Pile of 50 Dollar Bills

Todd Boehly Completes Half-Century of Players Signed as Chelsea Owner: But Is His Strategy Working?

By our reckoning, Joao Pedro is the 52nd player signed by Todd Boehly since he took charge of Chelsea in May 2022.

The Brighton striker has put pen to paper on an eight-year deal – that length now a Blues trademark – with a fee of £60 million to be paid.

The Brazilian joins fellow striker Liam Delap, Estevao (signing number 50 of the Boehly era), Dario Essugo, Mamadou Sarr and Kendry Paez through the entrance door of Stamford Bridge in the summer of 2025, with more new faces expected to follow.

All of which takes transfer spending in the Boehly era to £1.3 billion and counting, with just the Europa Conference League trophy to show for it.

But there’s a long-term vision at play here, with the majority of those 52 players signed aged 24 or younger – perhaps Boehly’s extravagance will pay off in the long run.

It’s a system, however, that comes with risks. Only 25 players can be registered in a Premier League squad, although unlimited under-21s can be deployed, so there’s a risk of unhappiness breaking out amongst some that aren’t involved in the first-team picture.

And then there’s the need to meet Profit & Sustainability Rules (PSR), which is another matter entirely.

So will Boehly’s boom-or-bust transfer strategy prove to be a success… or an abject failure that sets Chelsea back years?

How Do Chelsea Keep Beating PSR?

Balance Sheet with Calculator and Blue Pen

For the uninitiated, Chelsea’s ability to spend the GDP of a small nation on transfer fees – yet still beat PSR – remains an eternal mystery.

How can you spend £1.3 billion in three years and still satisfy what can loosely be described as financial fair play requirements?

The plot thickens when you consider that the Blues have recouped only around £300 million in fees from players sold in that timeframe.

But Boehly’s clever use of amortisation – spreading the cost of a transfer over the length of a player’s contract – has been costs managed, with those signing on eight-year deals costing less per year, in a PSR sense, than they otherwise would.

That said, the Premier League has now changed the rules on amortisation, with a five-year maximum term in place since 2024.

Boehly’s policy of buying young players also offers the chance to make a profit by selling them on for a higher fee in the future – as if he was flipping houses on the property market.

While everything seems hunky dory financially, note that Chelsea sold their women’s team to BlueCo for nearly £200 million earlier this year – a move designed to create ‘headroom’ for the club’s PSR calculations.

It has also been suggested that Chelsea has debts of £1 billion; the interest payment on those is estimated at £94 million a year alone.

There’s a feeling that the Blues are heading towards some sort of financial crossroads, with Boehly running out of levers to pull – success in the Club World Cup and the Champions League in 2025/26 will be of paramount importance.

On the Offensive

Football clubs that have what we might call an ‘accumulative’ transfer policy generally spend the big bucks on attacking players – these are, often, the beautifully plumaged peacocks that most catch the eye.

Boehly has been no different, signing dozens of players that are mostly deployed in advanced areas.

But in Enzo Maresca’s nominal 4-3-3 shape, only three or at best four of them can play at any one time – exposing the flaws of the transfer strategy, even when the club is competing on multiple fronts.

The other issue is that not all of those offensive signings have hit the ground running when we consider their chief output: goal involvements.

In fact, when you consider the number of goal involvements delivered – relative to transfer fee paid – it would only be fair to question the majority of Boehly’s attacking signings.

Of those that have made 20 or more first team appearances:

  • Cole Palmer – 94 appearances, 67 goal involvements (£40 million)
  • Noni Madueke – 90 appearances, 27 goal involvements (£30 million)
  • Raheem Sterling – 81 appearances, 31 goal involvements (£47 million)
  • Nicholas Jackson – 80 appearances, 42 goal involvements (£31 million)
  • Mykhailo Mudryk – 73 appearances, 18 goal involvements (£62 million)
  • Christopher Nkunku – 59 appearances, 23 goal involvements (£52 million)
  • Pedro Neto – 48 appearances, 17 goal involvements (£51 million)
  • Joao Felix – 40 appearances, 13 goal involvements (£62 million)

When the raw numbers are considered, it’s evident that Boehly’s tactic of accumulating an array of expensive attacking players – or these particular attacking players, at least – has not paid off.

Cole Palmer has, obviously, been a revelation, while Nicholas Jackson’s output – relative to his fee – has been a handy addition.

Some have been expensive but at least have the room to grow (Madueke, Neto), whereas the likes of Joao Felix and Mykhailo Mudryk have been nothing short of unmitigated disasters in the blue shirt.

If you want to compete successfully in domestic and continental competitions, having a large quantity of quality players is the key. But where that’s not possible, favouring quality over quantity has to be the way – something that Boehly may do well to take on board moving forward.