When the Todd Boehly-led ownership group officially purchased Chelsea from Roman Abramovich in May 2022, it sure seemed like they were taking over one of the five best clubs in the world.
In the two years prior to Boehly & Co.'s takeover, Chelsea reached four cup finals. They qualified for the Champions League in both seasons, and they'd won the whole thing just a year prior. While they weren't quite on the level of Liverpool and Manchester City in 2022, they lost to Real Madrid in extra time of the Champions League quarterfinals after a dominant second-leg comeback at the Santiago Bernabeu. Along with those three clubs and maybe Bayern Munich, no one else in Europe could make a legit claim to be sitting ahead of Chelsea in Europe's pecking order.
Since then under Boehly, Chelsea have handed out seven-year contracts seemingly for fun and paid more than €1 billion in transfer fees for 28 new players -- a previously unthinkable sum of money for a previously unthinkable number of acquisitions in an 18th-month span. After adding all of that investment to what was already one of the best teams on the planet, they have since finished 12th in the Premier League last year and are 10th this season.
They are, at least, finally back in a cup final, taking on Liverpool in the Carabao Cup on Sunday (stream it live on ESPN+). But, after spending a record amount of money on signing players, Boehly and the rest of the ownership group have clearly fallen short of their ambitions for Chelsea.
So, with the team one game away from winning the first trophy under their new owners, let's take a look back at those 28 signings and ask a simple question: How many of them have actually worked out? Let's go one step further: How many of these deals were actually good?
How have Chelsea spent, and by how much?
According to the site Transfermarkt, Chelsea have spent €1.1 billion on transfer fees since summer 2022.
You don't need me to tell you that's a lot of money, but I will. If you took all of the money that Boehly and the rest of Chelsea's ownership have invested in just the fees necessary to get a player to break his contract with his previous team, turned it into pennies and stacked those pennies on top of each other, the resulting structure would be more than 150 times taller then Mount Everest.
In soccer terms, Chelsea have devoted more than twice as much money to transfer fees than any other club except Paris Saint-Germain, who have spent €537 million on fees since summer 2022 and who are owned by a trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund.
- Stream FA Cup on ESPN+: Chelsea vs. Leeds (Feb. 28, 2 p.m. ET, U.S. only)
In terms of permanent transfers -- excluding the loans for players such as João Félix last season -- Chelsea have signed 28 players for a fee. The average age of those players is 21.5, and the average transfer fee is €38.9 million. Broken down by position, it looks like this:
• Goalkeepers: three total, average age of 22, average fee of €17.3 million
• Defenders: seven total, average age of 22.6, average fee of €43.1 million
• Midfielders: seven total, average age of 19.4, average fee of €53.1 million
• Forwards: 11 total, average age of 22.1, average fee of €33.1 million
As for where they're acquiring their players:
• England: 11
• France: four
• Brazil: three
• MLS and Italy: two
• Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Ukraine: one each
Those are a couple objective ways to categorize what Chelsea have done so far, but it's time to get subjective. Broadly, these 28 signings, which excludes loans, seem to settle into five categories:
1) It's too early to tell
2) Doesn't look great
3) Bad moves that went badly
4) Players on expensive contracts who play
5) Actually good moves
With that, let's dig into each signing now.
1. It's too early to tell
Among the 28 players signed by Chelsea's new owners, 10 of them have played fewer than 10% of the available Premier League minutes. Two of them, Ishé Samuels-Smith (€4.7 million, from Everton) and Jimmy-Jay Morgan (€3.4 million, from Southampton) joined the club at age 17 from the academies of other English clubs and went directly into Chelsea's under-21 team.
Four of them are currently on loan at other senior teams. Goalkeeper Gaga Slonina (acquired from the Chicago Fire at age 18 for €9.1 million), forward David Datro Fofana (20, from Molde in Norway for €12 million), forward Angelo (age 18, from Santos in Brazil for €15 million) and midfielder Andrey Santos (age 18, from Vasco da Gama for €12.5 million) are all playing for teams not named Chelsea. Angelo and Andrey Santos are playing for Strasbourg, the club in France also owned by Chelsea's ownership group. Slonina is in Belgium, while Datro Fofana is on his second loan this season -- first with Union Berlin and now with Burnley.
