Chelsea's £40m Conor Gallagher decision should be straightforward - but they may yet get it wrong

Depending on which reports you choose to believe, Chelsea’s Conor Gallagher will soon either extend his contract at Stamford Bridge or depart in order to free up some space on Todd Boehly’s balance sheet. The decision they make could have substantial ramifications across the coming seasons.

Head coach Mauricio Pochettino has made it pretty clear that he doesn’t want Gallagher to leave, invoking Hamlet when asked about the issue shortly before Christmas: “It is a decision between the player and the club, to be or not to be… He is in the starting eleven nearly every game and one of the captains. For me, he is the type of player the club need to have.”

Pochettino’s desire to keep the midfielder around doesn’t need too much explanation – Gallagher has been one of Chelsea’s most energetic and consistent players across the course of the season, the one stable component at the heart of a sputtering engine. He does a little bit of everything for his club, and among outfield players with any statistically significant number of minutes this season he is in their top five for pass completion, expected and actual assists per game and shot creating actions, whilst simultaneously making more tackles, blocks and interceptions than any other player in the squad. Nobody has worked as hard and few have been as effective.

What does require explanation is Chelsea’s interest in selling him in the first place. He was up for sale in the summer, too, with West Ham United reportedly interested but backing off after failing to negotiate a supposed £40m asking price down to something they deemed more manageable. Now Tottenham Hotspur have allegedly opened tentative negotiations, with the price unchanged. Sadly, the reason the Chelsea board are looking to move him on are purely financial and, frankly, cynical.

The Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules treat the sales of academy players differently than those of players who were bought into the club – money earned from the sale of a player who came through the club’s ranks is treated as pure profit, while the cost of purchasing a player is taken off the money earned from their eventual sale. So, selling Gallagher would net Chelsea £40m to spend elsewhere, with the costs of nurturing him over the years not factored in – if they sold, say, Benoît Badiashile for the same price, they would only open up around £6m under the regulations, because he cost £34m in the first place.

Boehly has used all manner of accountancy tricks to offset the damage done to the ledgers by Chelsea’s record spending spree over the last two years – those much-maligned eight-year contracts, for instance, allowed the club to amortise the cost of players like Mykhaylo Mudryk over a longer period, reducing the dent in their sustainability margin from the massive transfer fees. Now, in seeking to sell academy talents like Gallagher and the already-departed Mason Mount, Boehly and the rest of the Chelsea board are looking to make up ground again to ensure they stay the right side of the red line.

The appearance is that Boehly has something which borders on an addiction to exploiting loopholes and using tricksy fiscal manoeuvres to stretch financial resources to their greatest limit. That sort of chicanery no doubt serves him very well in the world of hedge fund management, where he has amassed a net worth in the region of £5bn, but he is one of several mega-rich investors, most of them American, who are discovering that the same approach doesn’t always work so well in sports, where the performance on the pitch needs more attention than the spreadsheets do.

Selling Gallagher, when he is performing so well and is outshining colossally expensive acquisitions like Moisés Caicedo and Enzo Fernández, would suggest that Boehly and his chums in the director’s box haven’t taken the lesson on board just yet. It should also be of some concern that all the early-season chatter about Pochettino being given more control in the club’s transfer dealings seems to have been wide of the mark – the Argentine’s comments make it fairly clear that his hands are tied on this one.

Gallagher himself seems keen to stay, at least, although negotiations over a possible new contract have not come especially close to a conclusion just yet based on the latest reportage. They seem to exist in some preliminary form, at least, which implies that the club’s power brokers have been listening to some of the feedback from the manager, media and stands, but no decision has been reached. Gallagher’s future remains in the balance. If he stays, Chelsea imply the desire to stop wheeling and dealing and start using what they have to form a stable core for the future. If he is forced out, they commit to continued churn and tell Pochettino that his involvement in the formation of the playing squad will be minimal. The latter scenario does not bode well, given how poorly the churn has served Chelsea so far.

Then there is, of course, the noxious sensation that all supporters get when ‘one of their own’ is farmed out of the club. Pochettino suggested that Gallagher “is important because of his Chelsea values,” which raises the question of exactly what those values are given that it has been a long, long time since the playing squad was mostly made up of local London boys. Since the 1990s, Chelsea has been about flashy foreign imports and since Roman Abramovich took over it has been about luxuriant spending. They have provided plenty of entertainment and enjoyed immense success over the course of the Premier League era, but in being a gritty, hard-working grafter born within 20 miles of London, Gallagher is an exception.

Ultimately, selling Gallagher would still surely be a bone-headed move. Chelsea have splashed their cash and should accept a period of tightened belts while their expensive but youthful players gel together. That approach might lead to a disappointing season or two while everyone beds in, but in the long term they already have the raw talent in midfield to build something special – Gallagher, at 23, is hardly long in the tooth himself but he is older than Fernández, Caicedo, Roméo Lavia and Cole Palmer. That is a midfield unit with a very bright future, even if things are a little rickety in the present.

But then the question is – with all that lavish spending already done, do they need the Gallagher money to finance moves in other areas of the field? If they want to sign a superstar striker such as Victor Osimhen or even Ivan Toney, do they have the breathing space under the Premier League’s financial rules to make that happen without selling someone else? Do they need reinforcements at full-back, or do they trust the long-term health and fitness of Reece James and Ben Chilwell? What about a goalkeeper – is Robert Sánchez good enough? Chelsea may still have much work to do in the transfer market, and only Boehly’s accountants know if selling Gallagher might be more of a necessity than a choice.

But if it is a choice, then the only correct call to make is to keep him at the club. Not because he’s home-grown, not because he adheres to some nebulous ‘Chelsea way’ that exists solely in the minds of the club’s marketing men, and not because the management of a football team by putting finances first makes most fans feel nauseous – but simply because he’s a damned good player who is only getting better and who has been one of the few parts of an expensive but thoughtlessly-assembled machine that is working as it should.