Chelsea throwing their money about blurs real picture
London club have moved for Werner and Ziyech, but it is unclear who else can spend in difficult times
There are so many aspects of life a global pandemic can halt – human interaction, school education, the economy – but Chelsea’s eternal quest to sign a marquee goalscorer goes on. Timo Werner is just the latest in a long line of the good, the bad and the indifferent in whom the Roman Abramovich era has placed its faith, with varying degrees of success.
The putative £53million investment in RB Leipzig’s red-hot Germany international felt like the first indication of normality since the league suspension in March. The 24-year-old follows in the footsteps of Hernan Crespo, Didier Drogba, Andriy Shevchenko, Fernando Torres and Alvaro Morata, among others, as the man who may or may not become the club’s great goalscoring heir.
Whether Werner succeeds in the context of football’s great crisis feels, for the time being, less important than the fact that Chelsea consider themselves sufficiently solvent to be making another acquisition of this type.
Six weeks ago, having failed to sign Erling Haaland in January, Chelsea were in the throes of difficult conversations with their players about wage cuts and deferrals, eventually rejected by the club on the basis that the reduction offered was not big enough. Now they are buying the great emergent goalscoring talent in Europe, along with Hakim Ziyech, who arrives from Ajax when this season finishes. For those players who rejected the wage cut last month that might well seem like the strongest argument yet for the stance they took.
Chelsea back to doing what Chelsea have done for the past 17 years: are these the first signs that English football, at the top at least, is returning to its old normal? And by normal, one means throwing astonishing amounts of money at the world’s best players.
Manchester City have appointed a new assistant, Juanma Lillo, to Pep Guardiola. The low hum of investment that is ever-present in Premier League football, the white noise of its neverending plotting of acquisitions, departures, renewals, seems to be slowly returning to the game.
For those clubs lower down who cannot afford to pay either their players or their Covid-19 testing bills to finish the season, it will stick in the throat. But this is the inequality of English football, a cruel divide the game has learnt to live with. The Premier League is no more likely to bail out bad owners in the Football League than Werner is to go on loan to
Macclesfield Town. Instead, the elite would point to their general contribution to the economy.
What will the business of football look like when the Premier League returns this month? An uneasy consensus has been reached between the clubs on the shape of Project Restart. Yet the old ways of doing things will have to change. It is by no means obvious who has money to spend. Tottenham have taken a £175million government loan.
Liverpool lost the Werner deal, although whether that was simply Frank Lampard winning the argument, or a financial consideration, is unclear. No decision yet as to when the transfer window opens although when it does there is a strong case for keeping it open much longer than just the summer. The finance of clubs is much dependent on the circulation of players in the market – RB Leipzig’s decision to sell Werner, for instance, is the first step in another acquisition and so the chain is established. If that stops then a logjam of the wrong players at the wrong clubs is created. Young players stranded without loans lower down the leagues. Unwanted older players unable to move on. Given the uncertainty of this summer, in terms of the calendar and financially, a transfer window that lasts the whole season is worth considering. The scope of the impact on clubs’ finances is changing all the time. If there is no chance of fans coming back into the stadiums next season there remains the possibility that clubs will still approach players for wage deferrals or even cuts.
There will be a tendency among most clubs in August to be conservative in their projections for squad rebuilding. It is hard to budget confidently to spend a season’s broadcast money when you have only just negotiated the rebate for the last one. Difficult too when there is no clarity as to what Uefa competition will look like for the next two years at least. With the flexibility to buy and sell players throughout the season, clubs can adjust to the changing reality of this new era.
Lower down, in the Championship in particular, the players remain one of the few liquid assets which might realistically be traded in the event of further financial catastrophe.
At Chelsea, the signing of another fine young prospect from under the noses of a rival will make it feel like some semblance of normal has returned. But a glance across the pitches at Cobham to the squad’s best player, N’Golo Kante, training alone – his return to action as yet unknown – is a reminder that nothing is the same. Will Kante play again this season or next? Will a replacement have to be drafted in? If so, when?
The old rules barely get close to fitting the new reality.