The other players below the 10% threshold are Deivid Washington (0.1% of the minutes), Cesare Casadei (0.7%), Romeo Lavia (1.5%) and Carney Chukwuemeka (9.2%).
Washington joined from Santos at 18 for €16 million, but the club wasn't able to get him loaned out. Casadei, who came from Inter Milan for €14.9 million, spent the first half of the season on loan at Leicester, but was recalled in January. Lavia cost €62.1 million to acquire from Southampton at 19 over the summer, and he's barely played thanks to injury issues. Chukwuemeka, an €18 million arrival at 18 from Aston Villa, started the first two games of the season before also getting hurt.
These players are still quite young and have a ways to go before they reach their prime years. But as the injuries to Lavia and Chukwuemeka or Fofana's volatile loan experience show, there is already so much uncertainty in the careers of players at these early ages. Outside of a handful of sure-thing stars who would not be available on the transfer market, it's impossible to have any real certainty that any player signed at 20-or-under will ever be good enough to play for a team with Chelsea's ambitions: challenging for every major domestic and continental trophy.
And so, as of today, Chelsea's ownership group has spent €167.7 million in transfer fees on 10 players who have combined to make two Premier League starts for the club. Both Inter Milan and Bayer Leverkusen -- the teams likely to win Serie A and the Bundesliga this season -- have spent less money than that on all of the players they've acquired over the past two years.
2. Doesn't look great
Every time there's a transfer, we can begin to judge it from the outside based on a number of factors: cost, player age, fit, positional value, etc. But even with all of that context, the most valuable information is what we get once a player actually plays with his new team. Every match, every performance, every decision by the manager not to play the player is a new piece of useful information about whether a given deal is going to pan out.
So, this category is for the players who have mostly given us negative information since joining Chelsea. Here are the players, how they were acquired and how old they were at the time:
• Lesley Ugochukwu: 19, €27 million from Rennes
• Christopher Nkunku: 25, €60 million from RB Leipzig
• Noni Madueke: 20, €35 million from PSV Eindhoven
• Benoit Badiashile: 21, €38 million from Monaco
• Djordje Petrovic: 23, €14 million from New England Revolution
Ugochukwu, Nkunku and Madueke have rarely seen the field -- the former playing 12.1% of the minutes this season, Nkunku appearing 14.2% of the time and the latter getting 15.5% of all the possible playing time. All of these players could become Chelsea stalwarts at some point, but this season counts just as much as any other season. It's a season that Chelsea are paying all of them to play for Chelsea ... and none of them are playing much at all.
Badiashile is still quite young, especially for a center back, but he played about a quarter of the minutes last year and is playing about a quarter of the minutes this year. Petrovic, too, is quite young for a goalkeeper, and has become the starter over the past couple months. Shot-stopping is a volatile metric, and Petrovic was probably the best shot-stopper in MLS history, but so far in the Premier League, Petrovic has struggled to stop shots.
Per FBref's goals prevented metric, Petrovic has allowed 2.3 goals more than we'd expect if the average goalkeeper faced the exact same shots. Per 90 minutes, that mark is worse than every Premier League starter other than Crystal Palace's Sam Johnstone and fellow former Revolution goalkeeper, Matt Turner.
Maybe there was something in the water in Boston? Purple are saves, orange are goals. The bigger the circle, the more difficult the shot faced:
It would not surprise me at all if one or two of the players in this tier end up becoming successes with Chelsea, but they all look less likely to succeed now than when they were initially signed. If you're keeping track, that's another €174 million spent on transfer fees for players who still haven't moved the needle.
So, taking these first two categories of players combined, that's nearly €342 million for signings that so far haven't done much to help Chelsea.
3. Bad deals that became bad deals
Sometimes bad deals become good deals: massively overpaying for a player without a track record who turns into a superstar and whose production vastly exceeds the cost to the club. Or, say, an older player extends his prime way beyond the normal expectation.
The opposite can be true, and good deals can go bad. Both Naby Keita and Jadon Sancho put up superstar numbers at a young age for two of the best teams in the Bundesliga, both came to the Premier League for fees well below what you'd expect for their age and already-established quality, and both of them flamed out without having much of an impact for Liverpool or Manchester United, respectively.
This section, though, is focused on six Chelsea deals that seemed bad at the time and have not worked out since.
