Enzo for €127m, Mudryk for €100m - Todd Boehly is playing Football Manager with Chelsea

Carlo Garganese

• Updated: 4 Jan 2023 11:18 GMT
• 5 min read

All Football Manager fans have done it. You decide which club you want to coach, dart straight to the data editor and then inject yourself with billions of pounds.

You start a new game and then proceed to splash hundreds upon hundreds of millions on new signings.

Money is no object and you have no qualms about paying well over the odds for players in order to secure their signatures.

Premier League 2022/23 January transfers: All the Done Deals

If a rival club is about to buy a top player, well, you sign them too so that your opponent doesn’t strengthen themselves.

While you feel a bit guilty about ‘cheating’ and not playing fairly, ultimately it doesn’t matter.

After all, it’s only a game right?

Well, since the takeover of Todd Boehly last year, Chelsea in real life have resembled a club run by a Football Manager fan on steroids.

Indeed, if someone was to show you Chelsea’s accounts and transfer spend since last summer, you would not think it’s real.

In the 2022 summer transfer window, Chelsea spent a world record €282 million on new players. Never in the history of the (real) game, has any club ever spent so much in one transfer window.

The way Boehly burned through Chelsea’s cash resembled the scene from Narcos where Pablo Escobar is so rich that he burns millions of dollars in banknotes just to light a fire to keep his daughter warm.

Chelsea summer signings

Chelsea overpaid on player after player - Wesley Fofana for €80m, €65m on Marc Cucurella, €40m on a 31-year-old Kalidou Koulibaly, €33m on two teenagers (Chukwuemeka and Casadei) who had barely kicked a first-team ball - the list goes on and on.

There was no actual coherent plan on how these players would be used, what formation, could they co-exist in the same team?

And to make matters worse, Boehly then sacked manager Thomas Tuchel one week after the transfer window closed - further highlighting the lack of planning and synergy.

Graham Potter was brought in to succeed Tuchel, a manager who had done wonders at Brighton but had no experience at a top club and certainly not one as chaotic as Chelsea’s.

Potter has unsurprisingly struggled and Chelsea currently look unlikely to even make the top four. They are languishing in 10th position, 10 points off a Champions League spot. It is likely to get worse with a double-header coming up versus champions Man City.

In true Football Manager-style, Boehly is throwing hundreds of millions of pounds more at the problem in a desperate attempt to rescue Chelsea’s season.

Chelsea will follow up their summer world record of spending by breaking the record also for most money ever spent in a January transfer window.

They are closing in on the signing of Argentina World Cup star Enzo Fernandez for a sensationally inflated €127m from Benfica. They have even agreed to pay €7m more than his release clause because, well, why not?

Enzo will become Chelsea’s biggest signing in history and the fourth most expensive transfer ever, behind only Neymar, Kylian Mbappe and Joao Felix.

Chelsea are also now favourites to sign Mykhailo Mudryk from Shakhtar Donetsk having, in true Football Manager-style, decided to hijack the winger’s transfer to Arsenal in order to stop their rivals buying him. He could cost over €100m also.

The Blues have already announced the signing of young forward David Datro Fofana from Molde for €12m, while they are soon set to announce teenage Brazilian Andrey Santos from Vasco da Gama for €12.5m plus add-ons.

Clearly short of centre-backs, having already signed two this season for well over €100m, Benoit Badiashile will also arrive from Monaco for close to €40m.

We are not even four days into the January transfer window and Chelsea are already looking at almost €300m of spending.

And they still want to sign a striker this month given the struggles of Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Kai Havertz in the number 9 role this season.

By the end of the month, Chelsea’s transfer expenditure for the season will almost certainly surpass €600m- and who knows by how much.

Todd Boehly, the face of Football Manager 2023!