Yeah, I Don't Understand What Chelsea's Doing Either

I tried and failed to comprehend Chelsea’s team-building approach:

If you wanted to defend Chelsea, at this point in the piece you might say: "But Cole Palmer and Enzo Fernandez and Moises Caicedo and Nico Jackson and Christopher Nkunku are all signed through 2030, too. These are good players, and Chelsea has them locked up long term."

As I wrote about last year, Chelsea have way more players on six- and seven-year deals than the rest of Europe combined. The first "benefit" to these deals was supposed to be accounting one. Sign a player for €70 million but get him on a seven-year deal, and that fee only gets accounted for at a rate of €10 million per year. This is the main way Chelsea have managed to sign so many players for so much money.

However, there was supposed to be a second benefit, too: Sure, they might swing and miss on a couple guys, but when you sign, say, Cole Palmer to a seven-year contract and he becomes a star, you've locked him up, long term, on a deal that pays him well below his market value.

Again, this might have worked -- in theory. The logic is sound on the surface. But once you tug at it just a tiny bit, the best case here was that Chelsea would build a team of young superstars and then just assume they'd all be happy together for a half-decade, making way less money than they could at Manchester City or Real Madrid? Really?

Sure enough, just a year after his breakout season, Palmer signed a newer, much more lucrative contract this summer. So much for that.

I look forward to them signing 10 more players before the end of the window. Happy Thursday, all.