sport news Todd Boehly has been putting faith in clever contracts, young recruits and ... trends now

To understand the scale of Chelsea owner Todd Boehly’s confidence in rewriting the rules of the transfer market — splashing out £320million last month to add to the £250m spent in the summer — it is worth relating a conversation with someone close to the project.

When it was put to them that this had all been tried before — see the Venky brothers’ demise at Blackburn, Peter Ridsdale living the dream at Leeds or Farhad Moshiri’s scattergun Everton spending — and that you cannot reinvent the wheel in football, there was an indignant response.

‘You absolutely can reinvent the wheel. The wheel has been reinvented countless times. The car was a reinvention of the wheel. The Premier League formation in 1992 was a reinvention of football.’

Whatever Boehly and his co-owners Behdad Eghbali and Jose Feliciano lack, it is not self-assurance. They are not tip toeing into a sport in which they have limited knowledge and are scoping out the ground.

Point out that they have spent close to £600m and still cannot score against Fulham, still lack a goalscorer, have bombed out their key summer signing in that position, Pierre- Emerick Aubameyang, by leaving him out of the Champions League squad, and you are met with knowing sighs. 

Best not also mention the difficulty of managing a squad of 34. And where does Raheem Sterling, a £50m summer signing, fit into all this?

Boehly and co genuinely believe they have spotted a flaw in the received wisdom of how you go about creating value in football. And that clubs have been too cautious and risk averse, especially when it comes to young talent.

Rich Americans telling Europeans they have got football all wrong does not exactly go down a storm, but there are precedents for business people there seeing opportunities that we had not grasped over here.

The Glazer family called correctly ahead of the massive upsurge in overseas TV rights in 2003 when clubs were hugely undervalued by Europeans. 

And John W Henry and Tom Werner were ridiculed for their data-led approach at Liverpool, until they won the Premier League and Champions Leagues with what was the best transfer policy at any major club. 

That said, for every Luis Suarez at Liverpool, there was an Andy Carroll. And for every John W Henry, there is a Farhad Moshiri.

Boehly, Eghbali and Feliciano are many things, but presumably naive they are not, with a combined net worth of about $15billion from their private equity funds. 

So, while agents and clubs — especially Brighton, Benfica and Dynamo Kiev — might have been rubbing their hands when Chelsea rode into town like the cocksure new sheriff, those close to that trio insist they will have the last laugh.

Put simply, Chelsea believe that talent, especially young talent, is relatively undervalued in football. That may seem hard to fathom for readers still getting their heads around the fact that £300,000 a week is now the starting point for weekly wage negotiations for a top-class international young player.

The unprecedented seven-year contracts Chelsea are putting players on is not just an amortisation trick to get around UEFA’s Financial Fair Play rules, in that spreading the cost over a long period reduces the annual cost on the balance sheet. UEFA will close the loophole in the summer, but there is more to this than just that ruse.

Boehly’s thinking is twofold. First, the contracts are

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