CHELSEA could be banned from fielding Liam Delap, Joao Pedro and other summer signings in next season’s Champions League.
The Blues have already splashed out more than £160m on Delap, Pedro, Brazilian youngster Willian Estevao and more arrivals, with Jamie Gittens also joining today from Borussia Dortmund in a deal worth £52m.
But if Chelsea are unable to balance the books by selling or loaning out players in the remainder of the window, the terms of their Uefa punishment for breaking financial rules will prevent them registering them all for the Champions League.
That is why homegrown defender Trevoh Chalobah is very likely to be sold this summer.
Yet even a £40m fee for Chalobah would not be enough to cover the costs of all the new recruits.
Uefa last week fined Chelsea a total of £27m, with a potential £52m more to come, for breaching regulations on football earnings and squad cost controls.
As part of the settlement, the Blues also accepted they could not add players to the 25-man A list for Uefa competitions without the annual cost of those players being covered by savings from removing existing members of the list.
The annual cost of a player is calculated by adding his wages to the amortisation value of his transfer fee.
For example Delap has joined Chelsea from Ipswich for a fee of £30m on a six-year contract.
But Uefa regulations say clubs have to calculate the amortisation over a five-year period.
Therefore, the amortisation cost of Delap next season will be £30m divided by five – £6m.
If the striker is on wages of £100,000 a week, that is £5.2m a year, making the total Delap cost £11.2m.
Should Chelsea want just him to play in the Champions League, they would have to find more than £11.2m in savings from players they wanted to take off the list.
The value of an outgoing player is calculated by adding their wages to any profit on their sale.
That is why Chalobah is particularly vulnerable to being sold. As a product of the Chelsea academy, his value on the books is zero so any fee received would be pure profit.
That was the case when Chelsea sold Mason Mount and Conor Gallagher in the last two summers.
A £40m fee for Chalobah, plus the saving in wages, would cover the costs related to Delap, £60m signing Joao Pedro and some others – but not all incomings this summer.
If Chelsea wanted to sell a player like goalkeeper Robert Sanchez, however, the maths is different.
Sanchez arrived from Brighton for £25m two years ago. Amortisation for each of those two years is £5m (£25m divided by 5) making a cost of £10m.
Sanchez’s value on the books is now £15m (£25m minus the £10m amortisation) so Chelsea would need to sell him for more than that to bank a profit, on top of the saving in wages.
Of the 25 players on Chelsea’s A list for the knockout stages of the Europa Conference League, the only big earner to leave so far is on-loan Jadon Sancho.
The Blues are believed to have paid half of Sancho’s £300,000 per week wages from his Manchester United contract – £150,000 a week..
Chelsea paid £5m to get out of an obligation to buy the winger. Sancho’s departure will save them £7.8m in wages, but it’s still not enough to cover the likely £11.2m cost of Delap.
Noni Madueke is now reported to have agreed personal terms with Arsenal, which would free up more funds for the Blues.
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