📈 Chelsea reborn, wild spending finally makes sense thanks to Maresca🙏 | OneFootball

Chelsea won the World Cup, earned an additional €105 million, but most importantly, they were reborn this season thanks to Maresca and perhaps their market as well.

Chelsea's market strategy can be briefly described as follows: "Buy young talents with low salaries, distribute payments over long contracts, evaluate players and sell those who have not performed to make a profit thanks to their age." A phrase perfectly synthesized by BBC journalist Nizaar Kinsella.

A modus operandi that in the long run may make sense, but initially required enormous, excessive investments. And only in the last season did it begin to bear fruit thanks to the best choice made by Chelsea in recent years: Enzo Maresca.

❗Market: unbalanced, expensive and improving

From summer 2022 to today, Chelsea has spent over €2 billion on the market, and the direction since January 2023 has been clear: focus on young players, test them, or loan them out to maintain their value.

In fact, about 90% of the purchases in recent years are Under 23: 33 players bought, 21 of whom have already left or could do so by this summer.

And in this sea of purchases, a part has lost a lot of its value: we're talking about players like Mudryk (€100M), Sterling (€57M), Joao Felix (€52M), Disasi (€45M), Datro Fofana (€12M), and others. To which we add Nkunku and - for now - Romeo Lavia, but due to injuries that have penalized them.

Some have become pillars: Caicedo, E. Fernandez and Cole Palmer, for example. While others have clearly increased their value despite the general perception that they are part of Chelsea's "crazy" expenses.

📈 But many increase in value

We're talking about players like Nicolas Jackson (paid €37 million and doubled in value), Madueke (paid €35M and now close to Arsenal for over €50M), Angelo (paid €15 and sold for €25), Petrovic (paid €16 and almost sold for €29), Renato Veiga (paid €14 and now valued at over €25M) to which we add other names.

And the strategy doesn't seem to have changed: the purchases of Joao Pedro (€63M), Delap (€30M), and Bynoe-Gittens (€64M) go in the same direction: young, paid a lot, and on whom to build the future. Or, at most, resell them in a short time without going too negative.

🤑 Youth sector? A source of income

Beyond the money from the property and revenue, these expenses were also sustained by the sales of products from the youth academy: valued as unsuitable or seen as necessary sales to carry forward this market strategy.

From 2023 to 2025, Chelsea earned around €230 million from the sale of players from the Academy: Mason Mount, Maatsen, Conor Gallagher, and Lewis-Hall are perfect examples.

👍Maresca put everything together

Within such an aggressive and risky strategy, the choice of coach is crucial, who must have the great ability to make young players grow, give them a tactical direction, and not be afraid to bench players without looking at the purchase price.

Maresca has managed to do all this. He brought Chelsea back to the top positions in the standings and found qualification in the Champions League, in addition to winning the Conference League (not a very complex result) and winning the Club World Cup.

Under his management, he carefully chose who to sacrifice (Gallagher, Sterling, and now Madueke, for example) and who to sell: Chelsea's transfer management is under his supervision, and some "random" purchases from the past are unlikely to be repeated. And if the impact of Joao Pedro in the Club World Cup is an indication, the Blues can rest easy.

The team is also happy with his method, expressed perfectly by this phrase: "He's a top coach, and that's why we're in the final, thanks to him, and I'm also talking about next season's Champions League qualification. He created a good team, a good energy among us, we're very happy", words by Malo Gusto. Certainly not a phenomenon, but worth more than when he was purchased: a fully achieved goal.

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇮🇹 here.

📸 PAUL ELLIS - AFP or licensors