When Manchester United whittle down their shortlist of strikers to one preferred target over the next couple of months there will be one thought occupying minds: let's hope Chelsea aren't interested as well.
The Blues are trying to take their spending across two transfers window under Todd Boehly to around £600million with an astronomical deal for Benfica midfielder Enzo Fernandez and their scattergun approach to the market is going to prove destabilising for other clubs.
Fernandez is a case in point. As soon as Chelsea's interest was clear Benfica were happy to bide their time. Boehly might have intimated he would walk away at the £105millon price, but by now it's pretty clear they were always going to return. If the deal goes through Benfica will sell the 22-year-old for a profit of more than £90million after he played just 22 games for them.
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Any other Premier League club with an interest in Fernandez would have known it was time to move on as soon as Chelsea declared their hand. Arsenal have already had the same experience with Mykhailo Mudryk, when weeks of negotiations were blown out of the water by Chelsea paying Shakhtar Donetsk what they wanted.
It feels reminiscent of when Roman Abramovic completed his takeover at Chelsea and immediately changed the rules of engagement when it came to the transfer market. As Arsenal chief executive David Dein famously remarked in those early days: "Roman Abramovich has parked his Russian tank in our front garden and is firing £50 notes at us."
The landscape is different in the Premier League now, but even the state-backed clubs of Manchester City and Newcastle haven't spent with the same abandon as Chelsea in Boehly's first eight months in charge. Newcastle are trying to be responsible and build slowly, while City's days of aggressive spending are generally a thing of the past now they are established.
But who knows how long Chelsea will continue to take this approach to the market, where they are happy to spend huge sums and sign players up on six, seven or eight-year contracts, easing the damage to the books by spreading the fee out via amortisation.
It's an approach United won't be able to compete with under the current ownership model and if the club was sold to someone such as Sir Jim Ratcliffe, that is unlikely to change, even if more of the revenues became available to be reinvested.
The issue for clubs trying to take a sustainable approach to the transfer market, only investing what they earn, which certainly includes Manchester United and Liverpool at the moment, as well as City in recent years, and Arsenal and Tottenham as well, is that the Premier League premium rockets as a result.
European clubs have seen selling players to England as a fix-all for financial issues in recent years and that isn't going to change, but they will point to Chelsea's approach and look at raising fees further. It gets harder and harder to compete, as United discovered when Abramovich took over at Stamford Bridge.
It was a similar issue in the early years of City's Abu Dhabi ownership and, unsurprisingly, it was the noisy neighbours' Sir Alex Ferguson took aim at in 2013.
"It's been an insane transfer market for a long time and I think clubs like City create that," he said. "They can buy all the players and put a marker on all the players and that makes it difficult for clubs then to be reasonable."
But in the same year he also mentioned the West London club, saying: "We're competitive in the market - we're not Chelsea or Manchester City in terms of money but we're competitive."
We might be a decade down the line, but not a lot has changed from that statement, even if Chelsea have needed a takeover to be reawakened from their transfer slumber.
Their January approach has certainly contrasted with United, who had to cobble together £2.6million to sign Wout Weghorst on loan from Burnley. That came after a £225million summer spending spree that left them nervous around financial fair play controls.
They will need to spend again in the summer and a striker is an absolute necessity. If they settle on Harry Kane then Tottenham's rivalry with Chelsea will take them out of the picture. If it's Victor Osimhen they decide to pursue, then interest in the Nigerian from Stamford Bridge will be little surprise.
Chelsea were the first of the Premier League's big six to become the great disruptors of the transfer market and nearly two decades on, they are at it again.
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