Chelsea slapped with a £10 million fine

Chelsea Football Club has been fined £10 million and handed a suspended two-window transfer ban for breaching rules on payments to agents between 2009 and 2022.

A six-point deduction, initially imposed but suspended until June 30, 2027, has been overturned on appeal. The club’s owners, Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital, had themselves reported 74 breaches of the Football Association’s (FA) rules when they acquired Chelsea in 2022. Chelsea admitted to making secret payments totaling £47 million to unregistered agents and third parties for transfers between 2011 and 2018. The FA stated it was continuing its investigations into potential individual misconduct related to the case. The initial fine was set at £26 million but was reduced by a third to £17.25 million for self-reporting the breaches and the club’s “exceptional and unprecedented” cooperation, deemed a mitigating factor. It was further reduced to £11.4 million due to an early guilty plea, and then to £10 million after accounting for fines already imposed by UEFA and the Premier League. The FA described the sanction as “appropriate,” aiming to punish the club while deterring future violations and preserving the integrity of the game. The £10 million fine will be redistributed to grassroots football. The regulatory commission noted that without Chelsea’s self-reporting, the breaches would likely have gone undetected. It clarified that the point deduction had been suspended because neither the FA nor the Premier League had requested it. “Now that the FA process is complete, this brings an end to all regulatory proceedings against the club,” Chelsea stated in a release. In March 2024, the club had already faced a nine-month immediate ban on signing under-18 players and a £750,000 fine over the registration of academy players between 2019 and 2022. All the breaches date back to the period when Roman Abramovich owned the club. In March 2022, Abramovich was sanctioned by the UK government over alleged ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, a claim he has always denied. He was granted a special license to sell Chelsea after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, on the condition that he did not profit from the sale. The £2.5 billion proceeds remain frozen in a UK bank account, inaccessible to the oligarch. In 2023, leaked documents revealed financial links between Abramovich and two men dubbed Putin’s “wallets,” according to an investigation by BBC and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism as part of the *Cyprus Confidential* operation. The documents suggested Abramovich may have been involved in a secret £26 million deal in 2010, a claim he has consistently denied. In June 2024, the UK government threatened to pursue Abramovich to ensure the sale proceeds from Chelsea were directed toward humanitarian aid in Ukraine, rather than “all victims of the war,” as he had initially pledged. Two months before the club’s sale in May 2022, Abramovich fell ill under suspicious circumstances during peace talks at the Ukraine-Belarus border. The billionaire, whose wealth stems from oil and gas, had acted as a mediator in negotiations between Ukraine and Russia.