Chelsea have landed extra £10m+ after deal agreed – Stefan Borson
Chelsea have saved more than £10million a year after selling Romelu Lukaku to Napoli before the transfer deadline.
That is the view of finance expert Stefan Borson, who exclusively told Football Insider Chelsea have come away with a reasonable deal despite selling the Belgium striker for significantly less than they signed him for three years ago.
Lukaku re-joined the west London club from Inter Milan for £97.5million in 2021, but he has spent the past couple of seasons on loan at Inter and Roma.
The 31-year-old failed to play a single game for Chelsea since May 2022 before signing for Napoli in a £30million deal on 29 August.
Chelsea to make significant savings after Romelu Lukaku sale
Borson revealed the big upside for the Premier League club in completing the sale will be getting Lukaku’s wages off the books.
“It’s a complicated one and there are lots of things that we don’t know about,” Borson told Football Insider.
“But it appears that there was a very chunky impairment of his book value that happened in 2022 because Chelsea announced the £70million impairment line in their accounts, which we think was largely Lukaku and probably a bit of Kepa as well.
“But if you take off £40million of his book value from 2021-22, it means that if I had to guess, I would think that he was probably sold to Napoli at around about his book value now that it’s been impaired.
“Therefore, that would be neutral from a profit perspective. But clearly, the big upside that Chelsea have is they save on his wages.
“Although it has been reported that he took a very sizeable wage decrease when they renegotiated the contract last summer, I think it’s still likely that he was on well over £200,000 a week.
“That would mean their saving on an annualized basis will be well over £10million, so it’s a deal that was very much worth doing for them given that they have no use for the player.
“Even though they have lost on a headline basis a very sizeable amount since they bought him only three years ago, somehow even despite that, it actually looks like a decent deal for them.”
In other news, Chelsea have agreed cut-price sponsorship deal.
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