‘Selling club’ is not a slur and teams shouldn’t fear it – Chelsea, Liverpool and Man City don’t

Clubs and fans seem terrified of the ‘selling club’ branding that everyone bar Real Madrid should embrace. Spurs and Newcastle must be more Chelsea.

Modern football fandom is beset with two-word comebacks that should really go directly in the bin.

Lazy, tribal, point-scoring shitpost retorts to shitpost statements. ‘Warra trophy’. ‘Cry more’. ‘Rent free’.

But there’s one two-word sobriquet that most clubs themselves appear to fear above all others, when in reality it belongs in the same social-media bonfire as the rest.

‘Selling club’.

It is a desperate moniker to become saddled with, a slur almost impossible to shake once it has taken hold. It’s one that speaks to so many of football’s wider talking points: of profit above glory; of placing more emphasis on the balance sheet than the league table; of, at the most basic level, a lack of ambition.

But there is something else very important about it, and that is the fact it is complete and utter and total bollocks. There is an utter bereft hollow meaninglessness at the core of the jet-black soul of ‘Selling Club’.

Because do you know which clubs are selling clubs? Almost all of them. And with the possible exception of Real Madrid, for any club that is not a ‘selling club’ at this time it is down to either rank incompetence or not for the want of trying.

Manchester United have spent much of the summer desperately trying to be a selling club. Tottenham and Arsenal both historically suck at the art of selling players.

With Spurs they either sell players long after the need has become obvious, or grudgingly unwillingly let star names go at the peak of their value but in such a way that no useful reinvestment of that windfall can ever follow.

Arsenal are simply incapable of selling players at all. At least, not for any meaningful value. The £22m they received from Real Madrid for Nicolas Anelka 25 years ago remains one of their biggest ever player sales, and that’s just plain nutty.

Against these you have Liverpool and Manchester City, who are just much better at it. Liverpool will not have entered this summer thinking “WE SIMPLY MUST SELL LUIS DIAZ” but at the same time knew there was a price that was worth selling him at, and when someone offered it they accepted.

And it’s not an isolated case. Unlike Arsenal or Spurs, they are happy enough to cash in on even talented homegrown players when the right offer comes along. Our gut feel is that if Jarell Quansah was at Spurs or Arsenal, they would not have sold him for £30m.

But that readiness and willingness to trade in the market is a big factor in why Liverpool have been able to spend as they have this summer.

The way in which they reaped the benefits of selling Philippe Coutinho for the very daftest of money has entered football legend, and those benefits continue to be felt to this day.

Man City operate similarly. They spend plenty, but they are better than most at recouping it as well. There are inevitably mistakes along the way with this approach. Cole Palmer, for instance. But who can really argue with City’s decision to move on Raheem Sterling or Ferran Torres or Gabriel Jesus or Leroy Sane at prices around the £50m mark.

Even though selling Julian Alvarez for around £70m left them short at times last season, it’s hard to argue that wasn’t reasonable business for an understudy.

But again, it’s simply not a deal one can imagine Spurs or Arsenal or Man United pulling off at this time.

A shrewder club than Spurs might, for instance, have considered cashing in on Brennan Johnson this summer. His stock is high after scoring the winning goal in Bilbao, and he is a player who catches the eye because he is very, very good at one particular thing: arriving late and finding space in the penalty area to score from close-range when his opposite number or full-back puts a cross into the box.

It’s certainly a very useful skill to have, and in the right team is absolutely deadly. He is also really quite average at almost everything else. There were many potential ways to upgrade there for minimal or even no financial outlay.

But it’s simply not the way Spurs operate. Always the most painfully self-aware of the fragility of their ‘Big Six’ status, Spurs are perhaps more afeared than anyone of selling any player who might still have some value. Instead they end up with a stockpile that leaves them quite unable to name an even halfway coherent Champions League squad and a logjam for incomings as well thanks to a squad that pulls off the trick of being both bloated yet desperately lacking in so many key areas.

While there are some teams who are good at selling and some that are bad, there needs to be a separate category altogether for Chelsea. We are grudgingly and confusedly coming round to the view that their objectively insane transfer strategy might just be the most correct one for an insane world.

Theirs is not necessarily a route open to other clubs in the way the City and Liverpool blueprints are. And Chelsea have always been pretty handy at this even in the Abramovich days. But under Clearlake they have leaned into it so successfully that even their stupidest signings end up stupid like a fox.

Spent over £30m on Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall for some reason? Don’t worry, Everton will make sure you wipe your feet.

Overspent on Joao Felix even after watching him go through a deeply unimpressive loan spell with absolutely no obvious reason to expect anything different on a permanent basis? Here comes the Saudi gravy train.

READ MORE: Chelsea and Liverpool dominate top 10 genius Premier League player sales this summer

Burnley are going to give them £20m for Armando Broja as well as a similar amount for Lesley Ugochukwu and £14m for Bashir Humphreys.

And it’s not just teams lower down the foodchain who very much enjoy handing Chelsea vast sums of money. Arsenal simply cannot get enough of handing Chelsea vast sums of money.

We’re not saying there’s anything particularly admirable about Chelsea’s vast football player megamart where players are bought and sold for absurd fees and daft contracts, but there’s something extraordinary about their ability to make their successes vast and even their failures, at worst, not that costly.

Someone, somewhere will, over the weeks ahead, cough up £80m for Nicolas Jackson. And you have to say that’s magnificent.

As Spurs make announcements about Radu Dragusin that declare their fifth-choice centre-back will be wearing the number three shirt next season, other clubs are actually selling these players and getting something for them. Like Vinted but for billionaires.

Newcastle are told time and again they must not sell Alexander Isak because it would make them a ‘selling club’. But that’s only true if they don’t actually spend that money on improving the team and the squad.

Because the boring reality behind the ‘selling club’ slur is that what you’re actually describing is a trading club.

And that is what almost all football clubs are, or should strive to be. It was always true, but never more so than now with PSR and squad limits ready to hurt those who can’t get this right.