Chelsea’s latest filing to Companies House shows that the football club’s wage bill went up by £25 million in the year ending 30th of June 2015.
The increase, which took the club’s wage bill from £190 million to £215.6 million, means that Chelsea currently have the highest wage bill of any club in the Premier League. The nearest competitors to Chelsea were Manchester United, whose wage bill came out at £203 million, and Manchester City’s, whose wage bill was £193.8 million. Chelsea’s London rivals Arsenal revealed that their wage bill is the fourth largest in the country at £192 million.
In the 2014-2015 season Chelsea won both the League Cup and the Premier League title, so the news regarding the wage bill seems to confirm a long held belief by football’s financial experts that the team with the highest wage bill will win the league more often than not.
The information regarding the wage bill does not reveal the split of how much money was spent on player’s wages and how much was spent on backroom staff and those that maintain the ground itself. What is revealed is that the club made a profit of £42 million that season thanks to the sale of players such as Ryan Bertrand to Southampton, Andre Schurrle to Wolfsburg and Romelu Lukaku to Everton. Frank Lampard and Ashley Cole also left during the 2014-2015 season.
The club’s accounts also happened to reveal that it had made a pre-tax loss of £22.6 million. That compares poorly to a £19 million profit from the previous year. The club themselves claim that turnover fell by £5.5 million to £319 million because the broadcasting revenue from the Champion’s League dropped after they got knocked out of the competition by Paris Saint Germain.
The difference in profit will also have been in no small part due to the arrival of new players, such as Cesc Fabregas, Diego Costa and the return of Didier Drogba for his second spell at the club.