We fear it is time to face an uncomfortable reality. It might be time to give Chelsea a small amount of credit for their transfer business.
Don’t worry, just a small amount; we don’t have to completely prostrate ourselves before our new genius American overlords.
They’re still operating on easy mode and with the Konami cheat code activated. It still all feels like it could come a-tumbling down around them at any moment. At some point they may yet run out of hotels and women’s teams they can sell to themselves.
But some of the actual business is starting to look, dare we even whisper it, shrewd.
They appear set to turn a very decent profit on Noni Madueke and that’s just crazy. Those absurdly long contracts they like to dish out can work both ways, but if fortune favours you and someone else desperately wants a player you’re no longer that arsed about, it really can lock in value.
We talked yesterday about how Anthony Elanga for £55m might seem like a madness, but if he’s really the final-piece-in-the-puzzle player that Newcastle think he might be then that’s the sort of money you might just have to yeet at that particular problem.
Harder to make that case about Madueke to Arsenal, a deal that feels very much like an Anti-Elanga: a very expensive transfer to solve a problem we’re not entirely sure exists.
We can sort of understand the idea of being willing to overpay a little to sign a player whose own contribution should be perfectly adequate but whose primary role may in fact be to ensure Arsenal can discover precisely how magnificent Bukayo Saka might be if not forced into a state of permanent exhaustion, but there’s also a related risk here of p*ssing off Ethan Nwaneri and stunting his development. Development that might well have made him that perfectly adequate player and freed up all this money for the places where Arsenal’s need is more conspicuously greater.
Madueke is a good player, and there are definitely clubs out there who we could understand dropping big money on him because the potential return on that investment is so big for them. It just doesn’t feel like that’s quite the case with Arsenal.
But what it definitely looks like is a fantastic deal for Chelsea, who are having quite the summer.
Madueke became an increasingly peripheral figure at Chelsea towards the end of last season, his major contributions after his hamstring injury reserved for the formalities of the Conference League, something that with the very best will in the world has little bearing on what Chelsea will do next.
His last Premier League goal came in January, and he managed only a single assist in the league after that…against Ipswich.
He is currently involved at the Club World Cup, doing very little really but nevertheless helping Chelsea rack up vast sums of prize money in one of the real feelgood, heartwarming stories of the summer.
The CWC is a pretty good indicator of Chelsea’s current antics as a whole. They’ve had all manner of good fortune, but you can only give them credit for exploiting it to the full.
The Club World Cup absolutely deserves to be won by a Chelsea side that is the distant fourth-best team in England who are only here at all because of something a completely different set of players did four years ago, and have enjoyed Gareth Southgate’s England levels of right-side-of-the-draw good fortune.
Just as with discovering there is a flourishing market for their stockpile of unnecessary wingers, you can’t begrudge Chelsea playing this kindly hand to its full potential.
Joao Pedro has surely set an unbreakable new world record for the speediest ‘paid off a big chunk of his transfer fee’ ever known for a summer arrival having joined from Brighton and immediately swanned over to America to score a couple of spectacularly lucrative goals in the semi-final against his old club Fluminense.
Watching Chelsea ease through the facile route placed before them in the US, with one of their new signings to the fore and with more lovely lucre heading their way as a result, and all while set to make serious profit on Madueke, make it hard not to feel like everything is coming up Clearlake.
If they now turn a profit on Joao Felix then we’ll know they truly have hacked the system and we’ll have to turn the whole thing off and on again. There are limits.
