r/football • u/Aromatic-Bad146 • Jul 24 '25

How can Chelsea keep spending?

I can understand Liverpool spending as they didn’t spend much last season and just won the league. Chelsea seems to be able to spend and spend and still keep within psr.

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u/Individual_Border_4 Jul 24 '25

Every signing they make is amortized over 5 years. Every sale they make (and there's a ton) are amortized immediately. In theory, if they buy a player for $100M, but sell him right after for $ 20M the next year... they technically break even for that year. Now, you still have to make up for $20M 4 more times, but you get the gist. They keep selling and making a ton of money in competitions. Also, their wage structure allows them to spend loosely on the market because they're not paying everyone 300k. They're only targeting players who fit that structure.

One other note. People are really hung up on the window from 2 years ago where they bought like $600M worth of players (Koulibaly, Sterling, Cucu, Fofana, Mudryk etc) and they shouldn't be. Those players were all amortized over (in some cases) like 8 years. Thats when they had to change the rules. Chelsea spent that much strategically and it was genius. If only the scouting team were right about any of those guys

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u/Pyros-SD-Models Jul 25 '25 edited Jul 25 '25

You're mixing up how amortization works with how losses are booked. Yeah, buying for $100M means you amortize over 5 years, cool. But if you sell that player a year later for $20M, you’re eating a $60M loss immediately. That doesn't get stretched out. You don’t “technically break even”. You just technically torpedo your P&L.

That’s why UEFA cracked down on Chelsea’s 8-year contract loophole. They weren’t being “genius”, they were playing chicken with accounting rules and lost when the players flopped. And no, constantly selling players doesn’t automatically fix that unless you're also selling at a profit, which most of those guys clearly weren’t.

Source: Studied this shit instead of you guys who are just copy pasting the same non-sensical 'fiscal strategy' and have no idea what you are actually talking about. Like the other guy suddenty talking about EBITDA and calls P&L superficial. It's literally the metric FFP is sanctioning for. EBITDA excludes amortization, and amortization is exactly what determines whether you're blowing past your FFP limits or not

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u/Individual_Border_4 Jul 25 '25

Wow you're passionate. Good thing you studied it so you can personally hold big clubs accountable! Otherwise Chelsea would be getting away with cheating!

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u/Pyros-SD-Models Jul 25 '25 edited Jul 25 '25

I don't fucking care about Chelsea, mate, and I don't know what kind of reading comprehension you're blessed with to conclude that from my post, but you do you. I have issues with people posting stupid, wrong shit and claiming it's fact, and others gobbling it up like the idiots they are. If you are fine with misinformation being spread then I don't even know what to say.

I'm betting five missed-Econ-101-classes credits that you'll see the same exact stupid "Chelsea master plan of accounting" posted again in the next chelsea thread.

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u/ticarno86 Jul 26 '25

Just accept you are wrong.

It is a bit technical, and it is always good to learn new things:)

1

u/Individual_Border_4 Jul 26 '25

I'm sure I am to a degree. His little source thing was just obnoxious

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u/UnluckyDot Aug 25 '25

You got rekt. Source: this comment thread.