Chelsea spent 14 weeks in third-place in the Premier League this season, looking up at the Manchester clubs above them. The three are in the same order near the top of the list of transfer expenditures for their squad, reaffirming the importance of knowing the cost of silver.
Manchester City’s squad cost €878 million, over 70 million more than Paris Saint-Germain and 140 million more than Manchester United’s. Despite being the third-most expensive team in the Premier League and the fifth in the world, Chelsea’s €592 million outlay seems paltry compared to the team sporting a 16-point lead atop the the Premier League.
Chelsea signed their club-record transfer over the summer and had an unusually active January transfer window that brought Ross Barkley, Olivier Giroud and Emerson Palmieri to Stamford Bridge. But, as Conte explained earlier this week, he is not very persuasive when making his case for transfers. And besides, Chelsea obtained three solid players at low prices, representing good business if not ideal footballing.
The Manchester clubs do not share that sentiment. Pep Guardiola, in particular, gets who he wants, cost be damned (or, the very least, paid in full). While the Blues negotiated and ultimately walked away from Alex Sandro over a matter of £3 million, Manchester City assembled history’s most expensive club.
Behind Chelsea on the CIES Football Observatory’s list are Liverpool (7th place), Arsenal (9th), Everton (10th) and Tottenham ( 12th). If not for the interloping (read: overpriced and underperforming) Everton, the six most expensive teams are the top six on the table. European football does not come cheap.
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Even the Premier League’s unexpected and frugal seventh-place team is on the top half of the expenditure table. Burnley’s squad cost €102 million in transfers, making them the 41st most expensive team among the big five European leagues. Only Bournemouth, Brighton and Huddersfield spent less. The latter two teams are in the Premier League for the first time in decades, yet are 45th and 48th on the list.
Even more so than the Champions League, the Premier League is in a runaway financial arms race. A team battling against relegation in England costs more than teams fighting for the Europa League in any of the other four big leagues.
People can bemoan the injustice of it all and the consequences for teams throughout the Football League. But Chelsea does not have that luxury, nor should they need to find refuge in such preening. The club have the money to spend. Chelsea are a global marketing force, even if not to the level of Manchester United, Real Madrid or Barcelona. They also have the academy as a source of transfer and sell-on fees from their young players.
Chelsea simply lack the financial will and sense of reality to support their ambitions. They would rather stay mired in a cycle of blame-and-sack the manager than buy him the players he needs. The absurdity is even more stark considering how much Chelsea pays out in severance packages to their abruptly terminated managers. Jose Mourinho’s firing could have paid for Alex Sandro. The money set aside for Antonio Conte’s severance would have covered Alexis Sanchez, with enough money to offer Eden Hazard a bonus.
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Businesses have to spend money to make money. The latter rounds of the Champions League and the top of the Premier League are lucrative places to be. If Chelsea don’t want to pay the price for silver, they will be left with little more than the aluminum foil cut-outs of the FA Cup so popular in north London.