Chelsea using yet another loophole to buy more players – A complete joke | OneFootball

Just when you think you have seen it all with Chelsea, you then come to realise you are still only scratching the surface.

It was shameful the way the football authorities and a compliant media allowed Roman Abramovich to get away with what he did at Stamford Bridge.

How could we have possibly guessed that Chelsea could be even more grotesque under these American jokers?

Selling club owned hotels to themselves, sell the Chelsea women’s team to themselves, dodging PSR restrictions.

The crazy wholesale buying and selling of countless players season after season with zero intention of most of them ever becoming Chelsea regulars, is all normalised now, the media never calling them to account.

Every season it is the norm for Chelsea to loan out 20-30 players, many other clubs paying the wages and often loan fees, the only intention of the Chelsea owners to then sell them on at a later date at a vast profit after these other clubs have developed them.

Then you have the multi-club angle as well at Chelsea.

Have you ever heard a transfer deal reported like this?

David Ornstein reporting for The Athletic – 20 August 2025:

BlueCo — the group that owns Chelsea and Strasbourg — has reached an agreement to sign midfielder Julio Enciso from Brighton & Hove Albion.

Enciso spent the second half of last season on loan at Ipswich Town and has chosen to join the BlueCo project for his next step.

Personal terms for the 21-year-old Paraguay international are in place with the consortium.

The sides have a healthy relationship after a conducting a significant amount of business since BlueCo completed its takeover of Chelsea in the summer of 2022 and then Strasbourg a year later.

Enciso is expected to initially spend time at the French club but is viewed as a long-term Chelsea player.’

Nothing to see here, all normal, just move along.

Obviously BlueCo (the owners of both Chelsea and Strasbourg) can’t actually buy a player themselves, well, it can’t be officially put down on paper like that.

Instead, we will have to wait and see which of their clubs that BlueCo allocates this player to.

I find it crazy that this multi-club ownership is allowed to happen at all, how can you ever look at it and think is a level playing field when certain owners can do this? No wonder it is a massive growth area, this multi-club model. They are doing it to get an unfair advantage over other clubs.

Chelsea aren’t alone either in all of this, the owners of Manchester City, Brighton and many others are using the multi-club ownership model.

Imagine this scenario

A Premier League club that is a single entity (not multi-club owned) wants to buy a promising young player for say £50m, who they think could be a great star of the future with the right development etc.

A Premier League club (we’ll call CLUB A) that is part of a multi-club model also wants to buy that promising young player but is right up to its PSR limit. Nothing to stop the owners allocating that signing to one of their other clubs (we’ll call CLUB B), with the absolute intention that in the longer-term it will be CLUB A that the signing is really for.

The whole thing is a sick joke.

It is the same with the ‘rule’ that clubs with the same owners can’t play in the same European competition. It is just a case of creating some extra paperwork before a certain deadline, creative accountancy/ownership, UEFA then can pretend that the same owners don’t exist for both clubs and all good. Well, for these multi-club owners it is. Crystal Palace only got caught out because they were surprised when achieving European football, so hadn’t done the creative ownership paperwork before the UEFA deadline for the following season’s European competitions.

We have seen the owners of clubs such as Manchester City, Brighton and others in recent seasons, allowed to have those clubs playing in the same European competition as other clubs where they are also have ownership.