Chelsea have now blown more than £650m on signing young talent - and the investment's going wrong

Another day, another young Chelsea signing. From the outside, it almost looks like an addiction – but in agreeing a deal for yet another talented teenage prospect, are Chelsea planning intelligently for the future, or demonstrating a lack of joined-up thinking as they spend exorbitantly on a bloated squad despite a precarious financial situation?

Yesterday, Chelsea agreed a deal for 16-year-old Kazak forward Dastan Satpaev, who will move to Stamford Bridge when he turns 18 in a deal worth a reported £3.3m including add-ons. By Chelsea’s munificent standards, it’s hardly a vast investment, but it’s still a new transfer record for Kazakhstan’s Premier League. It also means trying to find room for yet another gifted young player in a squad which is bursting at the seams.

£600m spent on youngsters - but Chelsea still struggle

With the signing of Satpaev, Chelsea have now committed roughly £56m to the purchase of young players who have yet to actually move to the club, with Palmeiras’ Estevão, Independiente del Valle’s Kendry Páez and KRC Genk goalkeeper Mike Penders all due to head to Stamford Bridge at a later date.

That comes on top of an estimated £55m spent on Under-21s this season alone, players who have combined for a total of 31 appearances so far – all of them from Marc Guiu and Renato Veiga, who is now a Juventus player. In total, Chelsea have already spent a breath-taking £600m on players aged 21 or younger since Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital bought the club ahead of the 2022/23 season, excluding the fees for future arrivals. That doesn’t even include the enormous amounts splashed out on Mykhaylo Mudryk and Enzo Fernández, who were both 22 when signed.

Some of those players, of course, were earmarked for the first team and a few have established themselves, or in the case of Cole Palmer positively thrived. A couple of others, such as Wesley Fofana and Roméo Lavia, have been desperately unlucky with injuries. But a considerable amount has also been spent on players who never truly troubled the first team.

Many are currently away on loan, hopefully honing their craft, especially at sister club Strasbourg, who were bought out by Chelsea’s ownership group and essentially re-imagined as a feeder team. Others have already left the club, such as Ângelo, Cesare Casadei and Carney Chukwuemeka. The infamous ‘bomb squad’ of Enzo Maresca’s unwanted cast-offs contains many players in whose futures Chelsea had invested considerable sums.

To give credit where it is due, Chelsea have showed a certain hard-nosed business sense in moving on those youngsters who failed to meet the grade. The club are set to net about £12m from Chukwuemeka’s move to Borussia Dortmund, assuming that the German side trigger the buy option in his loan deal, made about £8m profit on Ângelo’s eventual move to Al Nassr, and a sell-on clause in the deal that sent Casadei to Torino means that they should make a profit of some stripe if he succeeds in Turin. They broke even on the initial fee.

Not that commercialising the buying and selling of young talent ever quite feels right, and there is a valid question as to whether that serves the best interests of the playing squad. The club may well profit from many of the deals they have made in the long term, but that money could also have been spent on building a team that could make the Champions League – which would surely be a more lucrative way for the owners’ cash, as well as one that would be more palatable to the club’s supporters.

But in any case, while they may be making money on some of the investments they have made, the club as a whole is bleeding cash. In the 2022/23 season, the only one for which we have full financial results under the current owners, the club posted a loss of £90m, and with no Champions League football since, it is unlikely that the picture has greatly improved – but had they curbed some of their spending on players who have yet to make any dent on the first team, they would have avoided taking such a big hit on the balance sheet.

Chelsea’s apparent doctrine is to monetise youth, which - combined with creeping concerns over their capacity to remain within the strictures of the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules - has also seen them sell Conor Gallagher, even though he was arguably the club’s most important player in the 2023/24 season under Mauricio Pochettino. The enormous amount spent on youngsters may have a viable commercial theory to back it up, but it can be hard to see how the decisions made make sense for the first team. Selling players like Gallagher to make ends meet, only to spend that money on a combination of future prospects and players like João Félix and Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall is not a sustainable policy, nor one which sets the team up for success.

None of which necessarily suggests that the decision to sign Satpaev is a bad move. He may well shine brightly in a few years’ time. It’s certainly hard to imagine that they will regret their substantial investment in Estevão, a seemingly generational talent. Many of their young prodigies will go on to be successful, some of them, ideally, at Chelsea itself.

But a more focussed approach to youth recruitment would surely be wiser. Partly, because buying fewer Under-21s would allow them to spend more on the first-team and build a squad which could consistently challenge for Champions League qualification, which could have a huge impact on the club’s finances – and partly, it’s because there are so many youngsters at the club now that it’s hard to imagine them all getting the opportunity to bloom.

Vitesse take two - but will it work this time?

Farming players out to Strasbourg will help to provide minutes to some of the players, but that same strategy never worked as well as hoped when it was Vitesse Arnhem who propped the club’s youth strategy up under Roman Abramovich – many exciting prospects went to the Netherlands, few came back and broke into the first team in earnest. Players like Josh McEachran and Lucas Piazon were hyped up but never made the leap. Under Abramovich, the academy system was ultimately something of a let-down, but the new owners seem strangely keen to copy its model.

Even if a combination of playing time on loan and with the Under-21s, or in the lesser cup competitions, does help many of these players to reach their potential, there will be a bottleneck to get into the first-team itself. The clubs that have had the greatest historical success with their youth teams, like Arsenal and Manchester United, have been far more holistic with their development of young talent, gradually bringing players through and only sending their talents out on loan if they see a direct benefit.

Chelsea will have to shove players around to different clubs every season solely to make sure they get playing time, and their own coaches will have no opportunity to mould their technical development or ability to fit seamlessly into the first-team’s tactical set-up. Loans can be beneficial for players who just need that experience of proper playing time, but those who are shipped around for several years on end seldom end up making the grade. Clubs simply don’t have as much oversight over their young talents when they’re elsewhere, even if it’s a feeder team.

If Chelsea’s objective is to sign young players to sell on at a profit and to help them gave the profit and sustainability system, then they may well succeed – but if the object is to build up their first-team over time, then they are making too many expensive mistakes, mistakes which then necessitate more sales, more turnover, and less stability. If Chelsea are indeed living on the edge of the financial rules, then every Mudryk or Dewsbury-Hall or Benoît Badiashile means that a sacrifice has to be made elsewhere to keep the accounts in the black, and those sacrifices will inevitably have to come from selling the club’s best assets.

Chelsea have made many expensive errors in the transfer market since Boehly and Behdad Eghbali took the reins nearly three years ago – but instead of improving their scouting and looking at the root causes of why those deals went south, they are buying to sell, to ameliorate their losses on the balance sheet, without realising that such a policy risks instability in the first team.

Right now, Maresca broadly seems to have the club moving in the right direction again, but Champions League qualification is far from assured – and even if they make it, will they do it season after season if their transfer policy forces them to look at selling players like Levi Colwill just to be able to spend again? And for how long will the brightest young talents be willing to move to Stamford Bridge if it means years in Strasbourg and away from the coaches they want to impress? And, perhaps most a worryingly in the short term, how well will the balance sheet bear the enormous investments being made?