FSG skimping costs Liverpool again vs Chelsea as £50m transfer shows palm-greasing merit
Chelsea spending over £60m in agent fees over the last year is the sort of revelation that sums up Everything That’s Wrong With Football to your regular punter, just like PSR is also Everything That’s Wrong With Football, along with VAR and Rio Ferdinand.
But the transfer coups Chelsea have pulled off over the last three years under the BlueCo ownership – during which time they’ve consistently topped the Premier League agent fees table – provide strong evidence of the value in greasing the palms of football’s middle men.
They pinched Mykhaylo Mudryk from under Arsenal’s nose, beat Bayern Munich to Christopher Nkunku and were the scourge of Liverpool in the summer of 2023 by hijacking their moves for both Moises Caicedo and Romeo Lavia.
Differences in transfer fees were meagre at most, while contracts were heavily incentivised with competitive but not outlandish base pay. Players that move to Chelsea often claim they joined having been persuaded by “the project” or for some other similarly wishy-washy, marketing-speak reason.
But both Caicedo and Lavia said they chose Chelsea over Liverpool due to their long-standing interest. Through whom was that interest relayed? Their agents. Why do their agents pick up the phone to Chelsea? Because they know they will be well rewarded for taking that call and whispering the Blues’ sweet nothings into their clients’ ears.
Chelsea appear to have understood better than most that nothing gets done in the transfer market without excellent relationships with agents. And those relationships endure, as Liverpool are currently finding out to their cost in the race to sign Dean Huijsen.
If we’re to assume that Liverpool and Chelsea would be offering the 20-year-old roughly the same wages after paying his £50m release clause – which tracks given the Blues’ policy of spreading the cost of deals across absurdly long contracts – on the surface this looks like a straight choice between playing football for Liverpool and playing football for Chelsea.
The only clear benefit of picking Chelsea is an assured starting spot. But that may also be the case at Liverpool amid doubts about Ibrahima Konate’s future.
READ MORE: Huijsen or Konate? Richard Hughes has a huge decision to make at Liverpool
And yet a report on Wednesday claimed Huijsen is ‘seriously considering’ an offer from Chelsea with the Blues taking ‘a lead in the pursuit’ of the centre-back.
So he’s supposedly keen on joining a club that now looks likely to miss out on Champions League football next season, that’s been an utter mess since the new owners took charge and whose coach is roundly booed by the fans for his boring style, over the actual Premier League champions, where he would be playing alongside the best centre-back in the competition’s history. He can’t be that big a fan of the Club World Cup.
But crucially, his agent, Ali Barat, is a big fan of Chelsea.
It was Barat who brokered Caicedo’s £115m move from Brighton, for which he earned the Golden Agent Award and will have been the biggest of several paydays courtesy of the Blues over the last couple of seasons, with the agent also working on Nicolas Jackson’s new contract, Ian Maatsen’s move to Aston Villa, Conor Gallagher’s switch to Atletico Madrid and Cesare Casadei to Torino.
If this is as much Barat’s choice as it is Huijsen’s, there was only ever going to be one winner.
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Some Liverpool fans will see their seventh place in the agents fee table having spent roughly a third of Chelsea’s outlay as a source of pride – a middle finger to a broken system. But others will view it as further evidence of FSG skimping on necessary expenses after a season which has gone remarkably well but could have been a disaster after a lack of investment last summer, and in January left Arne Slot with a shallow squad that could so easily have been exposed through one or two significant injuries.
And while the logic in Chelsea’s agent-focused policy looks set to bear further fruit as Brazilian sensation Estevao arrives this summer ahead of Sporting’s Geovany Quenda the summer after, Billy Hogan, Michael Edwards, Richard Hughes or whoever’s in charge of such things at Liverpool may need to consider a change of tack.
Because like it or loathe it, agents now play as big a part in a player’s transfer move as anything else, and failing to accept the cost of that will see Liverpool continue to miss out on top talents like Huijsen to Chelsea, who appear to have at least got this one thing right.
