Why Chelsea owner may be pushing for an 18 team Premier League soon | OneFootball

Chelsea have jetted off to play in the Club World Cup, and will kick off their campaign tomorrow night.

With a huge amount of money and a fair bit of prestige on the line, fans and players seem to largely be excited by the concept. The fact that Chelsea haven’t been in the Champions League for a couple of years makes it much more interesting for us.

Prize money too tempting for Chelsea owners to ignore

The new FIFA Club World Cup trophy.

Our owners Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital will be loving the prize money, and The Chelsea Chronicle had a really interesting exclusive with football finance expert Adam Williams who suggested that our ownership would like to see a smaller domestic calendar in order to make more space for lucrative international tournaments like this:

“I think the Club World Cup is a litmus test in terms of what Todd Boehly and Clearlake want at Chelsea,” Williams said.

“Boehly has said that the fixture calendar is too crowded and that they need to reduce the number of matches. But what he really means is that there should be fewer less lucrative matches. The Club World Cup could be worth up to £100m in prize money, so that’s definitely not the type of event he wants removed from the calendar.

“Instead, he probably wants to scrap the League Cup and reduce the size of the Premier League. That way, you keep fixture congestion relatively limited, you lose less money to injuries and you can maybe cut the size of your squad and reduce your wage bill. I think if you look at the research, if you can remove seven or eight competitive matches from the calendar then that can let you have quite a brutal revision when it comes to the size of your squad.”

Less domestic football looks inevitable, long term

Reducing the size of the Premier League and scrapping the League Cup would reduce the flow of money down from the top table to smaller clubs in England, all for the sake of just enriching the owners of the top teams, and so we’re against it.

However money talks, and we can sadly see the game moving in exactly that direction long term.