Mourinho explains why Chelsea let Manchester United snap up Luke Shaw

Chelsea went into the summer knowing that Ashley Cole was set to leave and that the team would need a new left back. 19-year-old England left back Luke Shaw -- a Chelsea fan -- went into the summer looking for a transfer to one of the division's top clubs. It briefly looked like a match made in heaven.

Obviously, that didn't work out. Luke Shaw is at Manchester United; Filipe Luis came in to plug the gap for Chelsea. What happened? Here's Jose Mourinho with the (entirely sensible) answer.

If we pay to a 19-year-old boy what we were being asked for, to sign Luke Shaw, we are dead. We would have killed our stability with financial fair play, and killed the stability in our dressing room.

Because when you pay that much to a 19-year-old kid - a good player, fantastic player - but when you pay that amount of money, the next day, we would have had players knocking on our door. They would have been saying 'How is it possible I play 200 games for this club, won this and that, yet a 19-year-old comes here and gets more money than I get?'

It would've killed immediately our balance, and we couldn't allow that.

Source: Mirror.

And he's got a point, too. Paying a 19-year-old fullback (who has yet to make the step up to elite level) more than £6 million a season in wages on top of the transfer fee Southampton were demanding would have been madness. Granted, Mourinho's being slightly cheeky by saying Chelsea would never do something like this when Eden Hazard is one of our highest-paid stars, but that doesn't invalidate the overall argument. Luke Shaw would have cost far too much, and he hasn't done enough to show that he'd have been worth the money.

Filipe Luis, meanwhile:

[W]e can say Felipe is much less expensive. Felipe played for Brazil, won titles in Spain, won European competitions, played in the Champions League Final. Yet this guy is much cheaper than an English young lad. And is he good for our average wages? Yes he is.

Sometimes you have to make decisions.

No complaints from us here.