Their finances are “fecked” eh?
The arm of Clearlake related to investment in sporting and entertainment are always accepting new investment from vetted, non-public funds. The truly inept English media made this out as desperation looking for money for transfers; no.
Clearlake just dropped 700m on the Canary Wharf development. The are inviting in other parties to do nothing short of owning and transforming that area of London. They have vision much larger in scale than just owning Chelsea.
Their finances are fine. They are extremely smart and good with money, especially as it pertains to sporting activities and caps.
THEY found the irregularities from more than a decade ago under Abramovich. They were minor things, and the way the seizure and sale of the the club happened they have no chance of facing penalties for this, but the interesting thing is the regulatory authorities didn’t understand what was wrong even after it was shown to them… it had to be explained.
They have already set aside the first part of the 850 m related to the stadium in a special separate account.
They have their French club, and will soon have a Portugal club to start filling out their talent development umbrella.
Chelsea was already light years ahead of other PL teams in terms of making money off player development and sales… and even then Clearlake looked at it and thought it was haphazard and way underleveraged.
They have a setup to handle “flops” and the financial terms of the different contracts reflect that. They also have insurance that covers catastrophic loss (see: Fofana). I saw some people saying “well, one person gets hurt and they are broke, done!”
Doesn’t work that way.
If Chalobah and Gallagher move on this year we might even spend MORE this window… pretty easily actually.
And if they don’t work out we have the most talented young players in the world (see: Cesarean Casadei; Golden Ball winner from U21 Euros) 3 and 4 deep at every position spread out in our growing system to take those spots OR to make even more profit as we develop them Into high earning pros for other teams.
A misconception is that every one of these talents is being sold just on the idea of playing for Chelsea. No. We can sell a superior structure led by people with track records for developing young players into high earning professionals.