Why Chelsea need not worry about financial fair play

Chelsea have been spending big in this summer’s transfer window with their outlay likely to be well over £200m by deadline day. The authoritative Swiss Ramble looks at the financial implications and explain how Chelsea can still be in line with Financial Fair Play (FFP) regulations.

New owner Todd Boehly is well aware of the challenge: “FFP is starting to get some teeth and that will limit the ability to acquire players at any price. That could mean financial penalties and disqualification from sporting competitions.”

Spending ability is limited by the Premier League Profitability and Sustainability (P&S) rules. These allow a £5m loss a year, which can be boosted by £30m equity injection, giving allowable losses of £35m a year. This works out to £105m over the 3-year monitoring period.

On the face of it, things don’t look too good for the club, as their pre-tax loss in the last 3 years was a hefty £222m, including £156m in 2020/21 and £102m in 2018/19. This was obviously adversely impacted by COVID, but was the 2nd highest loss in the Premier League in this period.

However, the Premier League has relaxed the regulations to neutralise the adverse impact of COVID, so the 2022 monitoring period assessed the seasons 2019/20 and 2020/21 as a single (average) period.  This is important, as it allowed #them to include £67m profit from 2017/18. On this basis, the pre-tax loss over the adjusted 3-year monitoring period up to 2020/21 (the last published accounts) was “only” £94m, which was £11m better than the P&S maximum allowable loss of £105m.

In addition, they can make an £85m adjustment for “healthy” expenditure (depreciation £29m, non-player amortisation £6m, youth development £30m, women’s football £14m and community £6m), giving a P&S loss of £10m, i.e. £95m better than he £105m allowable loss.

They can also adjust for the adverse COVID impact. Not disclosed by the club, but I have estimated £128m revenue reduction (match day £76m, commercial £36m and broadcasting £16m), partly offset by £58m cost savings, giving a net £70m (averaged as £35m over the last 2 years).

Therefore, the £94m pre-tax loss over the 3-year monitoring period was improved by £85m allowable deductions and £35m COVID impact to give £25m adjusted P&S profit. In other words, Chelsea were £130m better than the £105m permitted loss, a comfortable difference.

They have spent £160m to date this summer to bring in Marc Cucurella, Raheem Sterling, Kalidou Koulibaly, Carney Chukwuemeka and Gabriel Slonina, while 2021/22 included the purchase of Romelu Lukaku for nearly £100m. Club also impacted by player loans (arrivals and returns).

The impact on theprofit and loss account will be driven by two factors: (a) wages of the new purchases, which I have estimated at £119m for the last 2 years; (b) player amortisation, the annual cost of writing-off transfer fees, which is £90m. This adds up to annual £209m cost.

Against that, Chelsea have sold players for £181m in last 2 years, including Tammy Abraham, Kurt Zouma, Fikayo Tomori, Timo Werner, Marc Guéhi and Eden Hazard (add-on) plus £12m loan fees. This has produced significant £164m profit, as most leaving players were fully amortised.

In addition, Chelsea benefit from reducing wage bill and player amortisation for those exits, even when no transfer fee received, e.g. Antonio Rüdiger, Andreas Christensen & Danny Drinkwater. Estimated annual savings are £77m wages and £19m player amortisation, so £96m in total.

So the net result of transfer activity in last two years is £113m cost increase in accounts, with player purchases growing the cost base by £209m, mitigated by £96m reduction from sales. This will be more than offset by £164m profit on player sales (including loan fees).

Big spending is nothing new for Chelsea, who have splashed out nearly a billion on gross transfers in the 5 years up to 2020/21 (including signing-on and agent fees), which is joint highest in the Premier League with Manchester City, far ahead of Manchester United £850m, Arsenal £676m and Liverpool £660m.

The business model

The business model has essentially been to offset large operating losses with profits from player sales. As a result, they made £406m operating losses in the last 3 years (excluding exceptional items), while their £159m deficit in 2021 was easily the worst in the Premier League.

In stark contrast, they have generated an impressive  £413m profit from player sales in the last 5 years, including good money (pure profit) from Academy products. This is the highest in the top flight, significantly more than rivals, e.g. the next highest is Liverpool with £274m.

Putting all these estimates together would give a £42m pre-tax profit for in 2021/22, largely driven by the massive £160m profit from player sales. This would actually be the highest ever player trading profit in England, beating Chelsea’s own £143m in 2019/20.

That would imply a P&S adjusted profit of £3m over the 3-year monitoring period, so £108m better than the allowed £105m loss. The 2017/18 £95m P&S profit will be dropped, replaced by the estimated 2021/22 £73m profit, so not too much damage done. Even with the huge loss for 2022/23, Chelsea would still be fine under the Premier League’s P&S rules, though their margin of safety would fall to £26m. Cleary, these are only modeled figures, but it does highlight that leading clubs have more room to maoeuvre than people think.

That said, UEFA’s FFP rules are stricter than the Premier League with the allowable losses (“acceptable deviation”) over 3 years being only €30m (including €25m equity contribution), though this will increase to €90m from 2024 (i.e. including 2022/23 as the 3rd year).

It might be a little surprising that the new owners are spending at the same rate as Abramovich, but the magnitude of the investment into the squad demonstrates their ambitions, while they look to grow the club’s revenue streams.

Boehly said, “We think the global footprint of this sport is really undeveloped. There are 4 billion fans of European football. There are 170 million fans of NFL. Global club football is a fraction of the NFL media money.” In order to benefit, Chelsramust remain at the top table.

They will clearly have to be conscious of financial fair play, but their big spending does not automatically mean they will fall foul of the regulations, especially if they maintain their profitable player trading model (assisted by the accounting treatment of transfers).