Forget Salah, Ake and De Bruyne - Chelsea are entering a whole new era of transfer blunders

Mason Mount looks increasingly likely to depart Chelsea – and Kai Havertz won’t be far behind, by the sounds of it. Both departures are symptomatic of last season’s struggles, but they will also join a long list of players moved on by the club – only to play at a level far higher than they managed at Stamford Bridge.

Mohamed Salah, Kevin de Bruyne and Nathan Aké are among a number of players bought young, sold on for a small profit, but not given the chance to blossom into the better (and more valuable) players they would become down the line. Romelu Lukaku was sold for a €20m profit, only to be bought back for nearly €80m more seven years later. Chelsea have always been keen to play the horse trading game, but rarely got it right.

Mount and Havertz – both 24 years old – are a little older than most of the players Chelsea moved on prematurely, and their stories are very different: Mount the superlative academy product, Havertz the hyper-talented overseas import unable to live up to his billing. But they could easily end up representing fresh mistakes in the transfer market – and while a surface reading puts them in the same bracket as Salah, De Bruyne and company, these are problems produced by different kinds of mistakes.

Mount is likely to leave for something in the area of £50m – not bad money, but a fraction of the fees they’ve paid for players like Enzo Fernández and Mykhaylo Mudryk. His value, had Chelsea qualified for the Champions League and a new contract been signed, would surely be much higher. As it is, he has just one more year on his deal at Stamford Bridge and Chelsea are compelled to cash in.

The price Havertz will fetch is hard to call at the moment – Chelsea’s valuation of £75m is highly unlikely to be met and realistically, a compromise figure will be reached with one of the German’s suitors. Chances are he will be sold at a loss despite having two years left on his initial five-year contract with the club.

Under the old Roman Abramovich regime, the trading of young players was a large part of the financial model that the club ran by. Players were bought young and cheap, developed, sold on, and those profits went a long way to paying off the cash spent on the first team – Salah and De Bruyne were both sold on for a profit, and were therefore deemed successful trades at the time by the standards of the system in place.

And the system worked – Chelsea were in a pretty strong financial position for most of the Abramovich era, and the player trading they did was a part of the reason why, albeit an often exaggerated part of their financial strength. The problem was the gap between their hard-nosed business sense and their talent identification – they could have made far more money on two players who ended up being among the very best in the world. Or just have had them in the squad…

Now there is a new boss in town, new investors, and new mistakes. Allowing a player like Mount, hugely important to the team and hugely valuable player on the balance sheets, to get down to one year left on his contract was negligent. To be all but forced into selling him for less than the club has paid for players half as good is more so.

With Havertz, the problem predates Clearlake Capital but comes down to the wrong players being bought for the wrong coaches – Havertz has talent to burn but has spent most of his time at Stamford Bridge playing out of position and struggling, while a succession of managers, some ill-suited to the job, try to sort everything out in their own ways. Now he will be sold on for a loss in order to ameliorate overspending elsewhere.

The Havertz sale would be far more palatable if it wasn’t a necessity thanks to FFP requirements – the lack of Champions League football puts an enormous squeeze on the finances for the next couple of years, a problem only coming up because Chelsea spent more money in one year than any other club in history, all under the auspices of a wealthy American who installed himself as sporting director despite a complete lack of personal history in the game.

In the past, Chelsea’s biggest flaw was their failure to integrate many of their huge numbers of young players into the first team – the club was winning trophies, but missing out on chances to improve while a horde of talented teens spent seasons in Vitesse. Now the mistakes have been baked in right from the start – a total mismanagement of resources costing the club cash and quality.

Todd Boehly and Clearlake cannot roll the clock back and undo their many poor purchases – but they can spend less and smarter to balance the books. The reported arrival of Moisés Caicedo fills a need but will cost huge amounts of money that have to be made back somewhere else – all while N’Golo Kanté, one of the best ball-winning midfielders in Premier League history, departs on a free. Chelsea could not have predicted being wildly outgunned by the sudden Saudi Pro League spending spree, but they could have offered a new deal at the start of the campaign and prevented the situation from occurring.

Chelsea will likely try to offload almost every other player whose contract ends, like Mount’s, in 2024 – Christian Pulisic, Ruben Loftus-Cheek and Mateo Kovačić. A few others are getting on and short-term contacts are a necessity. But one of the most important pieces of business they can undertake this summer is to tie down players who are down to leave in 2025 before their value depreciates – Levi Colwill, for instance, would be worth a whole lot more to the club if he extends soon. We’ll soon find out whether Chelsea’s current ownership have learned that lesson.

When Chelsea made their player trading mistakes in the past, they were unforced errors, a product of a blind spot in a mostly well-run team. Now Chelsea are victims of their own systemic foul-ups, spending big money to reduce the quality of their squad. It’s possible to correct the problem going forward, but that starts with finding bargain signings as they balance their books in the short term, not spending big on a Brighton player again, even if Caicedo is liable to succeed where Marc Cucurella has thus far failed. Caicedo may prove to be a brilliant player at Stamford Bridge – but the fact that the rumour mill is still focused on big, flashy buys rather than sly bits of budget work should be a cause for some concern at Chelsea.

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Clearlake got virtually everything wrong in their first season in charge – and if there are no clear signs of a change in direction, it’s optimistic to think that things will be any better for the second act. Time will tell.