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Football365

·24 July 2026

Football365

·24 July 2026

At the top of the summer spending chart, two clubs are currently miles ahead of the rest.

One of them is Chelsea, who have once again already gone past the £200m mark and are showing no sign of easing off. Yet for now they still sit second behind, of all clubs, Tottenham.

Spurs have already spent well over £200m in transfer fees alone on Jan Paul van Hecke, Sandro Tonali and Mateus Fernandes, while also committing significant wages to those players, along with free transfers Andy Robertson and Marcos Senesi.

Both clubs are clearly not finished yet, with Chelsea moving closer to a deal for Maxence Lacroix and Spurs’ badly underwhelming attack still untouched by the major spending that has been focused on their defence and midfield. There is surely at least one more big-money signing to come there.

That naturally throws up plenty of questions. Let us begin with the obvious one…

Let us start with Chelsea, the less surprising but perhaps more interesting case. As we know, Chelsea have spent several years flirting with both Premier League and UEFA spending regulations.

They were fined £2.6m by UEFA this year, and a much larger £26.7m last year. So, if you want to take the glass-half-full view, things are actually getting better.

And a sizeable part of their latest fine can be offset if they continue to cut spending and/or bring in more revenue.

There is almost no chance of the first part, but the second is the real core of Chelsea’s model.

We have said before, half-jokingly, that it is easier now to think of Chelsea less as a football club and more as a player-trading company with a side business of actually making those players turn up for matches now and then so their value stays high.

Another relevant point here is another half-joke about how, for a very rich man, fines stop feeling like fines and simply become the price of doing something. You or I might see a sign saying “NO PARKING – £100 FINE” and think “Right, best not park there.” The rich man thinks, “Oh, it costs £100 to park there.”

Chelsea’s approach to Premier League and UEFA regulations is similar; as long as they remain within limits that lead to financial rather than sporting punishments, broadly speaking they can treat it as a cost of doing business.

Chelsea brought in a massive £300m through player sales last season. They are already into nine figures for sales this summer, with plenty more still expected.

Transfermarkt values their huge squad at £1.3bn, which is second only to Manchester City in England and fourth across Europe. To a football fan, that looks like an oversized and unbalanced squad that needs urgent streamlining; to Chelsea, it is an investment that can be realised whenever required.

So even though Chelsea are meant to spend no more than 85 percent of their revenue on player costs to comply with the new squad cost ratio rules, they can generate huge revenue almost whenever they like, and that 85 per cent figure is only the starting point anyway.

As football finance expert Kieran Maguire told the BBC:

“So, 85% is their PSR compliance with the Premier League but that does give them a slight advantage. If you look at the small print of the Premier League’s SCR rules, you can spend up to 115% of revenue on your player costs because that takes you up to what we refer to as the red zone. “Provided you’re in the red zone and don’t go beyond it, you still end up effectively paying a tax on additional costs, rather than having a points deduction.”

Really, it is a bit of a moot point. The short answer is probably yes, they do need to sell to stay out of trouble. But the reality is that they will absolutely sell more players anyway.

Even before any further post-Rogers arrivals alongside Marco Palestra and the pre-agreed signings of Geovany Quenda, Emmanuel Emegha and the Premier League’s new pantomime villain Valentin Barco, Chelsea already have 38 senior players on their books.

Reports say they are actively trying to move on some or all of Marc Guiu, Benoit Badiashile, Axel Disasi and Trevoh Chalobah, but the reality is that Chelsea’s way of operating means almost everyone apart from a small group of untouchables (your Caicedos, your Palmers, the Estevaos of this world) is permanently available for sale at the right price.

It is not useful to think of Chelsea as a buying club or a selling club, with the associations those labels carry. They are the ultimate trading club.

It is also worth pointing out that Chelsea have no European football this season; if only to protect the value of their investments, they really need to move several players on just so they do not spend a year inactive and lose value.

It is easy, and probably right, to be cynical about the figures being quoted for the Rogers and Garnacho deals.

We are back in the territory of our old friend amortisation here, where money coming in can be put straight onto the books and money going out can be spread over a much longer period.

But that particular loophole is harder to exploit now because of new rules on what counts as a ‘swap deal’. In simple terms, if two clubs exchange players within a 45-day period, it will be treated as a swap deal for the purposes of the rules, and the timing of Rogers’ move to Chelsea meant there was no way for Garnacho to go the other way before the window closes without falling under that rule.

It is murkier, though, in loan deals such as Garnacho’s. Even an obligation to buy does not automatically bring it under the swap-deal rule, because a judgement has to be made on whether the conditions needed to trigger that obligation make it, in effect, a delayed permanent transfer or not. The likely view is that it will be judged not to be the case.

Even if, for example, only 10 appearances are needed to trigger the obligation, Villa still have full control and the right simply not to pick him 10 times. And Harvey Elliott can tell you that they will do it too, if required.

An example of two separate deals that would still be treated as a swap under the rules is Spurs signing Van Hecke from Brighton and then selling Luka Vuskovic to them soon after. The difference there is that neither of those clubs are anywhere near the same level of scrutiny.

Chelsea and Villa both have a delicate balancing act to manage this season. And to be clear, it is UEFA’s swap-deal rules that matter here, with the Premier League being much more relaxed about these kinds of related moves between two clubs.

That part is actually much easier. Spurs can spend huge amounts of money because they have huge amounts of money to spend.

The new 85 per cent cap for the ratio of revenue to player costs is a ridiculously high ceiling for Spurs; their latest figures, for the 24/25 season, put them at only 61%, and that includes all salaries, not just the playing staff covered by the new rules.

Spurs’ revenue is significantly boosted by the major non-football events – NFL, concerts and similar occasions – that can be staged at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. In the final season at the old White Hart Lane, Spurs had matchday revenue of £45m and commercial income of £73m.

In those latest 24/25 accounts, those numbers had surged to £126m and £277m. All of that goes into the pool from which Spurs’ SCR figure is calculated.

And, of course, amortisation is still part of the picture too. Assuming Spurs have spread their transfer-fee outgoings this summer over the maximum five-year period, their big summer spend so far will still show as under £50m on this year’s accounts, while their previous smaller spends, though still larger than people sometimes remember, mean they do not have the huge carry-over from earlier summers that some similarly sized clubs carry.

There is not the same need for Spurs to sell as there is for Chelsea or Villa, simply because there is not the same immediate pressure – at least this summer – to balance the books, given the large cushion Spurs enjoy under the current rules framework.

What Spurs do have is the sporting need to trim the squad. They are already at the stage where, in a season without European football, they would not be able to register all their current senior first-team players and still stay within the Premier League’s 25-man squad rules.

So there will definitely be more player sales at Spurs this summer, and beyond the obvious names we already know about, such as Cristian Romero, the aim is to balance the squad rather than the spreadsheet.

It also feels worth noting that this is another area where Spurs are already clearly moving away from the Daniel Levy-led norms that have been set over the last two decades in North London.

Spurs have already brought in around £80m in player-sale income this summer without yet moving on a single player with meaningful first-team experience or even one who looked likely to get it any time soon. Selling rather than loaning out again the likes of Vuskovic, Alejo Veliz, Alfie Devine, Tynan Thompson and Will Lankshear all helps build the large pot of cash Spurs can, and are, spending on fees and wages this summer and, rightly or wrongly, is simply not something they would have done under Levy.

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