Chelsea’s contract extensions are the other summer business derailed by UK sanctions
Like most Premier League clubs, Chelsea sign most player contract extensions during the summer. The inability to plan due to the government sanctions affected these negotiations, which ripples through
From team owners to agents down to sock puppet ITKs on Twitter, the transfer market is a year-round endeavor. The 33% of the year that the window is open holds not much more than 33% of the work it takes to make the signings happen. Contract extensions are only nominally easier since there are not always opposing parties and counter-offers, but the negotiations can be just as adversarial. For example, all parties involved seem to want Romelu Lukaku at Inter, whereas Chelsea fought the specter of Real Madrid for Antonio Rudiger.
Losing any month, whether due to a transfer ban or an expropriation, is going to impact a club’s ability to manage players’ goings, leavings and stayings.
Antonio Rudiger was the most prominent player out of contract at the end of the 2021/22 season, followed by Andreas Christensen. The centerbacks were linked to Real Madrid and Barcelona, respectively, and Chelsea showed little interest in standing between Christensen and the door. However, the club negotiated with Rudiger throughout the spring, with the caveat hanging over the talks that, even if they could reach an agreement, the club may not be able to sign him.
This led to criticism that Chelsea should not have allowed a player like Rudiger to get so far into his final season – or even simply to his final season – under contract without inking an extension. The UK government’s seizure of the club would have affected a lot of things, this line of thinking goes, but not Rudiger’s extension, because he already should have been locked down by late February.
The same thought process applied to Cesar Azpilicueta. Azpilicueta’s contract expires at the end of the 2022/23 season, and he is in the usual position of Chelsea players over age 30 arguing for more than a one year contract while considering offers from other large clubs (Barcelona, in his case, too).
Despite being able to sign contract extensions year round, 48% of Premier League contract extensions from 2006 to the present (n=496) occurred in June, July and August. Extensions are relatively steady throughout the season.
This pattern holds across the league, and may be even more pronounced among the top clubs. The “Big Six” clubs concentrate their extensions in the summer months more so than the rest of the league. And, within the Big Six, the most successful clubs during this timeframe stand out: Chelsea, Manchester City and Liverpool do more in the summer / less during the season than Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspurs. Chelsea, in fact, do hardly any extensions in the spring.
Only one feature emerges from looking at Chelsea’s contract extensions at the player level: the loan army veterans sign their extensions in the summer, as part of the Stamford Bridge ritual of extending a player before sending him out on yet another loan.
Some might say this particular pattern is a Chelsea thing.
Transfermarkt’s data does not indicate how many years a player had left on his contract when he signed his extension, and I didn’t feel like going that deep into the weeds of data collection to find out. The data for Chelsea also only goes back to 2014, so we can’t compare the pre-Michael Emenalo & Marina Granovskaia period to the years that they – and, eventually, she alone – dictated the Blues’ player activity. Additionally, Transfermarkt is wiki’d / crowd-sourced, so while we can trust the data they have to a high extent, it may be missing some transfers.
But the persistence of the trends across the years and clubs suggests that these patterns are legitimate and stable. Looking at the Chelsea data, too, we can be reasonably confident that the data is comprehensive: if Transfermarkt’s contributors monitor Ulises Davila and Danilo Pantic along with Eden Hazard, N’Golo Kante and Mason Mount, they’re obviously on top of things.
The main caveat, particularly in response to the criticism that motivated this article, is that we don’t know when in a player’s contract they would sign their extension. Was Chelsea deviating from their own habits by not extending players before the final year of their contract, or before the second half of their final season? Do the most successful or richest clubs secure those extensions earlier than the rest? We don’t know, but we (or you) could find out.
Chelsea lost three months of planning and stability (to go with their loss of an owner), and those uncertain months will continue to affect player movement via contract extensions and transfers. If Chelsea can’t guarantee that they will be able to actually sign a contract extension, they will have a harder time convincing a player to pledge to stay. He will be more likely, then, to seek other options, leaving the club possibly needing a replacement that they also don’t know if they’ll be able to sign. Without knowing who is leaving and who is staying, the club can’t make any definitive steps towards who might be coming. There was only so much the Blues could say to Jules Kounde before Antonio Rudiger signed something somewhere.
The UK government’s sanctions on Roman Abramovich and the club may not have directly kept a player’s signature off an already agreed-to contract, since Chelsea don’t sign many player extensions in the spring. But they do much of their extension and transfer preparation in the spring, giving the sanctions another way of disrupting the club beyond the months of ownership limbo.