We'll start with the two players who no longer even play for Chelsea: Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, who was brought over from Barcelona for €12 million at age 33, and Kalidou Koulibaly, who arrived from Napoli for €38 million at age 31.
Aubameyang had begun his decline years prior, and Arsenal almost seemed to immediately improve as soon as manager Mikel Arteta stopped playing him. Koulibaly was a star defender for the past decade at Napoli, but Chelsea signed him right at the age when defenders start to decline. He plays in Saudi Arabia now, while Aubameyang is in France with Marseille.
After one decent season with Brighton -- 3,000-plus minutes, but just one assist from the fullback position -- Marc Cucurella came to Chelsea at age 24 for a fee of €65.3 million. Neither a commanding center back nor an attacking fullback, Cucurella seemed like a solid ninth or 10th man at best, but Chelsea paid a fee that seemed to suggest some certainty that he'd be a needle-moving star. Instead, across three different managers, he has played just 41.9% of the minutes since joining the club.
Another Brighton signing, goalkeeper Robert Sánchez for €28.7 million, seemed strange at the time, too. Why were Chelsea spending nearly €30 million on a goalkeeper who had never posted a single above-average shot-stopping season in the league and who had been benched by Brighton the season before? Sanchez started two-thirds of Chelsea's games this season, but he hasn't played since early December after being benched for Petrovic. If only they could've seen that coming...
In Wesley Fofana, Chelsea paid €80.4 million to sign a 21-year-old center back with one full professional season as a starter. On top of that, he'd missed all but seven games in the previous season because of a broken leg. Despite all kinds of uncertainty around the player's health and his track record of performance, Chelsea made Fofana one of the most expensive defenders in the history of the sport. Since joining the club in summer 2022, he has appeared in just 15 Premier League matches thanks to a succession of long-term injury issues.
And then there's Mykhailo Mudryk, the youngest player in this category at just 23 years old. The big issue with the Mudryk deal was that it implied all kinds of certainty and confidence from a player and situation that didn't justify either. While teams like Brighton and Napoli have massively benefitted from scouting players from lower-tier leagues, the reason the approach makes sense is because it allows you to make lots of small money bets on different players. If they fail, no big deal. If they hit, you've got a star for almost nothing.
The quality of the Ukrainian league has massively declined since Russia's invasion of the country -- how could it not? -- so signing a player like Mudryk from Shakhtar Donetsk is way different than signing someone like Willian or Fernandinho, back when the league was filled with foreign stars. Taking a chance on a super-fast young Ukrainian prospect could still make sense for any team, but Chelsea made Mudryk one of the 50 highest paid players of all time, paying €70 million to acquire him last January. That's what Manchester City paid for Rodri and Liverpool paid for Alisson!
In his first year-and-a-half with the club, Mudryk looks like a player who made the leap from a middling, chaotic European league to the best league in the world. Outside of a handful of runs with the ball, he has provided very little attacking production and has played in less than 40% of the minutes this season.
4. Players on expensive contracts who play
In Enzo Fernández and Moisés Caicedo, Chelsea have two of the three most expensive midfielder contracts of all time -- on the same team, in the same midfield.
In January 2023, they spent €121 million to acquire Enzo from Benfica at the age of 22. At the time, that was €16 million more than any other team had ever spent on a transfer fee for a midfielder. The gap has since shrunk after Chelsea also spent €116 million to acquire Moises Caicedo (and Arsenal did the same with Declan Rice) this past summer.
Historically, midfielders who don't score and assist goals haven't been so pricey to sign. And insofar as we're able to understand the value of everything that happens on a soccer field, this seems like one of the few things the soccer world has right. Defenders and attackers are "worth" more because everything that happens around the goal is more valuable than everything that happens in the middle of the field. An action near the goal can drastically shift a given possession's chances of becoming a goal, while most things that happen in the middle of the field have only a marginal effect.
This logic isn't perfect, but it's close enough. Beyond the value that the best midfielders provide with the ball and with their positioning off it, I think the most valuable deep-lying midfielders also provide value in the flexibility that they provide to the rest of their team. Rice's defensive proficiency, for example, frequently allows Arsenal to play five attack-oriented players in front of him. That won't show up in his individual statistics, but it will make the team better. And guess what? Arsenal are better this year than they were last year.
