The £114m forward Chelsea may have forced themselves into signing

We’re at a point where the plot twists in Cheslea’s summer transfer window would be rejected by soap scriptwriters for being too unbelievable. Even at its most absurd, Coronation Street probably wouldn’t have João Félix coming back to Stamford Bridge – but then again, Gail probably never had to make a multi-million pound purchase solely to service the needs of a tangled web of financial commitments.

Negotiations between Chelsea and Atlético Madrid to sign Félix – reported by The Daily Mail among others – aren’t taking place because Chelsea were stunned by the Portuguese forward’s quality during a relatively underwhelming loan spell in the 2022/23 season, or because Enzo Maresca has identified his qualities as essential to his squad. They’re trying to sign him because their finances will be in a mess if they don’t.

All of this has come about because of the unexpected collapse of a £34.5m deal to sign young striker Samu Omorodion from Diego Simeone’s side. The cash Atlético Madrid earned from that deal would be used to sign both Conor Gallagher and Julián Álvarez from Manchester City, but now that a “major problem” with contract negotiations has scuppered that move (per The Athletic), Atléti need to find somebody else to sell. Chelsea, meanwhile, are equally crowbarred into buying someone from the Spanish capital.

Having treated the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules (PSR) as something to be worried about later, Chelsea’s current ownership find themselves desperate to sell homegrown players in order to plug the massive black hole in their accounts and keep the books tentatively balanced. Selling Gallagher would represent pure profit on the right side of the ledger which can be banked immediately, while the costs of acquiring Omorodion, like the many other youngsters signed at great expense in recent months, can be amortised and split over five years. So even though the fees agreed for Gallagher and Omorodion were similar, Chelsea would be able to put down a large ‘profit’ to put towards this year’s PSR calculations.

With the Omorodion deal falling through, Chelsea need to sign someone different from the same club or the Gallagher deal likely collapses too (and perhaps the Álvarez deal with it, as the same accountancy tricks are at play in Spain), and that would send the Blues back to square one – desperately needing to sell academy players to dodge a points deduction down the line. They may yet be able to find another buyer for Gallagher if needs be, or to sell Trevoh Chalobah or Armando Broja, but moving Gallagher likely eases a lot of issues. Without access to their books, a degree of guesswork is involved, but the fact that they have been pushing hard to sell the England midfielder for a year or so despite impressive performances under Mauricio Pochettino provides a hint that the need to sell is somewhat urgent.

All of which brings us back to João Félix. Signed by Atlético Madrid for £114m back in 2019, the former Benfica forward has never really paid his fee back. A return of 25 goals in 96 league games for his permanent employers was deemed insufficient for the outlay and over the past two seasons, they have been trying their best to find a buyer who will pay off at least some of the losses incurred.

That led to a loan spell with Chelsea (four goals in 16 league games, no assists and some pretty flimsy performances) and, last year, with Barcelona, where he started brightly before fading (seven goals in 30 in La Liga – apparently, he scores almost exactly once every four games wherever he plays). Throughout the last two seasons, the pattern has been occasional spells of sparky form interspersing longer runs in which he fails to make an impact. He is a fine technician, a lovely dribbler and his movement is excellent, but somehow he seems to fall at the final hurdle all too often. He looks for all the world as if he should be a great creative presence who scores with regularity, but the final pass never comes and the finishing is just a couple of notches down from where it needs to be.

Now, finally, a sucker has been found. Chelsea probably don’t really want Félix, although at 24 years old he’s not past the point of being considered young enough to develop into the player he threatened to be back at Benfica, at the very least, and we don’t seem to know how much money he would cost (over the next five years, anyway). The deal may not be all that bad, and maybe Maresca can become the first coach to get a consistent tune out of him since he was a teenager. But it must still be depressing for fans, players and even managers when players are bought and sold according not to their clubs’ tactical needs and desires but to keep the accountants happy.

It's surely demoralising for a player like Chalobah, who played well when given chances under Pochettino last season but now finds himself banned from first-team training in a calculated act of petty cruelty, seemingly designed to ensure the player doesn’t get any big ideas about refusing to move and fighting for his place. But if somebody meets his £25m asking price, that’s a bit of a nudge towards PSR’s break even point and maybe even enough to cover the first year or so of payments towards Victor Osimhen, whose recent transfer request has fuelled speculation that he might be moving to Chelsea after all.

Critics of PSR would likely observe that it’s a pity that this sort of behaviour is encouraged by the way the rules treat the sale of home-grown players. Others might wonder if flogging good players like Gallagher and Chalobah is only incentivised if their club has overspent and failed to regulate their transfer dealings over the course of a couple of seasons. Take your preferred position, but there’s no argument that Chelsea have, thus far, spent too much money on too many players for minimal return on investment, and now young men who have worked their socks off are paying the price – and Félix prepares himself to be flogged off to a new owner like a racehorse in a syndicate.

Maybe this will all have a happy ending. Maybe Chalobah will find a club he loves playing for, perhaps Félix finds his best form at Stamford Bridge and finally fulfils his sky-high potential, and maybe Gallagher is just as perfect a fit for life under Simeone as he looks to be on paper. Perhaps Omorodion goes on to have a long and impressive career instead of scrapping with five other young forwards for a place on the bench under Maresca and the next seven managers that Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali hire. But it feels like many more people would be a fair bit happier if we lived in a world in which footballers weren’t treated as people rather than ‘intangible assets’ by their teams, even if that’s what they are to the bean counters. But that isn’t the world we live in any more.