Brain surgery, rocket science and oddballs who don’t like gherkins are impossible for the average person to understand. But quite possibly trumping all of those unfathomable is football finance. Getting your head around buyout clauses, sell-on fees, performance-related add-ons and why Manchester United thought paying Casimiro, Mason Mount, Matthijs de Ligt and Harry Maguire a combined £985,000 a week is one thing. We might even stretch to comprehending amortisation and the basics of Profit and Sustainability on a good day. But there is no doubt that there are some aspects of the financial side of the beautiful game, as it used to be called before it turned into an ugly money game, that will forever prove beyond us.
Not long ago it was reported that Man United, one of the richest clubs in the world, were dropping a £50 steward’s award and lunches for staff to save money. Despite predicting a profit of £145m to £160m for the year ahead in a November 2024 press release, the Red Devils were savagely cutting costs come the New Year. To justify these moves, which included ditching reduced-price tickets for children and seniors, and big increases for all tickets, the very same club said that had made pre-tax losses over the past three years of more than £300m.
And if that sounds confusing, strap yourselves in, because now we turn to Chelsea, a club that has spent around £1.2bn on players since the Todd Boehly-led takeover of 2022. And yet has just reported a profit of a very handsome £128.4m!
Chelsea’s Surprising Profit
Chelsea Football Club have today announced a £128.4m profit before tax. The year earlier, Chelsea declared a loss of £90.1m. Chelsea’s profit was due to increased profit on disposal or player registrations and repositioning of the women’s team. (@NizaarKinsella) #CFC pic.twitter.com/HiGaS6eoEg
— Pys (@CFCPys) March 31, 2025
At the end of March Chelsea announced that their pre-tax profit for the year that ended in June 2024 (there is always a delay in reporting as accounts need to be checked thoroughly and sometimes audited) was a healthy, if surprising, £128.4m. A year earlier, on the 7th of March 2024, it was revealed that the club had lost over £90m in the year up to June of 2023, so it was quite the turnaround.
That £90m was also, in fact, better than the 12 months prior to that, not all of which was under the Boehly reign. A year earlier the club had reported a loss of just over £120m, so to make that same amount in profit really is rather striking. This outcome was achieved despite a small drop in revenue, with the Blues’ income stream reducing from £512.5m in the previous year down to £468.5m in the accounting period in question.
That drop was said to be due to the team not appearing in the Champions League. Chelsea put their positive financial position down to the “disposal of player registrations” and what they called the “repositioning” of the women’s team. What anyone else would call the sale of the women’s team to themselves is what has caught the attention of those who enjoy pouring over the finances of football clubs and know what they are doing.
Sale of Women’s Team
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Chelsea’s women have enjoyed incredible success over the past decade or so and are in the hunt for a quadruple in 2025, despite having lost their influential manager, Emma Hayes, to the US national team. However, is the women’s team worth the £200m that the accounts appear to show the club received for it? We can’t be sure exactly what price was paid but the accounts list “profit on disposal of subsidiaries” as just under £199m.
Chelsea’s (women’s) recent Champions League clash with Man City was held at Stamford Bridge and attracted a crowd of fewer than 11,000. And that was despite very cheap tickets. Considering that the Friedkin Group bought Everton for around £400m in December 2024, two years earlier Bournemouth were bought for £100m, and Leeds United were valued at £170m when the 49ers completed their takeover in 2023, £200m seems, shall we say, a little on the generous side.
Of course, the cost of many things depends on what a buyer will pay, and the buyer in this instance decided that £200m was fair. However, the buyer was not a wealthy Chelsea fan, nor a female entrepreneur wanting to get into women’s football. The entity that bought Chelsea’s women’s side was BlueCo.
BlueCo was the entity through which Boehly and Co. bought Chelsea in the first instance. Which is not at all strange or suspicious or questionable. Moreover, this is not the first time the club have pulled a move such as this, with the previous set of accounts including the sale of two hotels from Chelsea FC Holdings Ltd. The buyer in that case – again at what was thought by many to be an inflated price – was BlueCo 22 Properties Ltd.
The Rules
This sort of activity appears to be permitted under Premier League rules but UEFA has stricter regulations on such matters. The Premier League does not have rules against associated party transactions (APTs) after clubs could not agree to regulate against them in the AGM of June 2024.
UEFA do have such rules though and these are considered within their Financial Fair Play requirements. Almost straight away it was said that UEFA would consider Chelsea’s dealings at the end of the current season. UEFA has an independent panel which would consider whether or not the Blues are allowed to include the profit made on the sale to offset operational losses.
Moreover, UEFA’s permitted losses are also more stringent than the Premier League’s, the former allowing just £75m over a three-year timeframe, compared to the £105m loss allowed by the latter. It should be noted, however, that whilst the Premier League have, in the past, handed out fairly severe sporting sanctions via points deductions, any UEFA penalty is far more likely to be financial.
In the EFL the tactic of, in simple terms, selling assets to yourself – be that players, property, rights or, for example, the women’s team – is outlawed. To most people this would seem to make sense and be fair enough, but for whatever reason the Premier League was unable to pass a motion to close the loophole that allowed it.
Chelsea are confident that their transactions meet current Premier League regulations and that will be their chief aim. Any subsequent UEFA investigation is not such a worry, with a fine probably seen as a price worth paying.