Ever since Clearlake Capital took over Chelsea Football Club, the landscape at Stamford Bridge has changed incredibly.
The Blues have been embarrassingly unsuccessful under the new ownership, with Todd Boehly’s prediction that they’d beat Real Madrid 3-0 in their April 2023 match-up toe-curlingly awful and lacking respect to the Champions League Kings.
?? "Chelsea are going to win 3-0 tonight." ?
Todd Boehly is very confident about beating Real Madrid ? pic.twitter.com/L0SvqSmlGa
— Football Daily (@footballdaily) April 12, 2023
In any event, the amount of money that’s been spent over the past couple of seasons should arguably have seen success on the pitch, but that hasn’t been forthcoming.
Enzo Maresca now has the responsibility of doing better than the likes of Thomas Tuchel, Graham Potter, caretaker Frank Lampard and Mauricio Pochettino.
It’s not going to be a walk in the park for the Italian who, let’s not forget, has never managed an English top-flight side.
Chelsea’s finances are not in great shape – Football finance expert
In fact, he’s never managed a team in a top division anywhere, given that his stints at both Parma and Leicester City were in the Italian and English second tiers.
Away from on-pitch matters, there is the scale of financial mismanagement under Clearlake which has made it’s way into the public domain.
Football finance expert, Stefan Borson, discussed the same with Football Insider, and it doesn’t make for good reading for Chelsea’s long-suffering supporters.
“It’s very hard to properly understand what the plan is at the moment at Chelsea because they keep spending,” he said.
“They are going to get to a situation where they approach £300million of player amortisation per year to go with a wage bill that for 2022-23 was £400million.
“It will probably be £300million for the season just gone and for the upcoming season I would think it will probably be £300million again.
“That means you start the season with £600million of costs of amortisation plus wages.
“The turnover is between £400-450million, so straight away they are £150million down and we haven’t even talked in that equation about the other operating expenses of the club, which are probably another £150million.”