The idea behind the new Chelsea ownership’s transfer plans was simple. Buy low, sell high.
Sadly, it doesn’t always work like that. It’s hard to buy low when you’re Chelsea, for starters. Clubs know you’ve got money, and we got fleeced on a number of deals simply because the sellers knew how much we needed to get a deal done.
Then there’s the other issue – no matter what you pay for a player, their value isn’t going to increase unless they’re playing well. And it’s very hard for them to play well in a team full of new faces. So in the main, very few (if any) of our major buys would currently get near what we paid for them if we were to sell them now.
The big exception
The great exception to all this, of course, is Cole Palmer. Here the sporting directors did it right – they got him for a low price, and he’s since played so exceptionally well that his value has increased.
It’s impossible to get it right every time of course, but their hit rate so far has been scandalously low. The CIES Football Observatory, which estimates players value, claims that Palmer’s value is now £100m, more than double the £40m we paid.
The problem is of course, that this is not an increase we really want to realise. If a player is doing well and going up in value, we’d rather keep them in the team.
Just imagine the scenes if we sold Palmer this summer, no matter the price tag…
It’s all pretty irrelevant if you don’t want or need to sell! But a note on selling while we’re on the topic…
How foolish does the club who sold Christian Pulisic for 20m last year look right now? The voices at Chelsea News and in the stands clamored for more than a year that he was a bust and just had to go and now look how idiotic that impulse has turned out to be!
I said it over and over and over in these comments that the English blowhards were all selling him short because he’d never enjoyed the full faith of the manager and been given a run of games in his preferred position. Combined with the bad luck of repeated injuries, he’d just never been given a fair shake. But folks like SuperFrank bought into the groupthink and managed to convince themselves he was a bust and had no future. My word! How wrong they were!
And he’s not the only former Chelsea man helping AC Milan to second place in Serie A. Nearly half of their starting lineup are our cast offs—Timori, Loftus-Cheek, Giroud. This article indicates that those guys played a major role in bringing Pulisic there and it’s telling that one of the aspects they touted was the settled atmosphere around the club (which no doubt stands in stark contrast to the pressure-cooker-like zoo that the supporters and the constant managerial changes have created around Stamford Bridge). Read and weep:
https://apple.news/A8cHLtZKsQxSHfIdBtRiYEw