Matt Damon
Player Valuation: £60m
They could do that having disposed of player sales. And they will attempt to again in the next two windows to balance the books. But to assume that they'll offer Fellaini 100k a week plus - is in my view unlikely. They could afford maybe three or four players in that range. No more.
Also the amount of wages they are able to "write off" will increasingly put them under pressure - as they dispose of players ... the more they dispose - the more that new signings/replacements wages will be incorporated. Therefore this is a pressure on their wage bill.
Hence Pienaar, only offered £55k a week by them
via FT.com
Chelsea Football Club, which on Monday spent £76.5m on two players on the final day of the January transfer window, suffered a pre-tax loss of £70.4m last season.
The loss is 59 per cent higher than the previous season, when it paid £12.6m compensation to former manager Luiz Felipe Scolari and his coaching staff.
The club, owned by the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, on Friday issued its financial statement for the year to June 30 2010, which showed a rise of £3.1m in revenues to £209.5m.
Its (Paris: FR0010370163 - news) income from football activities came to £185.5m, a rise of only 0.1 per cent.
Taking out the compensation costs to Mr Scolari and his coaches, the wage bill has gone up by 12.8 per cent to £172.6m, and now accounts for 84 per cent of turnover.
That is considerably higher than most rivals, with the exception of Manchester City, which has a wages-to-turnover ratio of 107 per cent.
Chelsea this week paid £50m to buy Fernando Torres from Liverpool and £26.5m to buy David Luiz from the Portuguese club Benfica.
But Chelsea reduced its staff numbers from 573 to 548, including a reduction of four in the number of players and coaches.
Most of the wage bill increase was attributable to a tenfold rise in "other pension costs".
Operating losses were £68.6m, compared with £72.3m the previous year. While it made a profit on the sale of players of £28.6m in 2008-09, including Wayne Bridge and Steve Sidwell, the club made a loss of £980,000 on player sales last season.
The club's valuation of its players fell from £247.5m to £215.7m.
Chelsea's financial position appears to leave the club struggling to comply with Uefa's financial fair play rule, which comes into effect at the start of next season and which requires clubs to apply greater discipline to their spending.
Clubs will be allowed to incur losses of only €45m (£38m) in 2011-12 and 2012-13 if they are to avoid sanction. But Uefa will allow clubs to write off the value of the contracts of players signed before June 2010.
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