Chelsea FC’s Spluttering Youth Experiment Is More History Repeated

Ever since Chelsea FC came under the ownership of US investors Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital the scrutiny on the strategy has been intense.

As performances on the pitch have continued to tank, the leadership has bemoaned the lack of long-term vision from their predecessors whilst acting in strikingly similar ways.

Just as was the case under Roman Abramovich, managers have been swapped with regularity and huge numbers of players have arrived, often for extraordinarily high transfer fees.

After periods of curiosity, incredulity and disdain the most common refrain in the British soccer establishment when referencing Chelsea is now: “I don’t understand.”

There is a degree of legitimacy to the statement. In the past year or so the Blues have adopted an extreme approach to contracts never really seen before in the sport.

Young players are being signed on eight-year deals, almost double the normal length, for monstrously high transfer fees.

Although the tactic elongates the player’s cost of the balance sheet-a helpful tool when complying with Financial Fair Play regulations-it also prompts the question of what impact will these unprecedented contracts have on the players.

According to ex-Manchester United star Gary Neville, the answer is more problems.

“There’s no such thing as certainty in an eight-year contract,” he said.

‘Let’s say [recent signing] Mykhailo [Mudryk] becomes a Lionel Messi in four years and Chelsea would sit here today and say “We’ve got him locked down for another four years on a lower wage.

“I don’t care whether he’s got four years left on his contract or not, Mudryk will kick off, his agent will kick off, he’ll down tools and say “I want more money.”

“You’ll end up paying the Messi wage or you’ll have a very unhappy player for the last four years who’ll feel he’s been exploited because he signed an eight-year contract at the age of 22.

“In football, in this country, with players coming particularly from international soil, I do not see how an eight-year contract can be honored if the player progresses into something far greater than he is today.”

Neville also questions the efficacy of having a star tied to a deal that length when managers rarely last that number of years.

“Will every manager who comes in during those eight years want the player? Will the player want to go home at some point?” He added.

“It just feels to me like, in football as we see it in this country, not the NFL in America, I don’t see the benefit of an eight-year deal.

“If you sign a five-year deal and a player does brilliantly after three years, you’ve still got two years. Eight? I just don’t understand it.”

Investment In Youth

The most straightforward explanation for these lengthy contracts is that they limit the possibility of losing any value on a player.

If Enzo Fernandez or Moses Caciedo fulfills their potential and catches the eye of Real Madrid or Manchester City the only way for those clubs to purchase the player is by paying a sky-high fee.

By locking everyone down there is little chance of losing money, particularly when you consider the other aspect of the current Chelsea spending spree which is that it is almost entirely being invested in young players.

The trouble is that in buying so many talented players Boehly is by sheer weight of numbers blocking their pathways to the first team.

How, for example, is Andrey Santos, 19, (currently on loan at Nottingham Forest) supposed to dislodge either 21-year-old Moises Caciedo or backup Romeo Lavia, 19, from the first team when both those players are contracted to the club for the next seven years at least?

The only answer so far from Boehly is that they might buy another club where these youngsters can play.

“The challenge at Chelsea is that when you have 18-, 19-, 20-year-old superstars, you can loan them out to other clubs but you put their development in someone else’s hands,” he said.

“Our goal is to make sure we can show pathways for our young superstars to get onto the Chelsea pitch while getting them real game time. To me, the way to do that is through another club somewhere in a really competitive league in Europe.”

But most Chelsea fans can tell you this is not a new problem, in the past couple of decades the club has tried again and again to make youth development part of its setup.

Mo Salah and Kevin De Bruyne

The first attempt in earnest by Chelsea to develop superstar talent rather than buying it came under the managerial reign of Andre Villas-Boas.

As the players who’d elevated the club to an elite level, like John Terry and Frank Lampard, aged the leadership decided it needed to invest in the future.

Kevin De Bruyne, Mohamed Salah and Romelu Lukaku were just three of the exciting prospects brought to Stamford Bridge as part of this plan.

Villas-Boas admitted at the time he had not been consulted on these deals and in the end it was that detachment from the managers thinking that proved fatal.

All struggled for opportunities and, with more established names ahead of them in the pecking order, eventually sold elsewhere.

As two of the three went on to become Premier League’s greats Chelsea’s folly in being unable to execute its plan was frequently revisited.

The second time youth was prioritized was a result of circumstance.

When the club was hit with a transfer ban it had little option but to promote exciting talent like Mason Mount, Tammy Abraham and Reece James.

But once again, when the club was permitted to buy players again, many of the young players who broke through found their paths blocked and were sold.

Only James remains from that team and time will tell whether any of the many talented stars who departed will make Chelsea look as foolish as with Salah and De Bruyne. The indications are there may be some who the club will regret letting go.

In his public statements, Boehly has demonstrated knowledge of these past mistakes, but it is unclear whether he is learning the right lessons from them.

“If you look at what our academy has developed, it’s Mo Salah, Kevin De Bruyne, more recently Tammy Abraham, Reece James, Mason Mount, Trevoh Chalobah,” he said no long after buying the club.

“We have 10 or 11 players right now who are either on loan controlled by us, we have the right to buy them back, or they’re playing for our team that came from our academy.

“What we really need is a place to put our 18-, 19-, 20-year-olds to develop them, in Portugal, Belgium or somewhere like that. Get them out of South America and into Portugal, which is a perfect example, we think, and then to get them on the pitch for Chelsea.”

The problem has always been the last part of that sentence because time and again, regardless of the promises made or potential shown the youngsters were never allowed to wear the blue of Chelsea.