Time to dig into this one a little bit. Context is always important with claims like this.
First of all, Stefan Borson is a former Financial Adviser for Manchester City. I don’t believe he currently does this role for any other club now and it appears that all he does at the moment is give exclusive interviews to Football Insider speaking about finances in football, mainly Chelsea, oddly enough.
In my opinion, it seems like Borson is just not really a big fan of Chelsea and our current owners, he does appear to go at us a lot and we can probably put him in the same biased category that the likes of Jamie Carragher and others sit in.
So, what I am saying is, take a lot of this with a pinch of salt and understand that actually, Borson probably has about as much knowledge as you and I, when talking about how much Chelsea are paying their players right now. The fact is, only the club, the players, and anyone who deals DIRECTLY with our finances right now, will know what our players are currently earning.
Chelsea pay low base contract fees with incentives. None of us know what those incentives are and how much these wages can go up to.
I just wanted to lay down all those foundations before I give you the quotes, just so you can get a sense of what is actually going down here.
Borson says:
“It’s my favourite subject this one. We hear a lot about Chelsea being unique in their approach, where they have highly incentivised contracts.
“I can tell you every single football club, including those in League Two, have highly incentivised contracts. It is a perfectly typical way of doing things.
“And in any event, if Chelsea have highly incentivised contracts, well, they’re currently paying very high wages because the club won the Club World Cup, qualified for the Champions League and has had a level of success, which would have then triggered all of these incentivisations that people said is so unique. I think you’ll find that the wage bill is very high.”
You can just see the little digs he makes in these comments. It’s a bit weird.
I respect that he’s had big experience of working in football finances and yes, his knowledge on everything in that sense is much more than my own. He is probably making some points that do also stand here, too.
But he’s doing it in a bit of a bitter and biased way and also, he’s lacking context and facts. I say again, Borson does NOT know the incentives that our players are on, there’s no way he knows that.
Everything he’s said above is based on his opinion only.
The context here is that Chelsea will be paying higher incentives right now off the back off more success, and more success brings more profits. Winning trophies brings more award money, so it all balances up. If Chelsea were paying high wages like they used to, we’d be paying those regardless of what we were doing on the field, and that’s bad.
Why is he painting out incentives to be a bad thing? It literally gives players a financial motivation to win trophies, surely that’s only a good thing?
I am first to call negative things out when I see them. I will always criticise things I don’t agree with at the club. But this one is honestly just ridiculous. Talking about straw-clutching just to have a dig at Chelsea, behave man!
I like these low base fee contracts with incentives. If the players are happy with them, and the club are happy with them, and they provide motivation to win and bring success, then it’s only a win-win situation, surely!?
