Chelsea have announced a Premier League record pre-tax loss of £262.4million for the year ending June 30 2025.
The scale of their loss for the financial year ending 2025 overtakes Manchester City’s 2010-11 loss of £197.5m to become by far the English top flight’s largest-ever recorded annual loss for a club.
The loss came despite a Chelsea statement — which was published before the club’s full financial accounts become public — revealing a revenue of £490.9m, which is the second-highest on record for the west London club.
Chelsea sources insist the club are confident they will be complaint with all financial regulatory requirements and expect to remain so.
Chelsea’s previous year’s accounts saw a £128.4m profit posted, but that included the sale of the women’s club to a subsidiary company, BlueCo MidCo, for nearly £200m.
The club said the recent losses could be partly explained by higher operating costs in 2024-25 compared to the previous season.
In February, a UEFA report listed Chelsea's losses for 2025 at an even higher level of £355m. Different sporting requirements about intricacies in accounting are thought to explain why the UEFA figure does not match the loss level published by Chelsea.
Chelsea are believed to be forecasting a revenue of more than £700m for the 2025-26 season.
While club insiders said Chelsea's spending on agents was at or below the Premier League average mark, Chelsea in fact topped the Premier League agent fee list with more than £60m of spending on agent fees in both of the years that overlap the financial year.
On Wednesday, their February 2025 to February 2026 spend on agent fees was shown to have been a Premier League-high £65.1m.
Chelsea avoided a points deduction from the Premier League when it was last month hit instead with a league-record £10.75m fine and a suspended one-year transfer ban following an investigation into illicit payments to unlicensed agents during the Roman Abramovich era. Co-operation with the Premier League by the club’s current owners, BlueCo, has been cited as the reason the punishment was not greater.
Chelsea also announced on Wednesday that their women's team had posted a loss of £17.1m but a revenue of £21.3m.
