Chelsea have confirmed they recorded the highest pre-tax loss in English football history last season, announcing a £262.4million ($349m) deficit in the accounts of Chelsea FC Holdings Limited, the company which houses the club’s men’s team.
That sum differs from the £342m loss disclosed in a UEFA report released at the end of February but, as The Athletic reported at the time, there was always a likelihood the loss per Chelsea’s accounts would differ from that disclosed by UEFA. European football’s governing body has introduced several rule changes in recent years which seek to capture a club’s true running costs and to exclude what they deem irrelevant income wherever possible.
Those rules do not come into play when a club files its annual financial statements, which are instead governed by wider, non-football-specific accounting rules.
The difference is especially stark at clubs like Chelsea who, alongside employing several transactions in recent seasons that are not allowed by UEFA, also sit in a multi-club ownership (MCO) group. UEFA’s rules require clubs to report all costs related to the running of football operations, even if they appear outside of a club’s legal entity, a concept termed a ‘reporting perimeter’.
That perimeter has thrown up disparities between filed accounts and UEFA reports for clubs including Manchester City, themselves part of an MCO, and now the same is being seen for Chelsea, who are in a group with French outfit Strasbourg under the BlueCo banner.
A difference between the wage bill disclosed in Chelsea FC Holdings and the figure submitted to UEFA accounts for around a quarter of the £80m gap in the two pre-tax loss figures. Per UEFA, Chelsea’s wage bill in 2024-25 was around £374m; in a Deloitte report published in January, which draws its figures from club accounts, the wage bill was £21m lower. That is likely a product of relevant costs sitting further up the MCO chain.
The remainder of the difference is harder to quantify but one explanation is the way Chelsea spread, or amortise, their transfer fees across player contracts. Ostensibly in response to clubs like Chelsea handing out lengthy contracts to reduce annual amortisation costs, UEFA introduced a rule ahead of the 2023-24 season which limited clubs to amortising fees over a maximum of five years.
Accounting rules, which club accounts are prepared to, contain no such limit. At a club like Chelsea, with several long-term contracts on their books, it creates a material difference between the limited company accounts and figures submitted to football’s governing bodies.
Fuller picture to come but massive deficits laid bare
Chelsea have not yet released full accounts for 2024-25, so the exact make-up of their record loss is unknown. The club’s revenue actually rose last season, on the back of improved gate receipts and a trip to the FIFA Club World Cup, even if only around £20m of their £85m prize pot is reflected in last season’s accounts (the rest falls into 2025-26).
Yet the huge loss reflects the fact Chelsea continue to run massive day-to-day deficits. Those have been offset in recent seasons by a mixture of internal asset sales — shifting two hotels, a car park and the women’s team around the BlueCo group generated £275m in paper profit in the two seasons before last — and the club has topped £100m in profits for player trading in each of the past two seasons.
Those profits slumped £95m to £58m last season and, combined with no intragroup asset sales to boost the bottom line, resulted in English football’s largest ever loss. No club has ever previously topped £200m in annual losses, with only Manchester City’s £197.5m deficit in 2010-11 coming close.
When reporting on that UEFA document, The Athletic detailed how one source with knowledge of Chelsea’s dealings, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships, highlighted player value and other asset write-offs as contributing to the huge pre-tax loss. Without the full accounts, which should be published online at the UK’s Companies House facility in the coming week, it is impossible to determine the quantum of those write-offs.
What is known is that Chelsea had no trouble with domestic profitability and sustainability rules (PSR), owing to those past internal asset sales. Last season’s record deficit represents a £391m swing from the £128m profit of 2023-24, but The Athletic had previously projected Chelsea as having enormous headroom to make losses in 2024-25. Even an English record didn’t push them over the Premier League’s regulatory edge.