Two teams currently sit miles clear of everyone else at the top of the summer spending list.
One is Chelsea, who have once again already blown through the £200m barrier and show no sign of slowing down. Yet they still for now sit only second behind, of all clubs, Tottenham.
Spurs have splashed out well over £200m in transfer fees alone on Jan Paul van Hecke, Sandro Tonali and Mateus Fernandes, as well as committing sizeable wages to those guys, and freebies Andy Robertson and Marcos Senesi.
Both clubs are very clearly not done yet, with Chelsea closing on a deal for Maxence Lacroix and Spurs’ wildly underperforming attack conspicuously as yet untouched by the transformative splurge that’s been lavished on their defence and midfield. There’s surely at least one more big-money incoming to happen there.
Which all raises lots of questions. Let’s start with the obvious one…
How are Chelsea and Tottenham able to be spending all this cash?
Let’s start with Chelsea, the less surprising but perhaps more interesting example. Chelsea, we know, have already spent several years flirting with both the Premier League and UEFA’s spending rules.
They were fined £2.6m by UEFA this year, and last year a far larger £26.7m. So the glass-half-full approach is to show things are actually improving.
And a large chunk of their latest fine can be written off if they continue to reduce their spending and/or increase revenue.
There’s almost no chance of the former, but the latter is the key to Chelsea’s whole schtick.
We’ve half-jokingly said before that it’s easier now to think of Chelsea not so much as a football club but a player-trading company with a related sideline in actually having those lads play some football matches now and then to keep their value up.
Another relevant thing to consider here is another half-joke about how to the man rich enough fines stop being fines and just start being what things cost. You or I might see a sign that reads “NO PARKING – £100 FINE” and think “Ah, can’t park there then”. The rich man thinks “Oh, it costs £100 to park there.”
Chelsea’s approach to the Premier League and UEFA rules is similar; as long as they stay within limits that mean they are hit with financial rather than sporting penalties then, broadly speaking, they can just treat it as the cost of doing business.
Chelsea brought in a whopping £300m in player sales last season. They are already into nine figures for sales this summer, with plenty more to come.
Transfermarkt values their vast squad of players at £1.3bn, second only to Manchester City in England and fourth in Europe. To a football fan, this looks like a bloated, unbalanced squad in need of urgent sorting; to Chelsea it’s an investment to be realised when necessary.
So while Chelsea are supposed to spend no more than 85 percent of their revenue on player costs to comply with the new squad cost ratio rules, they can generate huge amounts of revenue pretty much whenever they like, and that 85 per cent figure is only a starting point anyway.
As football finance expert Kieran Maguire put it for the BBC:
“So, 85% is their PSR compliance with the Premier League but that does give them a slight advantage. If you look at the small print of the Premier League’s SCR rules, you can spend up to 115% of revenue on your player costs because that takes you up to what we refer to as the red zone.
“Provided you’re in the red zone and don’t go beyond it, you still end up effectively paying a tax on additional costs, rather than having a points deduction.”
So do Chelsea need to sell?
It’s kind of moot, really. The short answer is probably yes, they do need to sell to avoid getting into trouble. But the reality is that they absolutely will sell more players anyway.
Even before any further post-Rogers incomings alongside Marco Palestra and the pre-agreed arrivals of Geovany Quenda, Emmanuel Emegha and the Premier League’s new pantomime villain Valentin Barco, Chelsea have 38 senior players on their books.
Reports suggest they’re actively looking to move on some or all of the likes of Marc Guiu, Benoit Badiashile, Axel Disasi and Trevoh Chalobah, but the reality is that Chelsea’s modus operandi means all but a select group of untouchables (your Caicedos, your Palmers, the Estevaos of this world) are permanently available for sale at the right price.
It’s not helpful to think of Chelsea as a buying club or a selling club, with the connotations those terms bring. They’re the ultimate trading club.
