Stefan Borson

Wed 16 April 2025 14:29, UK

Chelsea could face a significant financial penalty after breaching Uefa’s spending rules in recent seasons. 

Uefa has rejected Chelsea’s £200million sale of their women’s team, which helped turn their previous £90million loss for 2022-23 into a £128million profit for last season.

The Premier League side are now reportedly in talks over a settlement for an overspend, with proceeds from the women’s team sale, and a transaction that saw club hotels transferred to owners BlueCo, excluded from the balance sheet. 

Uefa rules apply to Chelsea as they are participating in this year’s Conference League and have hopes of playing in the Champions League next season.

Finance expert Stefan Borson exclusively told Football Insider the London giants could face a €10million (£8.6million) penalty following their breach. 

Chelsea’s latest accounts for 2023-24 revealed their overall revenue fell from £513million to £469million last season, while their underlying losses dropped from £249million to £214million. 

They are understood to have spent around £1.5billion on new signings since Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali’s Clearlake Capital took over in May 2022. 

Chelsea face two financial breaches after new reveal

Borson revealed Chelsea could be facing two Uefa breaches following their heavy spending.

He told Football Insider: “Uefa have been all over the place in the last few years.

“If you look at the settlements that they did with Manchester United and with Barcelona, Barcelona missed by €267million (£229million) because of the treatment of a forward sale of media rights. 

“That was obviously an absolutely enormous miss, and they ended up charging them €500,000 (£428,000). The Manchester United miss was smaller, but again, they had a €500,000 fine.

“At the higher end, PSG failed maybe for the third time, certainly for the second, they ended up with a €10million fine, but with further penalties of up to another €55million (£47million) depending on their performance over the subsequent years from 2022 onwards.

“Now, apparently somehow they’ve complied with whatever they promised Uefa that they would comply with, which is astonishing when you look at their revenues and their costs. 

“There are a series of multi-million-euro penalties for teams like Roma. There are a number of repeat offenders who have had repeat penalties since the instigation of FFP by Uefa.

“There are probably two elements that Chelsea are going to fail. Certainly, they’re going to fail the football earnings.

“Now the football earnings is the one that ends up most likely being in the settlement agreement, where we have little detail about how that’s going to be assessed aside from what they’ve done over history.

“They may also fail the squad cost control. That has a different set of tariffs, which is just a percentage really of the miss that you’ve got, and so that will be a relatively small fine if that happens. 

“It’s really this football earnings one where it’s not clear whether it’s going to be like the raft of 2022 settlements that were paid to Uefa or whether it’s going to be something more similar to United and Barcelona, so we just have to see.

“It seems to me if you’re missing the football earnings by €100million (£86million) or maybe even more, surely you end up with a sort of €10million fine.

“If I had to guess, I’d say €10million, but who knows?” 

Chelsea well placed to agree lucrative shirt sponsor deal

Football Insider revealed on 11 April Chelsea are well placed to agree a lucrative front-of-shirt sponsorship deal if they qualify for the Champions League.

Enzo Maresca’s side, who sit sixth in the Premier League table, have played without a primary shirt sponsor throughout the current campaign after their deal with Infinite Athlete expired last summer.

Stamford Bridge chiefs have now turned their attention to a shirt deal for next season, with Todd Kline spearheading their commercial operations following his arrival from Tottenham.

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