Chelsea still owe up to £71MILLION to Inter for Romelu Lukaku – on top of another £100m for other transfer instalments

Posted Sunday, March 13, 2022 by Thesun.co.uk

CHELSEA still owe Inter Milan up to £71m for Romelu Lukaku.

That is on top of the £100m or so the Blues were due to pay out over the course of this season in instalments on previous transfers.

But Chelsea’s canny business in the player trading market means they were also in line to receive £167m from other clubs during 2021-22, according to the last accounts of Roman Abramovich’s holding company.

Chelsea declined to comment on the details of the Lukaku deal.

Some information is available, however, because Inter made it public when they refinanced their massive debts earlier this year.

Publicly-issued documents show that Inter are due to receive the full £95m fee for the August 2021 transfer later this year - but not directly from Chelsea.

And it remains unclear whether the Blues are having to stump up the whole cost of their misfiring striker in the coming months.

The club record transfer fee appears to have been split into five roughly equal instalments of £19m each.

Chelsea paid Inter the first £19m directly.

But then the Serie A champions made a forward-funding arrangement with an unnamed financial institution to get their hands on more money sooner.

It’s a common practice in football, especially for clubs like Inter who were in a financial crisis last summer.

Under the terms of the deal, Chelsea would then pay the remaining instalments to the institution directly rather than to Inter.

By September 30 2021 Inter had received an instalment of £18.4m from the institution, with the remaining £71m or so due to follow over the following 12 months.

But it is not known how many payments Chelsea were due to make on the Lukaku deal during the course of this season.

Even if they were in line to clear the whole debt, they were still set to break even in their player trading.

The last accounts for Fordstam Limited, the company through which Abramovich still technically owns Chelsea and its various subsidiaries, showed it had £104m of debts to trade creditors falling due for payment in the year from June 30 2021.

The vast majority of that sum will have been transfer payments due to other clubs.

But the same accounts show that the Blues were expecting £167m of income from clubs paying instalments for ex-Chelsea players they had bought.

The club should be able to pay its bills until the end of the season after the Government agreed to vary the terms of its licence to operate in light of Abramovich’s assets being frozen.

But whoever buys the club from the Russian billionaire will be inheriting a business that required £365.3m of extra funding from him over the last five years.

In the last full pre-pandemic season of 2018-19 Abramovich put in a staggering £247m to balance the books.