In moments of quiet reflection it is perfectly reasonable to decide that big money has changed football.
Sure, you’d be absolutely right, it definitely has. But that’s also an incomplete version of events. Because big money hasn’t just changed football; it also continues to change football, with its ability to enhance power and control still neither fully realised nor appreciated.
Chelsea’s manipulation of the loan system, for instance, deserves far more coverage in terms of being a source and method of control over the clubs around it. This, for me, is the latest development in how to make money count in football.
Two of the most significant individual contributions to the European football season are Chelsea loanees: Romelu Lukaku at Everton and Thibaut Courtois at Atletico Madrid. Soon, they will have helped decide who wins the Premier League, who wins the Champions League and who plays in it next time around. This is not just the way things are or the way things have always been, but instead a really significant step in the development of big money in football.
When Chelsea lends two of the best players in the world to other clubs, it isn’t a gesture of goodwill. There are strings attached and pitfalls that Atletico and Everton have to deal with now that they’ve dealt with Chelsea.
The first on the list sounds tame, but underpins everything else that’s to come: it’s reliance. Clubs such as Atletico and Everton have been at a huge disadvantage against clubs such as Chelsea for some time, but only now has that disadvantage been converted into something quite as overt as having to ask who they can pick to play and when.
The problem with these big loans is precisely that the players involved are so good. The teams they’re loaned out to can’t do without them on the pitch, so suddenly they need Chelsea too, because without its permission it doesn’t get to play its star player, it becomes a worse team, it melts away into obscurity. It needs Chelsea, so it’s subsumed into Chelsea.
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Reliance such as this opens up room for Chelsea control, particularly in the transfer market. For instance: Atletico borrow Courtois and want to keep him for as long as possible, which ensures that when the summer arrives and Atletico forward Diego Costa leaves, Chelsea gets the first shot at him, from a significantly closer distance than anyone else. At the worst, Atletico become a kind of feeder club, held to ransom by a club that can pull it apart at the seams if it wants to, by taking its incredible goalkeeper away.
Everton’s reliance on the Blues for Lukaku has an even more direct effect—on its points totals. Whether Jose Mourinho was right or not right to let Lukaku out of his sight for the season, he’s still profited from his presence by giving him to the fifth best team in the Premier League. Lukaku gets to play against all of Mourinho’s rivals, impeding their challenges as he does so; then, when his new team plays Chelsea, now reliant on his goals, he doesn’t get to play, and Chelsea gets an easier ride because of it.
The theory doesn’t necessarily match the reality here, but the possibility is the point. Chelsea has the possibility of control over its opponents (direct and indirect) and that, actually, is control.
Loans didn’t used to be like this. In 2003, when Real Madrid temporarily handed over Fernando Morientes to AS Monaco, he ended up scoring the goals that knocked them out of the Champions League quarterfinals. Big name loan signings were quirky; Chelsea has begun to make them efficient. These days, loan deals spread influence and build profit margins (Kevin De Bruyne barely ever played for Chelsea, yet was sold for a £11million profit after his loan to Werder Bremen last season).
Neither Lukaku nor Courtois has ever played regularly for Chelsea and both, in retrospect, seemed to be signed in order to stop other big clubs from signing them. Now, after successful spells at West Brom, Everton and Atletico they’re useful bargaining tools and potential profit-makers. Is that fair? Simply because Chelsea had the money to buy them in the first instance?
Regardless, the way they’re being used now probably had to happen. The only clue as to how the influence of money might progress each time is that the ultimate goal will always be complete market dominance; complete power; complete control. For Chelsea, having spent millions on its own team, eventually that avenue of direct control over results runs dry. After that, controlling other teams is the next logical step.
Teams such as Chelsea now have so much money that they can’t use it all. When you have so many billions to spend, you actually can’t spend it on talent that you can use, you have to spend it on talent you can’t use, too—possibly to stop other people from using it altogether, possibly just to control when and how they use it.
Ethan Dean-Richards is a London-based writer. Follow him on Twitter.