How bloody much?! Chelsea spend £75m on agents as wages rise to £404m

Official figures from the FA late last week showed Chelsea spent £75m on agents in the year to February - a record - then their 2022-23 accounts, published on Saturday, showed a massive wage hike

Two startling financial figures relating to Chelsea have emerged in the past few days. First came the £75m they spent on agents’ fees between February 2023 and February 2024, a record by any one club in any one year.

Then we found out they had a wage bill of £404m for the 2022-23 season when their accounts for that period dropped at Companies House on Saturday morning. The only other club in the history of English football to record a seasonal wage bill of more than £400m was Manchester City in their Treble-winning 2022-23 season, when their wages were £423m.

Huge agents payments and an astronomical wage bill spell potential trouble for Chelsea down the line, not least in trying to stay within UEFA’s financial rules - not that Chelsea look like playing European football soon.

It’s worth remembering that the cunning financial strategy when Todd Boehly & Co arrived at Stamford Bridge was supposed to revolve around young players on low initial contracts. Thus £404m is shocking, not least as Chelsea won nothing last season, finished in the bottom half of the league and exited both domestic cups in the third rounds. This wasn’t a bonus-heavy season. 

Before we look at the pitfalls, a brief recap on the extraordinary expenditure by Premier League clubs on agents in the past year. They spent £409.6m, between them, with club-by-club outlay detailed below.

That £409.6m, for a bit of context, is roughly the total gross transfer spending of all 72 EFL clubs in the Championship, League One and League Two, combined, over the past two seasons. And the £409.6m is just what the PL clubs gave the agents, on top of the gross £2.5bn they spent on players, in one year.

The breakdown of agents fee from February 2023 to February 2024 were published on the FA’s website here last week; there is also a file containing the names of every agent in every transaction, if not a specific sum earned per deal. Agents’ fees from 2015 to 2023 are at the Football Association website.

The FA began their welcome and commendable exercise in transparency around agents fees in 2015. Since then Premier League clubs have spent £2.3 BILLION on middlemen. These are solely payments from the clubs to agents; any sums that the players pay their agents come on top of this.

I’ve also looked at which PL clubs have spent the most on agents in this “transparency era.”

Chelsea are No1 with a whopping £287.2m in that time, just ahead of £286.2m by Manchester City, followed by Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal and Tottenham.

There is obviously a role for good agents in football, advising their clients on how best to manage their careers and negotiate the best deals. But some of the eye-watering sums that some receive can’t be justified easily. Chelsea spent pretty much the same on agents in the year to February as their entire season’s match day income (£76m). 

I investigated some of the more egregious examples of agents taking massive chunks of commissions across Europe in an investigation for the Mail on Sunday in December 2012.  

As the piece revealed, on at least 10 occasions in recent years an individual football agent has been paid at least £10m for his role in moving a player between one European club and another, with £5m-plus commissions twice as common.

In some instances multiple agents have been paid for their parts in the same deal, by one or both clubs and the player, with a ‘wild west’ culture pervasive among some middlemen.

FIFA were, at that time, intent on cracking down on profiteering practices, and were intent on introducing new caps on agent commissions. But cutting a long story short, groups of agents mounted a legal challenge, won, and FIFA’s plans were put on ice.

In one case in 2018, the agent of a player moving from a club in France’s Ligue 1 to Germany’s Bundesliga earned a £16m commission on a £20m transfer, while his client’s guaranteed wage for the entirety of his five-year contract was £14m over five years. 

As things stand there are no limits to what agents can be paid and no effective policing of the system. This has been the case since FIFA scrapped agent regulation in 2015, a move that everybody within the world governing body now accepts as, as one insider says, “a terrible mistake.”

Back to Chelsea, their spending does risk them falling foul of UEFA spending rules, which will limit clubs’ spending on wages, agents fees and amortisation of fees to 70 per cent of annual turnover.

Or in other words, for the 2022-23 season, when their revenue was £512m, and if the 70% limit were in place, that would mean £358m on wages, agents and amortisation.

That limit isn’t in place - it’s being phased in over three years. But £404m (wages), £75m on agents (give or take, depending on accounting years) and £200m on amortisation equals £679m, or about £300m too much. Yes, I’m grossly simplifying and there will be accounting gymnastics no doubt available. But there’s jeopardy here.  

Boehly says he’s confident Chelsea won’t breach the Premier League's Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSRs). "The club continues to balance success on the field together with the financial imperatives of complying with UEFA and Premier League financial regulations," he wrote in the accounts.

"The club has complied with these since their inception in 2012 and expects to do so in the foreseeable future."

Chelsea lost £89.1m in the financial year and that sum would have been much bigger if Chelsea hadn’t sold some hotels to their parent company for £76.3m. The EFL have outlawed sales of assets to related parties to massage your books: see the Derby and Sheffield Wednesday cases among others.

The Premier League allow such manoeuvres; it was discussed in 2021 but clubs made it clear they would vote against being prevented from selling assets, and no vote even took place.

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