Also worth noting here that Chelsea have no European football this season; if only to protect the value of their investments they really need to move several players on just to avoid them spending a year inactive and depreciating in value.
Where do Villa come into all this?
Easy and likely correct to be cynical about the numbers being bandied around for the Rogers and Garnacho deals.
We’re back into the territory of our old friend amortisation here, where money coming in can be slapped straight onto the ledger and money going out can be spread over a far longer period.
But that particular loophole is harder to exploit now with new rules about what counts as a ‘swap deal’. Essentially, if two clubs trade players within a 45-day period, they will be considered a swap deal for the purposes of the rules, and the timing of Rogers’ move to Chelsea means there was no way for Garnacho to go the other way before the window shuts without coming under the auspices of that rule.
It’s murkier, though, for loan deals such as Garnacho’s. Even the obligation to buy doesn’t necessarily bring it under the swap-deal ruling, with a judgement to be made on whether the conditions that must be met to trigger that obligation make it a de facto delayed permanent move or not. The likelihood is it will be deemed not to be the case.
Even if it requires only, say, 10 appearances to trigger the obligation, Villa retain the full control and right to simply not pick him 10 times. And Harvey Elliott can tell you that they’ll do it too, if need be.
An example of two separate deals that will nevertheless be treated as a swap for the purposes of the rules are Spurs signing Van Hecke from Brighton and then selling them Luka Vuskovic soon after. The difference there being that neither of those clubs are sailing close to any further scrutiny.
Chelsea and Villa do both have a delicate balancing act to perform this season. And to be clear, it’s UEFA’s rules over swap deals that are relevant here, with the Premier League rather more lax over these kinds of related moves between two clubs.
So what about Spurs then?
That’s actually far easier. Spurs can spend loads of money because they have loads of money to spend.
The new 85 per cent cap for the ratio of revenue to player costs is a ridiculously high ceiling for Spurs; their most recent figures (for the 24/25 season) put them at only 61%, and this includes all salaries and not just the playing staff that would be relevant to the new rules.
Spurs’ revenue is significantly bolstered by the huge non-football events – NFL, concerts and the like – that can be staged at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. In the final season at the old White Hart Lane, Spurs had matchday revenue of £45m and commercial income of £73m.
In those most recent 24/25 accounts, those figures had ballooned to £126m and £277m. That all goes into the pot from which Spurs’ SCR number is calculated.
And, of course, amortisation still comes into all this as well. Assuming Spurs have spread their transfer-fee outgoings this summer over the maximum five-year period, their bumper summer spend thus far will still amount to under £50m on this year’s books, with their previous smaller (though still larger than people sometimes remember) spends meaning they don’t have the vast carry-over from previous summers that other clubs of similar size carry.
And what about Spurs’ outgoings?
There is not the same imperative for Spurs to sell as there is for Chelsea or Villa, simply because there is not the same pressing need – this summer at least – to balance the books given the huge buffer Spurs enjoy within the current rules framework.
What Spurs do have is the sporting imperative to trim their squad. They are already at the point where, in a season with no European football, they would be unable to register all their current senior first-teamers and still comply with the Premier League’s 25-man squad rules.
So there will for sure be further player sales at Spurs this summer, and beyond the obvious ones we already know about like Cristian Romero, but with the aim of balancing the squad rather than a spreadsheet.
It does also feel worth noting here that this is in any case another area where Spurs are already clearly deviating from the Daniel Levy-led norms that have been established over the last two decades in North London.
Spurs have already generated around £80m in player-sale revenue this summer without yet moving on a single player with significant first-team experience or who even had the prospect of gaining it any time soon. Selling rather than loaning out (again) the likes of Vuskovic, Alejo Veliz, Alfie Devine, Tynan Thompson and Will Lankshear all helps contribute to the bumper pot of cash Spurs can and are splurging on fees and wages this summer and, rightly or wrongly, is simply not something they’d have done under Levy.
