Chelsea owner Todd Boehly has been warned he faces major issues following the day Mauricio Pochettino leaves the club. Former England striker Les Ferdinand says an incoming manager will have a list of players on long-term contracts who he doesn’t want but can’t get rid of.
Chelsea continued to spend big this summer and had a huge overhaul of their squad. Boehly has now spent over £1billion on new signings since he bought the west London club in May 2022.
Boehly has regularly handed out contracts of seven or eight years to his new signings. He has done so to help balance the books by amortising the transfer fees he has committed to paying.
Enzo Fernandez, Moises Caicedo, Mykhaylo Mudryk and Nicolas Jackson all have eight-year deals that do not expire until the summer of 2031. Cole Palmer, Noni Madueke, Lesley Ugochukwu, Djordje Petrovic and Deivid Washington have seven-year contracts with the option to extend them for a further 12 months.
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Palmer was one of the last signings Chelsea made in the summer. Ferdinand can see why Pochettino splashed out £45m on the attacking midfielder.
However, the lifespan of a manager at Chelsea is generally not long and Ferdinand believes Boehly will face big issues if a future replacement for Pochettino doesn’t rate the players that are on long-term deals. He told William Hill: “I understand Chelsea’s point of view in the Cole Palmer deal.
“Factor in that they’re trying to manage Financial Fair Play with these long contracts, and the reason why they do it is because the fee amortises – the price they pay for him will reduce for each year on his contract. The problem is that if after two years you change to a manager who doesn’t want Cole Palmer, he’s still sat there for another five years on high wages.
“Chelsea are hoping that as a young player he will have done enough for someone else to want to come and buy him if that situation arises, but if not you face the same problem that they have got with a few of their players at the moment.”
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Ferdinand also believes Chelsea in their current state is not a club some players would desire to be at. He added: “I look at Chelsea and think that it’s the one club you wouldn’t want to be anywhere near at the moment. They have players at the club who don’t want to be there.
“You look at Romelu Lukaku, he got given a five-year contract and now he doesn’t want to play for the football club, they can’t get rid of him. If you have players like that in your dressing room they are poisonous.
“At the moment Chelsea have quite a lot of those types of players and that makes it very difficult to get anything going in the right direction.”
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