the thing is Chelsea's lawyers are just very clever.
hotel sales, all above board
women team sales, all above board, others now started to copy...
and earlier the 8-9 year contracts which had to be approved until the changes happened, it did help them with some expensive players amortized costs early on...
they probably told new owners to admit some of sketchy stuff of the Abra era, and this will help to get tiny punishment, compared to PL finds out from different source and then goes on witch hunt like with City, even though the actual rules broken are just as sick or even worse than some of the 115 charges.
the amount potentially involved in us maybe paying Mancini bits and pieces through UAE club, doesnt even come close to Chelsea regularly paying off agents outside the accounts which helped them to get big players "cheaper" = sporting advantage.
make no mistake if we would report ourselves now that we see under the Sinawatra era there were some strange payments PL would start a huge investigation no matter what and media noise around it would be serious.
with Chelsea though I am doubtful they even get anything else than a small financial fine maybe. despite these do not even need much a hearing as they self admitted all of it.
the media silence on Chelsea's case is brutal. nobody interested, nobody asking for timelines, nobody impatient to know the punishment.
A few things are giving me an uneasy feeling about the Chelsea situation. Yes, they do seem to have some good lawyers exploiting every loophole in the various rule books, but good luck to them with that. They have every right to do this - within the rules.
But since they self-reported their own cheating, which the media seems very relaxed about, they have been, and by all accounts continue to be negotiating with the authorities for only financial punishments. This was reported in 2023:
“In accordance with the club’s ownership group’s core principles of full compliance and transparency with its regulators, we are grateful that this case has been concluded by proactive disclosure of information to UEFA and a settlement that fully resolves the reported matters.
“We wish to place on record our gratitude to UEFA for its consideration of this matter.”
Yes, no wonder they are grateful to UEFA for such a lenient punishment, when others (e.g. Juventus) received financial punishments as well as a ban from playing in UEFA competitions.
But since Chelsea confessed everything, the leaks that came to light in November 2023 have identified further cheating from Chelsea, which apparently they didn't self-report. So they weren't perhaps as honest and up-front as they would have had us believe, and they might have fallen short of their core principles of "full compliance and transparency with its regulators". This commitment to "full compliance" incidentally that led to a £27m fine this year for non-compliance.
By all accounts, Chelsea secured the signing of Hazard using dubious hidden payments to his agent, and prevented us from signing him at the time. I would say that this signing set us back significantly, and was definitely a major factor in Chelsea's success at the time, and at our expense.
In my opinion, this should result in sporting sanctions against Chelsea from both UEFA and the PL. UEFA tends to stick to is own limitation period of six years, but generally where this is legislated, limitation doesn't apply when facts (fraud) has been deliberately concealed, which is the situation with Chelsea.
Maybe the PL has other business occupying a lot of its time at the moment, but it is very quiet on the Chelsea front.
