Todd Boehly has been putting faith in clever contracts, young recruits and Potter’s diplomacy

To understand the scale of Chelsea owner Todd Boehly’s confidence in rewriting the rules of the transfer market — splashing out £320million last month to add to the £250m spent in the summer — it is worth relating a conversation with someone close to the project.

When it was put to them that this had all been tried before — see the Venky brothers’ demise at Blackburn, Peter Ridsdale living the dream at Leeds or Farhad Moshiri’s scattergun Everton spending — and that you cannot reinvent the wheel in football, there was an indignant response.

‘You absolutely can reinvent the wheel. The wheel has been reinvented countless times. The car was a reinvention of the wheel. The Premier League formation in 1992 was a reinvention of football.’

Whatever Boehly and his co-owners Behdad Eghbali and Jose Feliciano lack, it is not self-assurance. They are not tip toeing into a sport in which they have limited knowledge and are scoping out the ground.

Point out that they have spent close to £600m and still cannot score against Fulham, still lack a goalscorer, have bombed out their key summer signing in that position, Pierre- Emerick Aubameyang, by leaving him out of the Champions League squad, and you are met with knowing sighs. 

Chelsea’s owner Todd Boehly has spent £320million in the last month building Chelsea’s team 

Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang was one of the summer signings to suffer from the January action

Best not also mention the difficulty of managing a squad of 34. And where does Raheem Sterling, a £50m summer signing, fit into all this?

Boehly and co genuinely believe they have spotted a flaw in the received wisdom of how you go about creating value in football. And that clubs have been too cautious and risk averse, especially when it comes to young talent.

Rich Americans telling Europeans they have got football all wrong does not exactly go down a storm, but there are precedents for business people there seeing opportunities that we had not grasped over here.

The Glazer family called correctly ahead of the massive upsurge in overseas TV rights in 2003 when clubs were hugely undervalued by Europeans. 

And John W Henry and Tom Werner were ridiculed for their data-led approach at Liverpool, until they won the Premier League and Champions Leagues with what was the best transfer policy at any major club. 

That said, for every Luis Suarez at Liverpool, there was an Andy Carroll. And for every John W Henry, there is a Farhad Moshiri.

Boehly, Eghbali and Feliciano are many things, but presumably naive they are not, with a combined net worth of about $15billion from their private equity funds. 

So, while agents and clubs — especially Brighton, Benfica and Dynamo Kiev — might have been rubbing their hands when Chelsea rode into town like the cocksure new sheriff, those close to that trio insist they will have the last laugh.

Chelsea’s broke the British transfer record to sign Benfica star Enzo Fernandez this week

Put simply, Chelsea believe that talent, especially young talent, is relatively undervalued in football. That may seem hard to fathom for readers still getting their heads around the fact that £300,000 a week is now the starting point for weekly wage negotiations for a top-class international young player.

The unprecedented seven-year contracts Chelsea are putting players on is not just an amortisation trick to get around UEFA’s Financial Fair Play rules, in that spreading the cost over a long period reduces the annual cost on the balance sheet. UEFA will close the loophole in the summer, but there is more to this than just that ruse.

Boehly’s thinking is twofold. First, the contracts are backloaded, so the salary increases in the later years. They will start relatively modest in the early years, but Mykhailo Mudryk, the £70m Ukrainian, might have been promised £350,000 a week in the last two years of his deal.

But Chelsea reason that if Mudryk is as good as he seems, paying him £350,000 a week in 2030 is going to appear cheap. Wage inflation will see to that and they will not be fretting about negotiating a double-your-money new deal in two years’ time, which is a stressful, expensive and risky business.

Graham Potter has overseen a huge change in personnel during his short stint at Chelsea

Secondly, assembling young talent together early in their careers brings exponential rewards. And key to that is Graham Potter. That might seem odd, given that the team have slumped since he got there.

But Boelhy and co see Potter as the modern manager perfect for their project because he has the emotional and tactical skills to bring these players to their potential.

Chelsea tried something similar before when they signed Eden Hazard, Thorgan Hazard, Kevin De Bruyne, Mo Salah, Thibaut Courtois and Romelu Lukaku in a 30-month period. The difference then was Jose Mourinho was the inheritor of those riches, a manager who wants experienced battle-hardened pros rather than young teams to grow.

It is fair to say that had the manager and club had the patience to keep that team together, they would still be reaping the benefits and would have saved themselves a lot of bother and money. And if you have a group of young players growing up together, the synchronicity in their play, spirit and unity will be greater than a team constructed year by year.

To be proved right, two things have to happen. First, the market in wages needs to keep growing as it has the past 20 years. That seems fairly likely and it may well seem like Chelsea have Mudryk and Enzo Fernandez locked in on relatively frugal salaries in five years’ time.

Mykhailo Mudryk was another of Chelsea’s marquee signings during the January window

The other variable is the human factor. It assumes that Mudryk is not Andrey Arshavin and that Fernandez is not Juan Sebastian Veron. Both were superb but neither quite fitted the Premier League. Both ended up leaving worth less than when they arrived.

This, sceptics would say, is the risky part. Players fail because their girlfriends do not settle, their children are unhappy at school, the language is harder than they imagined. Not necessarily because they are bad players. 

Add in the fact that £100m of revenue from Champions League football will now not be coming next year.

They have been here before. When they bought the LA Dodgers in 2011, Boehly and his partners viewed the intellectual property of the franchise as a massively undervalued asset. 

Live sport is great content and it keeps paying dividends year in, year out. Critics scoffed, but in 2012 the LA Dodgers announced an $8.5bn TV deal with Time Warner Cable, a figure previously unheard of in baseball, spread over 25 years.

Boehly (right) has taken charge of Chelsea after being co-owner of the LA Dodgers

‘We were a little early to thinking about this,’ said Boehly, when asked why every franchise was not doing similar. ‘I don’t think the world saw it like we saw it at the time. Having a fixed-income credit structure background gave me a way to look at it from a different lens.’

That same year they transformed the Dodgers from being a bit-part team in salary stakes to the MLB’s biggest spender. They secured the biggest trade ever at the time with the Boston Red Sox, acquiring Josh Beckett, Carl Crawford, Adrian Gonzalez and Nick Punto. Five of their players, less valuable, went to the Red Sox, owned by Liverpool’s John W Henry and Tom Werner.

It was the Red Sox who won the World Series that year. But baseball fans claim that Gonzalez was iconic in revitalising the Dodgers, who are now consistently baseball’s biggest spenders, have reinvested in Dodger Stadium and won the 2020 World Series.

Despite the ifs, buts and maybes, Boehly will say he is looking through a different lens and that we will all catch up shortly. He will claim it is not a gamble, even though it looks as if he has lumped it all on black and is waiting to see where the roulette wheel stops.