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Back in September, we rolled out the first edition of our player wage database in recognition of the fact that UEFA's financial fair play regulations mandate that we start focusing not only on tactical analysis and performance metrics, but also the financial impact when discussing player acqusitions.
The database contains everything you could ever want to know about Chelsea's contracts, wages, and the impact they have on FFP compliance. We updated the database about a month ago after the club released it's 2012-13 financial statement to account for the fact that Chelsea is now unlikely to qualify for the wage exemption contained in Annex 11 §2 of UEFA's financial fair play regulations during the first monitoring period (which covers the 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 seasons).
Now that the transfer window has closed, it's worth taking another look at a new updated edition of Chelsea's wage database to see exactly how each transaction fits within the context of the overall financial fair play costs associated with player wages and transfer fees.
A note on the updates
We made a number of updates to the wage database, most of which were to account for the transfer activity that took place this month.
As such, we've accounted for the sales of Juan Mata, Michael Essien, and Kevin de Bruyne and the purchases of Nemanja Matic, Mohamed Salah, Kurt Zouma, and Mario Pasalic. We've also accounted for the various changes in the loan status' of players under Chelsea's control.
After taking a closer look at the numbers for a different project involving transfer inflation, I decided to adjust the transfer fee for both Oscar and John Obi Mikel. The new figures with regards to both transfer fees are smaller than what we had originally, and as such, you'll notice a reduced annual FFP cost for both players.
January transfer window activity
As the graphic shows, the club was able to shave £27.5m off of its 2013-14 FFP wage bill. As I've mentioned several times however, I don't think any of these sales were at all motivated by FFP issues, and rather, were simply a recognition that the players were surplus to requirements under Jose Mourinho and given that they could fetch excellent prices on the transfer market, it made a lot more sense to have £35.6m in the bank account rather than sitting on the bench.
Over the last month, we have discussed the financial impact of each transaction at length, and if interested in the details, we have articles focusing solely on the economics of each transaction in our financial archives.
Feel free to play around with the database, and if anything jumps out at you (for example, the fact that Fernando Torres costs £124,000 more than David Luiz, Ramires, and Oscar combined), be sure to share it with the rest of us in the comments section.
