You’ve got to remember in all this that Chelsea have always wanted to sign Omari Kellyman. Omari Kellyman is the final piece of the puzzle. This is why they let Aston Villa sign him for £600,000, watched him play 35 Premier League minutes and have now agreed to pay Aston Villa £19m for him.
Welcome, somehow, to yet another new age of transfer nonsense, the era of the “mutually beneficial” deal, a phrase so steeped in euphemism you have to wring it out before saying it.
Before now, if you heard tell of a club’s interest in a footballer, you at least assumed that they likely wanted to sign him. That’s no longer a guarantee.
Listen out for the following names: Ian Maatsen, Lewis Dobbin, Tim Iroegbunam, Yankuba Minteh, Dominic Calvert-Lewin, Jhon Duran, Conor Gallagher; there will be more.
There is a group of clubs who, we are told, must sell players before 30 June to avoid falling foul of Profitability and Sustainability Rules, so what works better in football than teamwork?
The explanation is obvious, if administrative. Say you sign a player from a club for £10m and sell them one of your players for £10m. The £10m you paid can be amortised over the length of the player’s contract (best make it five years). The amount received can be put onto the balance sheet in June’s figures and thus, hey presto, you’re immediately sustainable and profitable. Huzzah!
There are those partisan supporters who will read those last two sentences and think “Yes, my club is indeed run by clever geniuses who are gaming the system and getting away with it”. Accounting and player trading loophole champions, you’ll never sing that etc and so on.
Which is, of course, total hogwash. You aren’t saving money, you’re loading further debt on the club for future years, kicking the can down the road in the process and banking on there always being a stream of academy kids (sorry, we must call them Units of Pure Profit now) that you can sell on to fund your next transfer splurge that supporters demand.
It would be interesting to know what the Units of Pure Profit themselves make of all this. The rush of a presumed pay rise and the new challenge may offer temporary succour, but ultimately you’re being used as a pawn for your new club to buy players it actually wants. Perhaps the natural development is a young man in an announcement video, shaking hands with the accountant holding up his fee on a Casio calculator.
This is not, it goes without saying, how the system is supposed to work. Any system of financial limitation that incentivises clubs selling their academy graduates, or avoids the issue of elite clubs hoarding players by persuading them to farm them around like faceless units, is non-ideal to the point of being broken.
But here’s the thing: clubs will always look to find loopholes and clubs don’t have to operate like this. Those who say “well what choice do we have?” are deliberately ignoring that. The upper reaches of the PSR limitations are meant to be ceilings, not targets to be nudged under like a game of balance sheet limbo.
You can choose to ignore the pressure of those who demand you sign more and more players and who insist that transfer activity is the best route to squad improvement. You can develop your academy kids for your own first team. Just because another club is behaving maniacally doesn’t mean that yours has to.
There are many who see PSR, and the Premier League in general, as meddlers in something beyond their own business. Club A has a new multibillionaire or state owner and they should be permitted to spend what they like. They’re good for the money, after all. That has become the argument de rigeur: this is business so let them operate like businesses for God’s sake.
Which is fine while all is going well, but what happens when it’s not, when your state owner or multibillionaire decides they are bored and want to spend their money elsewhere and stop funding.
In an open market with less accounting regulation, clubs spend more on transfers and wages and are then in a worse position than they already are. Take a moment to think what might be the scene at Everton right now if they had spent £200m more on players or if Farhad Moshiri had got his way on the 777 Partners sale.
Ultimately this comes down to what you believe football clubs should be, the relentless pursuers of new players for short-termist silverware goals or social institutions.
Do you want to have a better chance of winning a trophy next season or a better chance of your kids and grandkids supporting the same club? If this is just business, do you really think that a football club is like any other business? Should it be allowed to just die when the money runs out?
To repeat: your football club doesn’t have to behave like this. This balance sheet merry-go-round, which is now pulling academy players into its orbit, is nothing but a construct. You are under no obligation to celebrate it.