By David Owen
February 3 – Chelsea may have boosted this year’s profits by close to £8m as a result of the club’s deadline-day dealings in which it effectively swapped one attack-minded wide man for another. The Premier League leaders brought in Colombian World Cup star Juan Cuadrado (pictured) from Fiorentina for a reported £23.3 million, while selling German World Cup winner André Schürrle to Wolfsburg for a reported £22 million.
While the deals largely cancelled each other out in cash terms, the lop-sided way in which player valuations are handled in English corporate accounts ought to enable the Blues to post a net gain on two deals that, on the face of it, left the club out of pocket to the tune of £1.3 million.
This is how the accounting magic might work:
Schürrle originally joined the West London club from Bayer Leverkusen in June 2013. This was said to be on a five-year contract for a £18 million fee. Since, when a player is bought, the transfer fee is normally amortised over the length of his contract, this suggests that around two-thirds of the German’s 2013 price tag, say £12 million, would have remained on Chelsea’s books at the time of this week’s sale.
The £22 million reportedly paid by Wolfsburg exceeds this residual value by £10 million – a handy enough gain even for a club with Chelsea’s enviable financial resources.
Against this must be set the portion of Cuadrado’s fee that needs to be amortised over the remaining five months of Chelsea’s 2014-15 financial year.
The 26-year-old Colombian is said to have signed a four-and-a-half year contract. This suggests the amount in question would be just over one-eleventh of the overall fee, or some £2.2 million.
Deducting this from the Schürrle gain leaves £7.8 million which should approximate to the combined benefit of the two deals to the club’s bottom-line, excluding other imponderables such as wage costs.
A significant surplus on player sales was one factor behind the £18.4 million profit – the biggest under Roman Abramovich’s ownership – that the club reported for its 2013-14 financial year.
The financial astuteness of its recent deal-making has not, however, been at the expense of quality: the present squad is generally recognised as significantly stronger than the group inherited by manager José Mourinho on his return to West London in 2013.
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