From Chelsea's Cole Palmer to Aaron Wan-Bissaka – why clubs are giving players longer contracts

When West Ham United agreed the signing of Aaron Wan-Bissaka for a fee of £15m on Tuesday, it raised more than a few eyebrows – not because of the deal between West Ham and Manchester United, which was a pretty routine transfer, but because of the seven-year contract Wan-Bissaka was given by his new employers. He will be 33 by the time his new deal expires.

On the very same day, Chelsea announced that they had agreed a contract extension with star player Cole Palmer which will keep him at the club until 2033 – a nine-year deal, the joint-longest contract in Premier League history. Only Enzo Fernández has ever been pinned down by the same team for so long.

All of which begs an obvious question – why are clubs giving their players such lengthy deals? For years, it was rare for teams to offer contracts which went beyond five years, but that paradigm has shifted.

Chelsea were the trend-setters, at least in the Premier League, and at first their motivation appeared to be strictly financial. Because players are considered to be ‘intangible assets’ under British financial law, the cost of purchasing them could be spread across the length of the contract – meaning then when they signed Mykhaylo Mudryk, for instance, and gave him a seven-and-a-half year contract, they could divide the cost evenly across every year of his deal. Suddenly, an initial £62m can go down on the books as just £7.75m each year for eight years. This process is known as amortisation.

That (entirely legal and legitimate) accountancy trick allowed them to spend far more money that the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules would otherwise allow. It was something other clubs could have been doing for years, but it was Chelsea who spotted the opportunity and dove in head first.

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That trick no longer works, however. In December last year, Premier League clubs voted to bring their rules in line with UEFA’s – now, clubs can only amortise their purchases over a total of five years. If clubs tie a player down for longer, it no longer has anything to do with profit and sustainability rules (which are, in any case, set to be scrapped at the end of the 2024/25 season). If Chelsea continue to offer extra-long deals, it’s because they also value the control it gives them over talented players’ long-term future.

So why did Wan-Bissaka get tied down for seven long years when he’s already 26? Few full-backs are able to continue playing at the very top level into their mid-thirties, after all, so it seems bizarre on the surface – but once again, financial rules play a key role.

Although West Ham will only be able to spread the £15m up-front cost of signing over the next five years for accounting purposes, they still need to factor in the size of their wage bill. Wages can’t be shunted around the books quite so easily and his wages at Manchester United were set at a substantial £90,000 per week, which West Ham weren’t willing to match.

That doesn’t mean they weren’t able to do so – they have several players on six-figure weekly salaries with Lucas Paquetá reportedly earning £150,000 per week – but having already spent nearly £125m on new signings this summer they may not have been able to pay as much as Wan-Bissaka wanted on a weekly basis without pushing their total outgoings too far into the red. The Premier League’s rules, after all, look at the total amount spent on players whether it’s transfer fees, signing bonuses, agent fees or their salary.

In signing Wan-Bissaka to a seven-year deal, they have agreed a lower weekly wage but effectively guaranteed it for longer – he will earn what he wanted in total, just spread out over a longer period. Combined with the fact that Wan-Bissaka was given a ‘golden goodbye’ of £5.6m (as reported by the Manchester Evening News), it was a good enough deal for Wan-Bissaka to accept even though he won’t earn as much as he used to on a weekly or monthly basis. It is, in other words, amortisation by other means.

That carries risks, of course. If Wan-Bissaka struggles to perform or endures a serious injury that curtails his career, West Ham will find it harder to sell him and get off the hook for those wages, but they are clearly judging that to be a risk worth taking. The player, meanwhile, will have far less leverage than he might have done to force a move down the line if that was what he wanted.

That last piece of logic may play into Chelsea’s decision to extend Palmer’s contract as well. The longer a key asset is contracted, the more leverage the club have in deciding his future – but Palmer had already signed an eight-year deal (one of which was a club option) at Stamford Bridge and had very little leeway as it was. So what gives?

Palmer’s new deal reportedly increases his weekly wage from £80,000 per week to approximately £120,000, bringing him in line with players like Fernández and Moisés Caicedo, another player signed at great expense and with a very length deal indeed.

That may look like bad business from Chelsea, but they would likely point out that Palmer is still earning far, far less than other top players at big clubs and they have now guaranteed a reasonable contract for even longer. Raheem Sterling, for instance, is earning £300,000 per week at the same club. Furthermore, they imply a culture in which exceptional performance is rewarded even when the club don’t really have to, and may see this as a motivational tool. Whether that tool is worth £40,000 every week for the next nine years is, admittedly, debatable, but keeping star players happy at all costs isn’t exactly a new concept for the sport.

Furthermore, they will now be able to cling on to Palmer all the way through to the start of his thirties if they so wish - essentially, the club has guaranteed themselves a talented player’s best years. If he continues playing as he did last year, it’s no great leap to imagine that a rich club might want to offer him a deal that looks more like Sterling’s, but he would have no leverage with which to try and force a move, and Chelsea have much more control and certainty that they won’t lose a star player or be forced to pay him an excessive amount down the line if they don’t want to.

None of Chelsea’s executives have yet commented on the logic behind the move, and given that Palmer was already under a lengthy contract it certainly seems thinner than it does with Wan-Bissaka – perhaps not the first time that the rationale between decisions Chelsea’s new ownership have made seems a little suspect.

Few other clubs have followed Chelsea’s lead in offering ultra-long contracts as yet, but now that the idea is out there it wouldn’t be a surprise to see agents trying to push for similar deals for their clients in the future – after all, longer deals provide more financial security, while giving the clubs more control over the future of their prized assets. When young players work out and hit their full potential, these deals will look very smart indeed for the clubs that make use of them, but when players fail for any reason, they’ll be a liability. The biggest problem for Chelsea or any other sides that follow suit is that it may be a good few years before we know how this strategy pans out.