Why are Chelsea spending so much money on young talent?
The main reasons why Chelsea are spending so much on young talent, even with the glaring holes in the first-team that haven't been filled.
Earlier this week, news came out in the Brazilian media claiming young midfielder Gabriel Moscardo to Chelsea was a done deal for around 25 million euros. That news ended up being premature and way off the mark but it sparked a wider debate in the Chelsea fanbase. Just what is the point of buying all these young players and what is the plan?
Since Boehly and Clearlake Capital purchased the club in May 2022, there seems to have been a never-ending cycle of young players being brought in for vast sums of money.
The young, non-first team (at the time of signing) players Chelsea have purchased so far are:
Gabriel Slonina - £9m
Cesare Casadei - £18m*
Carney Chukwuemeka - £18m
Jimmy-Jay Morgan - £3m
Alex Matos - Free Transfer
Angelo Gabriel - £13m
Andrey Santos - £12m
Diego Moreira - Free Transfer
Omari Hutchinson - Free Transfer
David Datro Fofana - £12m
Ishe Samuels-Smith - £4m
Deivid Washington - £20m
Lesley Ugochukwu - £25m
Kendry Paez - £17m*
*With potential add-ons.
That is £151m worth of talent and the club shows no signs of stopping these sorts of incomings.
It has frustrated fans to a degree to see such a huge amount of money spent on players who might never play for the club, especially with glaring holes in our first-team squad having not been addressed yet. There is an argument that some of the £151m could’ve been spent on someone like Victor Osimhen.
Of course, you get gems like Carney Chukwuemeka, Angelo Gabriel and Kendry Paez who end up joining the ranks as a result of this strategy, but some just cannot accept the huge expenditure.
The owners have done this for many reasons.
Firstly, the football club is a business and they are profit-seeking businessmen. They will see many of these players as an opportunity to profit which is understandable and is actually a very smart way to run a football club.
It’s a shame to have players coming into the club who you know will likely never wear the Chelsea shirt but I’d much rather see young players that we’ve bought flipped for profit than players who came through the ranks at Cobham.
Our main problem at the moment is how are we going to get these players’ stock to rise. Andrey Santos was signed for just over 10 million pounds and soon after went on to captain Brazil to the U20 South America Championship winning the Golden Boot from midfield which caused his market value to skyrocket.
That earned him a call-up to Brazil’s first team but now all that good work has been undone as we sent him on a daft loan. Who at Chelsea thought it was a good plan to send a young midfielder to a team like Nottingham Forest who have the most midfield options in world football?
His stock has now crashed and we’re going to recall him in January and be back to square one. Another loan that has failed is Diego Moreira to Lyon. He’s managed just 76 minutes for the Ligue 1 strugglers so far.
To put that into context, he’s played 45 minutes for Chelsea this season.
I’m all for flipping players for profit but the plan to get their name out there is not working. The loans have to be better tailored towards the players or they may become your Bakayoko’s or your Baba Rahman’s who come back every season and take up space before being loaned out again.
The second reason why I think the owners are stacking our squad with top young talent is the fact that I believe we’re going to receive a transfer ban at some point in the near future.
The owners have been transparent and have self-reported many of the ‘accounting inconsistencies’ from the Roman Abramovich era. Those are currently being investigated and although we’re not charged with anything at the minute, I do believe we will be punished.
Our transparency will hopefully mean we don’t face a points deduction but a transfer ban instead, and if that’s the case, to an extent I see the logic of filling the books with young talent.
The expansion of our multi-club model is the third and final reason why I believe we’re signing all of this top young talent. BlueCo owns nearly 100% of Strasbourg and the Ligue 1 side is the home to our most successful loanee this season, Angelo Gabriel.
The Brazilian impressed Chelsea fans a lot during pre-season, so much so that some wanted him to stay. He was sent to France and that move has been a success so far. He was even recently awarded the Ligue 1 Young Player of the Month award.
The fact he’s been so successful will give the owners a lot of joy and hope that the multi-club model will be huge in the futures of these young players whether that be nurturing them to join Chelsea’s first team, or raising their stock to sell for profit.
We’re extremely lucky that the Premier League clubs recently voted 7-13 against a temporary ban on associated party club loans otherwise we’d have been in trouble.
BlueCo are still looking to buy a Portuguese side and hopefully, that goes a long way to help this youth project as it’s another place we can send players to guarantee minutes and monitor their progress closely.
It is frustrating to see big money spent on these young players at times but there are reasons for it which I do understand.
We just need to balance out the here and now a bit better in my opinion.
The fact we have some glaringly obvious gaps in our first team that could’ve been addressed with the money spent on young players isn’t ideal, but we still have January to get that right and we simply must. UTC
By Will Reyner
copying this from a twitter thread as im not sure i can link the thread here... but these are exactly what i think about this model too:
"Buy a large amount of promising players at a discount, increase their valuation through by developing them and showcasing them in European leagues, keep the best ones and sell the rest for profit averaged over the full cohort".
The Plan is simple in concept, but doesn't really address potential issues.
* What happens when your young squad doesn't quite get good fast and you miss European football several years in a row?
* What happens when manager doesn't actually want to play these young players?
* What happens when these young players subsequently don't develop due to not being picked by their loan teams and their valuation doesn't go up?
* What happens when some DO develop but want to leave because they want to play European football you're not getting?
* What happens when you can't quite get a profitable market for these players because you paid too much for them and locked out the midtable market from buying them?
I think the other thing to consider is that the club operated almost under the opposite principles under Abramovich. Talented youngsters were bought almost purely for profit while established players were bought purely for the first team. What we saw happen was the club consistently buy senior players and when they did manage to buy gems like De Bruyne and Salah, there was never the patience nor the space to allow them to develop properly. So over the years, we've seen a lot of younger talent go other places because either first-team pathways or blocked or the player saw a better development future elsewhere.
On the other hand, I think the current ownership has taken the current approach a bit to the extreme. They did need to lower the average age of the squad and by essentially removing most of the senior squad, pathways aren't blocked and young players could see a path to playing. But we also see that there's a lack of experience in the squad when it comes to winning football matches.
I, for one, thought that some sort of change needed to be made in transfer policy, but I didn't think it'd be that extreme. However, if the current ownership would have set out to by established players to win now, I think we'd end up back in the same cycle as we were stuck in under Abramovich.
The only problem right now is that I think the expectations of making it back to the CL this season were a bit too high. I always thought that just getting back to any kind of European football next season would be considered a win and would buy time to make some decisions over the summer to hopefully push on for CL in 2025-2026.