arce/Getty Images)
Some have taken to calling it a ‘bomb squad’. Rival clubs are more likely to look at it and see a bargain bin. By signalling so clearly that some of the players listed above are not in Maresca’s plans, Chelsea have put themselves in a position where they must force the action in a market in which the motivated sellers have outnumbered the keen buyers.
Unless they can generate specific negotiating leverage or an auction among bidders, Chelsea will find it difficult to garner worthwhile offers for the players they want to sell this week — and while brinkmanship has always been a feature of the transfer market, the fact that markets have been so slow to develop for many of the above players underlines the scale of the challenge they face.
Sterling would rather leave Chelsea permanently than on loan after being cast out of Maresca’s squad and losing his squad number to new signing Pedro Neto, but the financial obstacles to that are considerable. Two years into a five-year contract signed when he joined in a £47.5million deal with Manchester City, the 29-year-old’s remaining book value is £28.5million.
Chelsea will not want to (and may not be able to afford to) sell Sterling for an accounting loss, but who is going to pay that transfer fee while coming anywhere near his salary, which is significantly north of £300,000 per week? Even if he is prepared to take a large pay cut to leave, that sacrifice alone may not be enough to counteract the economic forces working against a straightforward solution.
Chelsea will seek to move Sterling on (Eddie Keogh/Getty Images)
Recouping more than Chilwell’s remaining book value, estimated by The Athletic to be £13.5million, looks more achievable. He is, however, another relative veteran at the higher end of Chelsea’s first-team salary scale and has missed 55 games due to knee and hamstring trouble in the last two seasons, having ruptured the anterior cruciate in his right knee in November 2021.
Chilwell, 27, remains a quality left-back when fit, capable of helping a team towards the top end of the Premier League. How willing are Chelsea to sell to a potential rival for Champions League qualification in 2024-25 if it means shedding his salary from the books?
Being a Cobham academy graduate, Chalobah’s transfer fee represents pure profit. But unless an auction develops in the final days of the window, they are not in position to demand the £25million they accepted from Nottingham Forest last summer, only for the player to turn down the move. The market for him has been quiet for much of the summer.
Then there are the young recent signings who find themselves potential sale candidates: Petrovic, Chukwuemeka, Datro Fofana, Angelo Gabriel and Washington. This is where the flip side of the amortisation trick that Clearlake Capital and Todd Boehly used to flatten out the cost of their transfer spending could further complicate sales.
Chukwuemeka was bought from Villa (Darren Walsh/Chelsea FC via Getty Images)
Spreading a player’s transfer fee over a period longer than five years does lower their annual cost in the accounts, but it reduces the rate at which their remaining book value decreases — meaning that if you want to sell them on early in their contract, the bar to clear to post an accounting profit is higher than it would be if they had signed a shorter deal.
Chukwuemeka, a £20million acquisition from Aston Villa in the summer of 2022 who signed a six-year contract (before the Premier League and UEFA passed rules to cap amortisation at five years regardless of contract length), is amortised at a rate of around £3.3million per year, meaning his remaining book value is approximately £13.4million.
If he had signed a more standard five-year deal, that book value would have reduced by £4million per year and sit at £12million.
In most cases, the difference is relatively subtle but every penny matters for Chelsea’s accounts. Using reported transfer fees, The Athletic has calculated the following book value estimates for the other four young sale candidates: £11.7million for Petrovic, £7.8million for Datro Fofana, £10.8million for Angelo Gabriel and £11.7million for Washington.
Petrovic and Datro Fofana established themselves as useful Premier League players in 2023-24, but it is notable that attractive bids have not yet materialised for either. Angelo Gabriel did not meaningfully increase his value during an unremarkable loan stint at BlueCo sister club Strasbourg, while Washington spent the vast majority of last season leading the line for Chelsea’s development squad.
Loan moves might be the best options for all four, but Chelsea are restricted in this regard; FIFA’s loan regulations, first introduced in July 2022, limit clubs to six international loans of players who are not aged 21 or younger and “club-trained” per season. Aaron Anselmino (Boca Juniors), Andrey Santos and Caleb Wiley (both Strasbourg) occupy three of these slots.
Lukaku and Kepa took up two slots in 2023-24, adding to the myriad reasons why Chelsea want them gone. Domestic loans sit outside these FIFA limits, which explains why Bournemouth’s loan interest in Kepa is being taken seriously. It would not be shocking if Petrovic and Datro Fofana got Premier League loan moves, but Championship loans for Angelo Gabriel and Deivid Washington might be optimistic given their lack of senior professional pedigree in Europe.
Chelsea will hope other clubs share their sense of urgency. They have demonstrated a capacity to be creative, so expect to see more negotiations around loan moves with obligations to buy, similar to the deal that took Lewis Hall to Newcastle in the summer of 2023.
Stewart and Winstanley cannot afford to leave any stones unturned. Chelsea need departures, but conditions are not favourable and the leverage is not with them — and most importantly of all, time is not their friend.
(Top photo: Chilwell is one of those available for transfer. Mike Zarrilli/Getty Images)
