Jamie Carragher Questions Chelsea Progress Under Todd Boehly After Bayern Defeat

Chelsea may be world champions but Jamie Carragher claims they have not progressed since Todd Boehly led a £4.25 billion takeover of the club in May 2022.

Boehly landed at Stamford Bridge at the end of the 2021/22 season, during which Chelsea finished third in the Premier League, reached the Champions League quarter-finals, reached both domestic cup finals and won the UEFA Super Cup and a seven-team FIFA Club World Cup.

Chelsea have since finished 12th, sixth and fourth in the Premier League — and they currently sit fifth ahead of Saturday’s trip to Manchester United.

Last season saw Enzo Maresca — the sixth Chelsea manager to work under Boehly — win the UEFA Europa Conference League, before triumphing at the expanded Club World Cup in the USA over the summer.

But Carragher does not see those trophies as sufficient evidence to support suggestions that Boehly’s Blues are moving in the right direction.

Chelsea have spent close to £2bn on transfer fees on Boehly’s watch. That includes a £296.5 million spend during a record-breaking transfer window this summer.

Jamie Carragher not impressed by Todd Boehly’s Chelsea work so far

Carragher told CBS Sports on Wednesday night that Chelsea under BlueCo had drifted from the standards set when Thomas Tuchel was in charge. The former Liverpool defender was speaking after Chelsea fell to a humbling 3-1 defeat away at Bayern Munich in their opening game in the league phase of the Champions League.

“There’s no right or wrong way going about running a football club and trying to be successful; it doesn’t matter about the system. The point I’m trying to make is we can’t pretend that this has been a success so far after three and a half years.

“They came into a club and the manager was Thomas Tuchel — he’d won the Champions League at that club [in 2021]. At that stage under Thomas Tuchel, Manchester City and Liverpool were possibly the best two teams in world football, alongside Real Madrid, so it was very difficult for anybody to win the Premier League, but Chelsea were the third-best team. It wasn’t Manchester United, it wasn’t Arsenal, it was Chelsea.

“They then change that manager, they then take a team who were very close to competing and winning trophies like they did the Champions League, and they go and spend £2 billion. They are no closer — they are further away — than what that manager was doing three and a half years ago in terms of competing with the top teams in the Premier League, they are further away having spent two billion pounds.”

Micah Richards pushes back at Carragher over Chelsea criticism

Micah Richards, sitting alongside Carragher in the CBS studio, pushed back. He pointed out that Chelsea had climbed the league table in each of the past two seasons and returned to the Champions League, while also defeating Paris Saint-Germain on their way to winning the Club World Cup.

“But there’s been progress, hasn’t there?” Richards replied. “If you finish in the league in his first season, 12th, and then you finish sixth, and then you finish fourth, and then you win the Club World Cup. We’re talking about where they are now — yes, he has spent a lot of money — but there has been progress. They beat the best team in Europe in PSG. They did ever so well. I’m not saying Chelsea are going to win the Premier League, but you can see progress.”

Carragher, however, insisted Chelsea had lost their identity as perennial winners.

“Let’s not forget where Chelsea have come from — Chelsea are a winning machine,” he shot back, before dismissing last season’s Conference League triumph as “a Mickey Mouse trophy.”

That provoked another response from Richards, who hit back: “The Club World Cup? They’ve just beaten PSG, European champions.”

But Carragher countered once more: “You’ve just said they haven’t got a squad better than the other teams in the Premier League. How is that possible when you’ve spent £2 billion on a squad?”

The Boehly blueprint

Since taking over in 2022, Boehly and Clearlake Capital have ripped up Chelsea’s old recruitment model and replaced it with something closer to an investment portfolio. The strategy is built around signing young players on ultra-long contracts — often seven or eight years — to both protect value and exploit accounting rules under the Premier League’s Profit and Sustainability framework.

The logic is two-fold. First, if a player thrives, Chelsea have him tied down long term. If he struggles, the length of the deal still helps preserve resale value. Second, under PSR rules, transfer fees are spread across the duration of a contract. So a £60m signing amortised over eight years counts as just £7.5m per season in the books. That quirk allows Chelsea to keep spending heavily every summer without immediately breaching financial limits.

The churn has been relentless. This summer alone saw 31 deals — seven more than any other Premier League club. Chelsea spent £296.5m on incomings, bringing in Joao Pedro from Brighton, Alejandro Garnacho from Manchester United and Jamie Gittens from Borussia Dortmund, while also investing in teenagers such as Estevao Willian, Dario Essugo and Mike Penders.

At the same time, they raised a record £314.4m from sales, offloading Christopher Nkunku to AC Milan, Noni Madueke to Arsenal, Joao Felix to Al Nassr and Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall to Everton, along with a raft of academy graduates. Penders, for example, was bought from Genk for £17m and immediately loaned to Strasbourg, while Mamadou Sarr moved the other way for £12m before being loaned back.

The end result was a rare feat: Chelsea managed the unusual trick of retooling their squad while actually posting a net profit of £17.9m in a window that saw Premier League clubs combine for a record £3.2bn spend.

Supporters of the model — including Micah Richards in his CBS debate with Carragher — might argue it is “clever business” that keeps Chelsea flexible and future-proofed. Critics counter that it risks creating an airport-terminal feel, with constant turnover disrupting cohesion and leaving managers like Maresca to knit together a squad that changes year after year.