When Chelsea were revealed last week to be by far the most profligate club in Premier League history – with £1.2billion of red ink run up since the league’s conception – the blame was laid firmly at the door of Roman Abramovich, laying waste to British football with the profits he’d reaped from the ruins of post-Soviet Russia.
But the addiction to spending didn’t stop when Abramovich’s cosy relationship with Vladimir Putin saw him sanctioned and shown the Stamford Bridge door.
The maniacal outlay of Clearlake Capital – £1.15billion splashed on transfer fees and counting – has included arguably the most disgraceful waste of one club’s money on a single player, in the case of Raheem Sterling.
Graeme Souness once wrote in his Daily Mail Sport column that if ever a book were written with the title: Recruitment: How not to do it, then Chelsea would be the authors – and that is rather a diplomatic way of putting the Sterling episode. An episode of scandalous waste that should have every right-minded Chelsea fan asking: ‘How dare they run our club this way?’
Sterling was the flavour of the month when Thomas Tuchel argued the value of signing him in 2022. Co-owner Todd Boehly threw a £300,000-a-week contract at him, begged him to sign and the forward left Manchester City with good grace.
But since the Americans decided, in their infinite wisdom, that they only wanted young players, and ones who (Reece James apart) could fit within a reshaped wage structure, we have witnessed spending at its most profligate. Exhibiting that vast Premier League complacency and swagger which is all too familiar, Chelsea were so convinced the Gulf provided a way of getting Sterling off their hands that they completed the paperwork for a move before the player had even agreed to go.
Raheem Sterling’s time at Chelsea has been such a scandalous waste that it should have every right-minded Blues fan asking: ‘How dare they run our club this way?’
Co-owner Todd Boehly threw a £300,000-a-week contract at Sterling, begged him to sign and the forward left Manchester City with good grace
He was justifiably astonished – not wanting to be pushed into the Middle East after settling his family into London and discovering simple pleasures in watching his son develop into an Under 9s player at Arsenal’s academy. He called the club’s bluff and refused to move.
Chelsea thought they could bully him, offering a choice between their bomb squad or the desert, but the gist of his response was: ‘I’ll stay, then. You won’t push me around.’
In any normal, intellectually-functioning realm of business, the answer to a player’s perfectly reasonable request not to be parked as a non-entity in the desert would be to accept that he was staying and extract a little value from those wages.
The evidence of the time Sterling spent on loan at Arsenal last year tells us that at the very least he is a positive, mentoring force among young players.
But since Chelsea don’t act in that kind of way, they have this season thrown him back in the bomb squad, marginalising him in a way which is degrading. When Conor Gallagher was treated the same way to get him out the door, it raised questions from the PFA about the ethics of alienating such senior players without good reason.
The arrival of Liam Rosenior, a yes-man who has swallowed the management manual, was never going to make Sterling anything other than an ostracised outsider. The last man in the bomb squad.
By my calculation, Sterling has earned around £54million gross, before tax and bonuses in his bleak three years in west London, which is the equivalent to around £650,000 per game. He last played for the club in May 2024. Some might view him with disdain because of this but I do not begrudge him one penny.
The evidence of the time Sterling spent on loan at Arsenal last year tells us that at the very least he is a positive, mentoring force among young players
Chelsea have been shortsighted, driving down Sterling’s value by marginalising him
Chelsea were the ones who threw that money at him and then treated him disgracefully. They are also the ones who have managed to drive down his value by consigning him to irrelevance.
Sterling has been more than willing to take a substantial drop in pay to begin his career again at a club where he would be valued and, still only 31, might play. Chelsea have not pulled up trees to bring him such a move.
They’ve left it very late again. We are in the dying days of another transfer window and they are again trying to move him on, with the preference being a sale, though the termination of his contract or a loan move has not been ruled out. Paying out the final 18 months of his deal in full would cost them £22million.
An absolute fortune in your world or mine. Small change for the geniuses at Clearlake, custodians of a football club who are 13 points off the top of the Premier League and barely make the cut as the second best side in London.
