Chelsea: still a dilletante club

The "braintrust"

You know that uncool guy at the club/bar/underground S&M dungeon who is there solely due to the size of his wallet, but pretends to be a regular? That’s sort of like how Chelsea are currently pretending to be a properly run football club and not the toy of an egomaniac Russian billionaire.

Peter Kenyon was quoted in a Bloomberg (no link, sorry) article to the effect that Chelsea are trying to be an actual business and reign in their wage bill.

Feb. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Chelsea has shaved 6 percentage
points from its salary costs since July and will meet a target
to reduce payrolls at the London soccer club to 55 percent of
sales, Chief Executive Officer Peter Kenyon said.

Team payments to players have shrunk to ``about 70
percent'' of revenue, from 76 percent in fiscal 2006, Kenyon
said in an interview at Claridge's Hotel in London last night.
Wages at the club rose to 114 million pounds ($222 million) from
108.9 million pounds in the year through June 2006.

``We've got strict objectives in terms of where we want to
get to and they are 55 percent of our turnover represented in
wages,'' Kenyon said at a London Chamber of Commerce and
Industry dinner. ``That's our target, which we're comfortable
we'll get to.''

Later on in the piece, Kenyon also mentions how Chelsea have more or less balanced the books in terms of transfer spending over the past year. But it’s hard to square the logical business talk above with persistent rumors floating around that Roman and Avram want to buy Ronaldinho for 60 million pounds. Ronaldinho could join some of Chelsea's other shrewd transfer bargains, like Sheva and Ballack. Don’t they realize that Brazilians age in dog years? Exhibits: Adriano, Ronaldo. Letting Ronaldinho run wild with notorious boozers like Joe Cole is not going to help with that spare tire.