Chelsea’s co-sporting directors Paul Winstanley and Laurence Stewart have explained why the club sold Conor Gallagher to Atletico Madrid.
The midfielder was the Blues’ on-field captain for much of last season and a key player under Mauricio Pochettino, but he was not in new manager Enzo Maresca’s plans for this season and the club cashed in by selling him to Atletico for around £34million in August.
The 24-year-old represented a success story for Chelsea, having broken into the first team and become a regular after joining the club’s academy in 2006. Criticism around his sale has centred around the suggestion that Chelsea were selling a leading academy product simply because his transfer fee would help their accounts fall in line with profit and sustainability regulations (PSR).
But speaking in a newspaper interview, Winstanley and Stewart have attempted to set the record straight about the reasons behind Gallagher’s exit and Mason Mount’s earlier departure for Manchester United.
Winstanley told The Telegraph: “It is not just about PSR, it’s contractual statuses, it’s circumstances. The two players you referenced, there were contractual problems that we walked into. It’s really important for us to bring through players.”
Stewart said: “There has been interest in other players that we’ve turned down. Every decision has been a performance-based decision, which people have opinions on because that’s football. And, absolutely, with homegrown players it’s always more emotional.”
Under the ownership of Clearlake Capital, Chelsea have also taken a longer-term approach to player contracts than other clubs across Europe.
Cole Palmer is currently on a nine-year contract until June 2033, while Enzo Fernandez is tied down until 2032 and six different first-team players are on seven-year deals that run until 2031. Chelsea players account for eight of the 10 longest active contracts in Europe’s five major leagues.
Stewart and Winstanley rejected the premise that falling in line with PSR constraints is the sole reason for the club’s contract strategy. In December 2023, the Premier League voted to limit the amount of time a player's transfer fee can be spread across their accounts, reducing it to a maximum of five-year amortisation.
“People always sit and think ‘well, that’s what we’ve always done, so that’s what we’ve always got to continue doing’, but without forward thinking and progression, everyone will stand still”, Winstanley said.
“So it’s a clever concept the owners implemented in the beginning and what they believed in. Once we looked at it together in isolation, we were like ‘yeah, you can definitely see how this can work’. And we believe in it.
“You are not getting any benefit from a PSR position on it anymore, and we’ve still continued with it. So if it was just for PSR, we’d have stopped doing it.
“That was never at the forefront of the owners’ minds when we spoke to them about how we see it working, how we all see it working as a club.”
Explaining the reason Chelsea’s players tend to be on longer-term contracts than other clubs’ players, Stewart said: “It’s because the players, the talent and the value they have over the long term is really important to the clubs.
“Really, it is the biggest nod towards the ability to identify talent. You’ve got to get that right if you’re going to put players on these long contracts and then it’s your ability to develop players and develop talent
“That’s one of the key things that we talk about internally: to make our players better, across all of our teams.”
