There are two ways to look at Chelsea not signing a front-of-shirt sponsorship deal before the start of the season.

You could view it as a failure, with companies not wanting to fork out £45million-plus for the privilege of being in prime position on their kits following a disappointing Premier League campaign in 2023-24, buoyed by the narrative that the club’s owners, Clearlake Capital and Todd Boehly, don’t know what they are doing.

The alternate view, echoed within their home stadium Stamford Bridge, is that Chelsea rolled the dice and gambled on their sporting performance improving, therefore rendering it foolish to enter a long-term deal with a potential partner in the summer when the front-of-shirt value could be sold for a much bigger fee just a few months later.

In this case, both can be true, yet it’s evident no company was willing to pay what Chelsea were asking for, otherwise the players would be sporting some brand’s logo on their chests already.

One opportunistic company even shared a press release at the beginning of November, announcing the ‘exclusive news’ it had secured a deal to become Chelsea’s new front-of-shirt partner for the rest of the season. When challenged on the fact this simply wasn’t true, the firm, which will remain nameless, thought it would still be a good story for media outlets to run.

The club hierarchy’s choice to hold their nerve, to not just accept a low-ball figure for the sake of it, could be about to pay off — and it is a bet not many others in the game would have been willing to make.

New head coach Enzo Maresca has been a transformative appointment, guiding Chelsea to third in the league. There is a good feeling around Chelsea and the potential of their young squad.

This has led to renewed interest from potential partners when it comes to Chelsea selling their front-of-shirt sponsorship, meaning they have orchestrated something resembling a beauty contest to drive up the price.

Chelsea sources, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships, have indicated to The Athletic that the process is nearing its end — their shirts will have a sponsor before the season ends.

Leading the negotiations for securing a lucrative deal are Jason Gannon, the club’s president and chief operating officer, Todd Kline, their new president of commercial, and Casper Stylsvig, their chief revenue officer.

Chelsea’s starting point for this deal has always been at the Champions League level. Their domestic rivals competing in Europe’s elite club competition are the benchmark, and they didn’t want to accept an offer that would look cheap, despite playing in UEFA’s third-tier Conference League.

The view from the other side of the negotiation table, however, was one that essentially asked, ‘Why would we give you Champions League money when you aren’t even in that competition?’. There was also a fair sense of concern about how this season would play out, given the change from Mauricio Pochettino to Maresca in the dugout.

Manchester United, the outlier in this scenario due to years of underperforming on the pitch, recently extended their deal with technology firm Snapdragon, which sees them earn $75million (£59.8m at the current exchange rate) per year for their front-of-shirt asset.

In July 2022, Liverpool extended their deal with bank Standard Chartered to the end of 2026-27, with The Athletic being told it constituted a significant uplift on the previous £40million-a-year contract. Arsenal’s Emirates airlines deal — which was renewed at the start of last season, meaning it will have lasted for 22 years when the latest extension ends in 2028 — is reportedly worth £50m a year.

Chelsea are seeking around £60million a year, which they believe is the going rate for the Premier League’s elite clubs, especially those competing at the top end of the table.

The Athletic’s special report into Manchester City’s sponsors in 2022 detailed that they receive more than £67.5million a year from Etihad Airways, from the United Arab Emirates home of its owners, for sponsorship including matchday shirtfronts.

At the beginning of last season, again having failed to secure a front-of-shirt sponsorship, Chelsea signed a short-term deal for 2023-24 with Infinite Athlete, a biomechanics engineering company, which was worth over £40million to the club.

“Somewhere between £45million and £55m a year would probably be your typical Champions League high-ranking Premier League club’s value,” explains Professor Rob Wilson, from the University Campus of Football Business.

“In the context of this conversation, hindsight is our friend, so if it was a strategy in the summer, then you have to give Chelsea a pat on the back. But I can’t see it. I just think they simply weren’t able to sign a sponsor that was prepared to spend £40million a year, so they have sat on it looking for what they might find.

Chelsea are the only one of the 20 Premier League sides without a front-of-shirt sponsor (Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)

“They are now at the top end of the league and that makes them a more interesting proposition.”

Short-term and long-term sponsorship deals remain a possibility. One sticking point in negotiations with potential partners is that Chelsea are not looking to sign with anyone for five years, preferring shorter contracts. They don’t want to be stuck in a five-year deal if, as predicted, there is a sponsorship boom in football linked to the 2026 men’s World Cup, which is being jointly hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico.

“The power of the American investor is coming into play,” explains Richard Busby, chief executive of BDS Sponsorship — one of Europe’s most prominent consultancies in the field. “The World Cup in 2026 and its impact in America is crucial to what happens to shirt-sponsorship prices.

“If it starts to really get big viewership in America — the Premier League is still relatively small in America when it comes to viewership — then, clearly, there is a lot more money potentially available.”

This is a view also shared by senior figures at Chelsea. The club have been in discussions with several potential partners, including airlines and tech companies. The Middle East and the United States are generally viewed as where most of the sponsorship money is coming from, although Asia has also been touted as an emerging market.

