Premier League owners missed chance to outlaw latest Chelsea financial loophole

Chelsea are once again being named as Loophole FC as it looks like they may have found another one to get around Financial Fair Play and Profit and Sustainability Rules.

According to David Ornstein this weekend, Chelsea will clear any FFP and PSR rules for this season and do not need to sell any players by the end of June to comply.

And it looks like the reason that they will avoid this is because they have decided to sell their Cobham training ground to themselves (a sister company). This means they will make profit on that, just as they have done with some Stamford Bridge Hotels recently.

It looks like the club are exploiting another financial loophole in order to carry on spending in the transfer market without having to worry too much on profits coming in from players sales, at least for now.

And these will not be the first loopholes Chelsea have reportedly found – they also started putting players on long term contract in order to amortise the fee of signing them over a longer course of time, hence having less expenditure in bulk. Smart? Very. But laws in the game were soon changed to put a stop to this.

But clubs have seemingly missed a chance to outlaw the sale of assets between sister companies though, at least in the Premier League.

That is according to football finance expert Kieran Maguire, who responded to the post reporting Chelsea are selling Cobham to themselves last night.

As you can see from his post on X yesterday below, Maguire says owners of Premier League clubs had an option to outlaw this from happening but they said no.