Chelsea is ready to pay the championship price – Sport – Kommersant

Chelsea are close to signing Argentina midfielder Enzo Fernandez. The deal, if it goes through, will be the biggest of the season: Chelsea are willing to pay around €120m for the 2022 World Cup Young Player of the Year.

On Monday, a representative delegation made up of Chelsea leaders traveled to Lisbon for talks with Benfica bosses. Purpose, according to Daily Mail, to convince the Portuguese club and its president, the well-known former Portuguese national team player Ruy Costa, to agree to the transfer of the 22-year-old Argentine midfielder of Benfica, Enzo Fernandez. The sides have very little time.

On the night of January 31, the winter transfer window in Europe will close. There is, however, an option in which the transfer of Fernandez will be postponed until the summer. It provides for the parties to sign relevant legally binding documents.

According to the Daily Mail, Londoners are willing to pay the cost of Fernandez’s unconditional buyout. In his contract, it is designated in the amount of €120 million. That is, the purchase of the Argentinean can become the biggest deal in the industry this season. The only difficulty is that Chelsea would like to stretch the payments over three seasons, while Benfica insists on receiving the entire amount at once. However, The Telegraph’s sources claim that Chelsea have also put forward an alternative proposal, which would pay most of the player’s value up front and the rest over the next five years.

In a different situation, the demand of the Portuguese to pay everything at once, perhaps, would not have become a problem. But the fact is that Chelsea have already attracted too much attention because of their spending on buying players. This season, Chelsea have spent a record £460m on strengthening (the club managed to meet the rules of financial fair-play (FFP) by taking advantage of the gaps in them).

Particularly strong resonance produced in mid-January, the purchase of Ukrainian midfielder Mykhailo Mudryk from Shakhtar for €100 million. As a result, a number of Premier League clubs filed a complaint with the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) against Chelsea’s actions, accusing him of circumventing the regulations. In response, UEFA intends to adjust the FFP in order to limit the ability of teams to use the amortization rule. The same Chelsea, having agreed to give €100 million for Mudrik, signed a contract with him for eight and a half years, for which he stretched the costs of acquiring him in reporting in equal shares for the duration of the agreement. UEFA in response intends to ban the signing of agreements lasting more than five years.

It is noteworthy that if Chelsea decided to buy Enzo Fernandez last summer, they could save a lot. In May 2022, Fernandez, then playing for the Argentine River Plate, was worth €15 million.

For such an amount, Benfica bought him in the summer of 2022 (that is, the Lisbon residents, for whom Fernandez did not play two dozen matches and scored only one goal, can now increase their investments eight times). However, after Fernandez became the world champion as part of the Argentina national team, and even was recognized as the best young football player in the world championship, the price for him soared. Portal Transfermarkt, before the news of a serious interest in the Argentine from Chelsea, estimated the midfielder at €55 million. But it looks like this estimate will be revised upwards.

Alexander Petrov