Chelsea, naturally, see themselves as an attractive proposition. Being located in London is a significant part of that thinking, along with an improved sporting performance and brand identity, having won the Champions League twice in the past 12 years. What shouldn’t be overlooked, however, is that Chelsea have lost ground on their rivals by not having a front-of-shirt sponsor in place sooner.

Wilson says: “Chelsea should be worth somewhere between £35million and £40m a year. They’re obviously asking for a bit more than that to benchmark themselves against Liverpool, Manchester United and Manchester City, but it’s more the opportunity cost of the lost revenue.

“When you think about PSR (the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules) headroom, they are going to be extraordinarily tight. What they’ve done over the last couple of years is they’ve sold the hotel (at Stamford Bridge), they’ve sold the stake in the women’s team, and that is all geared up around their PSR compliance calculation.

“So, when you effectively aren’t able to weigh in an additional £40million worth of shirt sponsorship, that’s quite a sizeable amount of value against that calculation, hence why they’ve had to take those drastic steps to sell those assets.”

While Chelsea have gone through the first five months of the season with no front-of-shirt sponsor, they do have a longer campaign ahead than most. Yes, these months have gone, but 2024-25 could extend into July for them due to their involvement in the first revamped and greatly expanded Club World Cup.

The recently announced free-to-air DAZN broadcast deal for that U.S.-hosted tournament means any front-of-shirt sponsor that eventually does a deal with Chelsea is going to have more eyeballs on it from a global perspective — even if nobody knows how many people are actually going to tune in to watch the competition.

This means Chelsea can still appease companies feeling somewhat uneasy about committing to a deal in the second half of the season. But with Chelsea still to play in the FA Cup (they are at home to fourth-division strugglers Morecambe in round three next month) and through to the round of 16 in the Conference League in March, there are still plenty of fixtures to take place.

Busby says he would be “very surprised” if Chelsea could do a deal for such a significant fee in “less than nine months”, also noting January is “budget month” for many corporations, meaning that is the time they are sitting down to work out where money could be spent.

There is also the theory that anything spent on a shirt sponsorship has to be matched by the paying company to market it.

Chelsea did a short-term deal with Infinite Athlete last season (Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)

“For every pound spent on a sponsorship fee, theoretically, you should be spending the same in terms of making the activation work,” Busby says. “When Coca-Cola sponsor the Olympics, they are spending eight times as much on getting it activated as they do on the sponsorship fee.

“Now, you don’t need to spend eight times as much (in Chelsea’s situation), but you still need to spend a lot of money on a global sponsorship beyond the figure everyone sees reported.”

From the perspective of the Premier League’s PSR, which state clubs are allowed adjusted losses of £105million over a rolling three-year period, not having a front-of-shirt sponsor in place is far from ideal.

Chelsea are yet to publish their financial results for the year ending June 30, 2024, with those expected to land at Companies House in the early part of 2025, but they reported operating losses of £121.4million (2021-22) and £90.1m (2022-23) in the previous sets of accounts. The sale of two hotels to a sister company for £76.5m in 2023 helped ensure they remained on the right side of the Premier League guidelines, and the sense coming from the club is that even without a front-of-shirt sponsor being secured, they are going to be fine going forward.

Wilson, however, disagrees.

“They will breach this year unless they can bring in some additional revenue from an alternate source,” he says. “The only thing they have left to sell is their shirt sponsorship.

“Because of the hotel sale, combined with their transfer activity in the summer, they are going to be right on the limit for the year ending 2024. They will have a black hole in their 2024-25 accounts, unless they sell the shirt sponsorship, or they have a positive net transfer spend next summer. But they have to do that before June 30, because they will need the transfer receipts before the PSR year ends.”

Chelsea sources said to The Athletic they were confident there is no risk whatsoever of them breaching PSR for this season.

Chelsea are confident a front-of-shirt partnership will be finalised sooner rather than later, but, until then, the only Premier League side among the 20 without a partner’s logo on the chests of their matchday jersey will continue to be an outlier.

Whether or not Chelsea can generate their ideal fee remains to be seen, yet their decision to roll the dice and say no to taking a lower-valued deal was a bold and, in hindsight, brave move.

There is an expectation the 2026 World Cup, largely hosted by the United States, will change the football sponsorship market (Loren Elliott/Getty Images)

If the predictions about a potential sponsorship boom for Premier League clubs on the back of a successful 2026 World Cup prove true, then Chelsea, whose youthful squad will be a couple of years more experienced collectively and should be both regulars in the Champions League and competing for trophies once again, could be one of the first in line to cash in.

United are tied up with Snapdragon until 2029, Emirates will sponsor Arsenal until at least 2028 and Liverpool’s relationship with Standard Chartered runs to 2027. This means Chelsea could be the biggest Premier League club without a front-of-shirt sponsor, which is likely going to drive up interest due to the limited inventory.

If Chelsea’s season tails off, and playing in the Champions League again once more becomes a faraway dream, then they could find themselves back at square one. But when you roll the dice, especially in football, that’s the risk you take — and Chelsea made that move with their eyes wide open.

(Top photo: Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)