9 months ago
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With Mauricio Pochettino craving a trophy at Chelsea, winning the Carabao Cup could quickly backfire.
The Blues look set to miss out on European football due to their league form, with worrying back-to-back defeats pushing them down into the bottom half of the Premier League table.
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A 4-1 defeat away to Liverpool was followed by a humbling 4-2 loss to Wolves at Stamford Bridge.
That saw the Blues fans turn against Pochettino and owner Todd Boehly, the latter of which has had an immediate fall from grace despite giving fans what they wanted in the transfer market.
The American businessman has injected over £1billion into the club just on transfer fees since his takeover in May 2022, and that could become an issue with success at Wembley.
Should Chelsea beat Liverpool on February 25, live on talkSPORT, they would automatically qualify for Europe’s third-tier competition, the Europa Conference League.
With the prize money for winning the competition just £15million, that could leave the club in plenty of trouble.
As per the Daily Mirror, UEFA’s Financial Fair Play rules restrict the transfer spending of its participating clubs to a maximum of 80 per cent of their revenue.
Chelsea’s annual income is expected to fall below the £450m mark, and they’re already spending a whopping £360m on player salaries.
Even with the competition’s winnings, that would restrict their spending to just £10m for the proceeding transfer windows.
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The story would be very different if Chelsea made the top four and Champions League, where group stage income would easily surpass Conference League winnings.
But with Pochettino’s side 15 points off the top four, and showing little sign of improvement, making Europe’s third tier rather than its first could leave the side in a world of pain.
Ben Chilwell causes outrage with 'one of the worst things to say' after Chelsea's 4-2 home Premier League defeat to Wolves
On top of that, UEFA’s latest FFP regulations only allow losses of £34m across 2023 and 2024, which will also cause problems for Chelsea and Boehly.
Having completely overhauled their 2021 Champions League-winning squad, the next stage will be selling some of their erroneous purchases.
Romelu Lukaku sits top of that list, currently playing on loan at Roma despite reports he’s the London club’s highest-paid player.
Supporters have also turned on £47.5m Raheem Sterling in recent weeks, but the most likely source of income appears to be academy graduates like Conor Gallagher and Trevoh Chalobah.
