Chelsea FC losing the 2026 FA Cup final 1-0 to Manchester City will have been disappointing for the club’s fans. But perhaps the result was not hugely surprising, as the London club hasn’t had a brilliant season on the pitch.
Off the pitch, you could argue it’s been even worse.
Moments of anguish have included the expensive sacking in April 2026 of manager Liam Rosenior after just 106 days in the job. He was the side’s fifth manager (or head coach) in three years.
A month before that, Chelsea was fined over £10 million by the Premier League for breaching financial regulations – the biggest fine the league has ever imposed.
Added to (or taken away from) this, Chelsea then also posted the largest ever pre-tax financial loss in Premier League history. This amounted to £262.2 million in the 2024-25 season.
Not all of these events can be blamed on the club’s current owners, the US consortium known as BlueCo. Previously owned by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, Chelsea was sold in 2022 as a “distressed asset”, meaning that it needed to be sold quickly (and probably not for its full worth). This was because Abramovich’s assets had been frozen over his links to Vladimir Putin following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
When the new owners bought the club, they started combing through the financial books and found evidence of breaches of Premier League regulations which the club itself reported.
Part of this related to just over £47 million worth of undisclosed payments to unregistered agents and others as part of their plans to buy in new players. According to league rules, all payments relating to transfers need to go through the club books for reasons of fairness.
Leaving tens of millions of pounds out of the records means that the club shows fewer expenses than it should. This in turn could potentially shield it from breaking the league’s “profitability and sustainability” (PSR) rules, which are designed to force clubs into being financially sound businesses.
Those rules mean that clubs are allowed to build up footballing losses of no more than £105 million over a three-year period. Given Chelsea have been making losses for years, correctly recording expenses would increase those losses and potentially put them in breach of the PSR rules.
A fine of £10.75m is no small matter. It brings Chelsea closer to the PSR limit for the coming year, leaving more belt-tightening around spending decisions.
At the time, the club said in a statement: “From the outset of this process, the club has treated these matters with the utmost seriousness, providing full cooperation to all relevant regulators.”
But it is not just Chelsea that is affected. Football is a highly interconnected industry.
While clubs compete against each other, they are also very dependent on each other for matches (otherwise there would be nothing to watch and no tickets to sell) and for players. They also often suffer losses, with cash flow issues and other financial problems common. So having a competitor spend more than they should can negatively affect other clubs.
Football blues
Chelsea have also led the way in doing clever things within accounting rules, which others have followed. In 2023, the club started offering new players very long-term contracts which allowed them to spread their declared costs over a longer period.
So for example, a player bought for £90 million might be given a nine-year contract, meaning the annual cost can be recorded as £10 million.
This can help a club to stay within within PSR boundaries. But it also comes with financial risk (with big spending and time commitments), so to avoid other clubs following suit, both Uefa and the Premier League have now limited (to five) the number of years that can be used in the spending calculation.
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Chelsea also effectively sold its women’s team to itself by switching ownership to Chelsea’s parent company for almost £200 million. This shows up as a decent profit for Chelsea, providing another benefit in terms of staying within PSR boundaries. The idea caught on, with Aston Villa and Everton doing the same thing before the Premier League closed this loophole too.
So from a financial perspective it will be interesting to see what tactics Chelsea comes up with next. The fans though will surely be more interested in the tactics chosen by the club’s latest signing, manager Xabi Alonso. And if he gets the club winning again, they’ll happily write off this season’s considerable losses.
