With Chelsea FC completing the signing of Enzo Fernandez for £105-million, the commodification of football has never been more clear.
The 22-year-old midfielder has only played 84 professional games but became hot property after starring in Argentina’s World Cup winning team, causing the London club to pay more than double his market value last month.
His transfer – the Premier League’s highest of all time – helped to ensure that Chelsea spent £545-million on players in a single season, the most ever by a club.
“Idiot!” I hear you say, “This is just the continuation of a trend. Where have you been living for the past 20 years as transfer fees have skyrocketed?”
But while Fernandez’s fee, taken in isolation, may just look like a wealthy club securing the future of a potentially generational talent, it is informed by a sinister history.
Chelsea have a chequered recent past, languishing in relative top flight obscurity until Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich took over in 2003.
His instant cash injection paid off with a first Premier League title in 2005 and a first Champions League medal in 2012.
He would continue to spend hundreds of millions of pounds throughout his tenure, ensuring Chelsea became one of the top clubs in the world and that Russia’s rulers softened their public image in the capital of the United Kingdom.
Forced to sell the club after sanctions were imposed on him in 2022, one of Abramovich’s last major acts was to become one of the founders of the proposed European Super League.
The league would ensure automatic European qualification for 12 of the nominally biggest clubs on the continent, promising an economic trickle down effect on smaller and poorer teams.
Aside from the laughable Reaganomics of it all, make no mistake, the intent of the Super League was to end true competition, allowing the most successful clubs to coast on television deals to fortunes ever greater.
It was paused after massive outcry from the footballing public, but the insidious greed behind it just found new ways to manifest.
Fernandez has just signed an eight-year contract, significantly longer than the three or four year historical standards.
Perhaps it’s because Chelsea trusts him to be a great player? No.
An eight-year contract not only limits their risk of losing the player for free (when a player finishes their contract and does not renew, meaning the club can’t charge a transfer fee), but also allows them to amortize the cost.
In the eyes of the financial regulator, which imparts rules for ‘financial fair play’, Fernandez actually costs just over £13-million a year, allowing Chelsea to spend the aforementioned half a billion and get away with it.
It is a bold-faced attempt to buy victory and end true competition which has underpinned the cultural relevancy of sport for hundreds of years.
The last bastions of sportsmanship continue to hold on for now, but if Chelsea (and the dozens of other likeminded clubs) continue in this trend, the underdog stories will become fewer and farther between.
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