Chelsea in financial settlement talks over historical 'secret payments' case with Premier League — report

Today at 01:29 PM

Fine incoming, but nothing more

When the entity now known as BlueCo won the bidding in Chelsea's forced sale by Roman Abramovich in 2022, a deep-dive into the club's accounts by the new ownership uncovered some "incomplete financial information" over certain transfers from the previous decade. As a result, around £100-150m was set aside from the £2.3b transaction to cover "unforeseen liabilities".

(Not-so-fun fact: those billions, nearly three years later, still have NOT been handed over to any sort of charitable cause for the war in Ukraine, as they were supposed to be. Bang up job, UK government.)

Sure enough, about a year after the takeover, £10m of those funds were used to settle precisely such a case with UEFA, which in turn prompted the Premier League to launch their own investigation as well. Evidently they didn't trust our self-reporting, which I suppose is fair enough, but also just a giant waste of everyone's time as it's looking entirely likely that all that's going to come out of this is yet another financial settlement, just as we had planned.

As reported by The Times today, the two sides are now in talks over a settlement, and are expected to reach a number (relatively) shortly on the fine to be paid by Chelsea. No points deductions or anything so drastic are on the table, which I'm sure will cause outrage among the masses but is to be expected given that, as per the report, the league basically have no evidence other than what we've willingly provided to them already.

That evidence shows payments made to entities "separate to any transfer fee" during the signings of Willian, Samuel Eto'o from financially stricken club Anzhi Makhachkala — which already smelled a bit fishy at the time (2013), though is mostly remembered for Willian "seeing the light". Chelsea have argued that this happened not only a long time ago but under an entirely different ownership, so any sort of sporting sanctions now would be rather unfair, especially as we flagged the irregularities ourselves. And in any case, would it have made any actual difference if all the payments were above the board? FFP is toothless anyway and we've been in more danger of breaching it in the last couple years than at any point before then.

An official settlement is expected to be reached before the end of March.