Caicedo and Fernandez, though, play together. The money spent to sign Fernandez didn't allow Chelsea to then spend money on other weaker areas of the team -- no, they then went and spent just as much to sign another midfielder. So, neither player has given Chelsea that valuable team-building flexibility. And on top of that, they both were so expensive to sign that they have to be truly world-class game-changers to really justify the costs.
Instead, they've simply just been pretty good. They've both played about three-quarters of the minutes for Chelsea this season.
Enzo is one of the best progressive passers in the league. These are all of his passes that increased Chelsea's chances of scoring by at least 2%, per Stats Perform's expected-possession-value model.
Caicedo, meanwhile, has looked uncomfortable on the ball at times but continues to win back possession, not lose possession, press forward and protect the back line.
It's just that with both of them playing a lot, the team is still in 10th place. How much of an impact are they actually having on the club's performance?
More pertinent to performance might be the €56.2 million move for Manchester City's Raheem Sterling in summer 2022. He was 27 at the time of arrival and turned 29 in December, and it really just seems like one of the best Premier League attackers of his generation has finally hit a wall.
In Sterling's last season with Manchester City, he averaged 0.72 non-penalty expected goals+assists per 90 minutes. Last season, that dipped to 0.51. This year, it has ticked down to 0.47, which ranks 43rd in the league among players featuring in at least 30 minutes per game.
5. The actually good deals
To increase the number of soccer games you win, you have to find a way to acquire more talented players than your rivals would acquire for the same amount of money. Chelsea, of course, can outspend all but a handful of other clubs in the world, and thanks to their contract-engineering-scheme, they've vastly outspent all of their opponents on transfer fees over the past two seasons.
And yet, there are really only four players who you could even argue are providing any kind of value beyond what Chelsea paid to acquire them.
Chelsea needed a competent right back behind the frequently injured Reece James, and Malo Gusto (€30 million from Lyon at 19 years old) has given them just that, featuring in more than half of the minutes this season. They also needed someone to provide valuable minutes next to Thiago Silva at center back, and Axel Disasi (€45 million from Monaco at 25 years old) has featured in 91% of the minutes this year -- second most of anyone on the team.
It also seems like they still might think that they need a star center forward, but I'm not sure that they don't already have one. While Nicolas Jackson has only scored seven goals this season, he has taken shots worth 11.3 non-penalty xG so far this season. On top of that, he contributes in most of the other aspects of the game -- pressing, buildup passing, ballcarrying.
Overall, Jackson ranks fourth in the league with 0.77 non-penalty xG+xA per 90, behind only Erling Haaland, Mohamed Salah and Darwin Núñez. Chelsea paid €37 million to acquire the then-22-year-old from Villarreal. If his output ever starts to match his underlying performance, that kind of player would go for three times what Chelsea paid to get him. Even if he just keeps up his current pace -- 0.55 non-penalty goals+assists per 90 -- he's still giving you way more than that transfer fee represents.
Lastly, there's Cole Palmer, who was acquired at 21 years old for €47 million from Manchester City over the summer. I'm still not sure what his best position is, and his five penalty goals drastically overstate his actual impact. But Palmer already looks like one of the best passers in the league, and he's currently producing 0.6 non-penalty xG+xA per 90 -- a top-10 mark among players who have played at least 1,500 minutes.
Despite the promise of Palmer and Jackson, the contributions of Disasi and Gusto, and the solidity provided by Fernandez and Caicedo, it still hasn't added up to much. Chelsea have vastly outspent the performance they are getting back.
Chelsea are better than the 10th-best team that the league table says they are. But they're not much better. Looking at non-penalty xG differential, they're sixth, which is still well below where they want to be or where they should be with all of the money they spent.
After taking over the club, Chelsea's new owners decided that one of the best teams in the world needed a massive overhaul. They succeeded in flipping the squad -- there's no denying that. Chelsea are now the youngest team in the league: an average of 25.1 years, weighted by minutes played. And only one player from the pre-Boehly era, the 39-year-old Thiago Silva, has played more than 1,000 minutes for the club season.
All of a sudden, Chelsea do have a totally different team than the one that won the Champions League or the one that played Liverpool in the Carabao Cup final two years ago. It's different, yes, but is it better? You'll see Sunday when Chelsea face Liverpool in the Carabao. Or you could just take some time to look through the Premier League table over the past couple seasons. Sometimes, it doesn't lie.