Chelsea’s sporting directors Paul Winstanley and Laurence Stewart have opened up on the cub’s strategy to offer long term contracts in a rare interview.
Since Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital took over in 2022 new signings have regularly penned six or seven year contracts keeping them at the club into the 2030s.
Cole Palmer and Nicolas Jackson both recently signed contract extensions keeping them at the club until 2033, which means they have nine years to run on their current deals.
Winstanley and Stewart explain why Chelsea offer long term contracts
The Blues have come under criticism for offering players long term deals and former player Emmanuel Petit believes players will just sit back once they have signed a long term contract as they have nothing to prove.
One reason for offering the deals was the ability to spread the cost of a transfer over the length of a contract, but that loophole has now been closed and a transfer fee can only be spread over a maximum of five years.
Many believe that Chelsea are offering long term deals for PSR reasons but in a rare interview Winstanley and Stewart have opened up on the club’s strategy.
“People always sit and think ‘well that’s what we’ve always done, so that’s what we’ve always got to continue doing’, Winstanley told The Telegraph.
“But without forward thinking and progression, everyone will stand still. 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.”
In regards to PSR benefits Winstanley said:
“Well, you’re not getting any benefit from a PSR position on it any more 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.”
Other clubs are now starting to do a similar thing with previous Chelsea target Jhon Duran recently signing a new contract until 2030 at Aston Villa and Stewart also added his thoughts.
“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,” he said.
“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, and that’s one of the key things that we talk about internally, is to make our players better, across all of our teams.”
