Chelsea £365m scandal – Time for action to put a stop to this | OneFootball

Chelsea, the club that seemingly do what they like.

Rules are for others.

With Chelsea it has been a case of bend the rules, find the loopholes, carry on as normal.

The disgraced Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea loads of trophies whilst doing exactly as he wanted, these shameless American owners believing they can do the same.

To be fair to them, you can’t fault the sly ingenuity of the lengths Todd Boehly and his mates have gone t0, to cheat the system.

Did you know, if you rearrange the letters of ‘Chelsea Football Club’, you get ‘Club Cheat Fools Label’.

Well, I certainly can’t think of a better Label (Definition – A phrase or name applied to a person or thing) than that for our mates at Chelsea.

As well as all the other loopholes and ways of cheating the system, there is one that has been a little bit overshadowed in recent times at Stamford Bridge, with Chelsea instead making headlines with selling their hotels, women’s team and so on to themselves.

However, I think it is a massive cornerstone of how Chelsea operates and clearly the rules not fit for purpose in governing it.

These are the Chelsea players who were loaned out during the 2024/25 season:

Axel Disasi (Aston Villa)

Joao Felix (AC Milan)

Renato Veiga (Juventus)

Kepa (Bournemouth)

Carney Chukwuemeka (Borussia Dortmund)

Trevoh Chalobah (Crystal Palace)

Mike Penders (Genk)

Armando Broja (Everton)

Raheem Sterling (Arsenal)

Djordje Ptrovic (Strasbourg)

David Fofana (Goztepe)

Bashir Humphreys (Burnley)

Lesley Ugochukwu (Southampton)

Caleb Wiley (Strasbourg)

Gabriel Slonina (Barnsley)

Alfie Gilchrist (Sheffield United)

Ben Chilwell (Crystal Palace)

Caleb Wiley (Watford)

Aaron Anselmino (Boca Juniors)

Deivid Washington (Santos)

The FIFA rules on loans are supposedly in place to…’Develop young players, improve competitive balance and prevent the stockpiling of players.’

Maybe somebody should have mentioned this to Chelsea!

Last season (2024/25), as you can see above, Chelsea loaned out 20 different players, seven went to other Premier League clubs, seven went to clubs in the top tiers of other European leagues, two to major South American clubs, three to the Championship and one to League One.

This is surely the very definition of stockpiling players.

Chelsea having a whole other squad of players out on loan elsewhere, getting their wages paid by other clubs.

How many of these 20 loaned out players will ever play for Chelsea, how many matches between them?

Of the 20 Chelsea players loaned out last season, I found transfer fees that had been originally paid by Chelsea for 14 of them (transfer fees via transfermarkt) that totalled £365m!

Due to the ‘rules’ allowing it though, Chelsea aren’t doing anything at all to cut their stockpiling of players, they simply add to it.

If you include Jamie Gittens and Joao Pedro, Chelsea have now already committed another £250m+ on players to arrive for the 2025/26 season (Delap, Estevao, Essugo, Mamadou Sarr and Paez) and for the 2026/27 season (Quender, Denner).

How is it good for anybody, apart from the Chelsea owners, to allow so 20 or more players to be loaned out in a single season by one club???

The idea of loans, was always, as far as I’m aware, to let a small number of homegrown and signed younger players to go out short-term and get some regular football at a lower level, in the hope that this would help them progress and then be able to come back and play regularly for the club that had loaned them out.

What is happening at Chelsea is an abomination, the current loan rules are not fit for purpose and maybe allow clubs to loan out five players at the very most during a season.

This would then deter Chelsea and certain others from stockpiling so many players. Instead, it would mean more players staying longer and playing at their clubs and/or moving to other clubs where they will actually play football for that club!