So, there's this small, unassuming club. They play in a global soccer hotbed -- a country with so much talent that every four years, someone tries to determine how many World Cup-quality lineups you could put together with only players from this country. That country's actual World Cup lineups have reached each of the past two World Cup finals.
Unfortunately, the league this club plays in has been broken by what's happened to European soccer over the past 30 years: the influx of sovereign wealth and foreign investment funds. This league, in particular, is a grotesque example of how unlimited amounts of money can really warp a competitive landscape that barely has any guardrails against brute-force spending.
In this league, one juggernaut -- which is owned by the richest government in the world -- won the title in 11 of the previous 13 seasons. But there's no real sporting achievement for them -- no discovery of undervalued talent, nor a search for a new way to play the game that others weren't brave enough to try to find. No, they pay players around $202 million per year, which is nearly double the team with the second-highest payroll ($110 million), while no one else in the league is above $72 million.
However, our small, unassuming club looks like it's doing everything in its power on the field to close the gap. Their payroll is only $38 million. And before a downturn in results over the past month, they were only a couple points back of first. Even still, they're creating and conceding chances at the rate of about the fourth-best team in the league, despite a bottom-half-of-the-league payroll.
And they're doing it by being different. They play a unique, slow-paced style -- lots of short, sideways passes -- that still manages to lead the league in the goal-seeking, urgent passes that are most likely to lead to goals: through balls. And they're doing it with a roster that looks nothing like anything you'll see anywhere else in Europe. The average age of the players they've used so far this season is under 22 years old when no other team in any of the continent's major leagues has an average age below 24.
This small club, which won its only domestic title back in 1979 and was down in the third division as recently as 2016, has revived itself by committing to and trusting young talent in a way we've never really seen before. They're punching way above their weight, and their results seem to only be getting better with each passing season.
They should be one of the stories of the season, but they're not. Why? Because this small club -- Strasbourg in Ligue 1 -- is now owned by the same people who own Chelsea. You know, the Premier League club that set a record for spending more than $1 billion on its squad not too long ago.
Rather than being an antidote to the inequality that's plaguing the sport, Strasbourg are just another example of it. For all intents and purposes, Strasbourg has become Chelsea's farm team.
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The history of the 'farm team' in sports
The modern concept of the "farm system" was created by the legendary baseball general manager Branch Rickey. Hilariously, Rickey was fired as the manager (head coach) of the St. Louis Cardinals and then was "demoted" into what we essentially now conceive of as the GM role (akin to a sporting director).
At the time, baseball teams in America's top professional divisions, acquired new players the same way that Premier League clubs currently do: mostly from other, smaller leagues. In the United States, these were called the "minor" leagues.
"When the Cardinals were fighting for their life in the National League, I found that we were at a disadvantage in obtaining players of merit from the minors," Rickey has said. "Other clubs could outbid. They had money. They had superior scouting machinery. In short, we had to take what was left or nothing at all."
Rickey's solution was for the Cardinals to buy one of these smaller teams and use it as what he called a "proving ground" for younger players. This allowed the Cardinals to control a larger number of players than their competitors. And "control" had multiple meanings: (1) they controlled their employment, and (2) they controlled how they practiced and how they developed.
As Andy McCue at the Society of Baseball Research put it: "The Cardinals eventually created a chain of minor-league teams so they could sign players cheaply, winnow the good from the great, win pennants, and make money. Rickey would sell the good to others and keep the great for the Cardinals."
This was such an obviously beneficial practice that eventually all major league teams adopted it. Today, each one has three farm teams at uniform levels: single-A, double-A, and triple-A. After leaving the Cardinals, Rickey brought his know-how to the Brooklyn Dodgers, where he invented the concept of spring training, championed statistical analysis of the sport, eventually gave Jackie Robinson his debut, and helped lay the foundation for the LA Dodgers team that Todd Boehly eventually became a partial owner of in 2012.
Boehly, of course, is part of BlueCo, the ownership group that took over Chelsea in 2022. And Boehly has been an, um, active owner at Chelsea ever since.
He jet-setted around Europe in his first summer as new owner. He tried to sign Cristiano Ronaldo. He served as the team's de facto sporting director as they signed nine new players -- just two of whom currently get consistent minutes for the club. He suggested the Premier League needed an all-star game like the NBA and MLB, and he just generally fit every stereotype a British fan might have of a finance guy from the United States who just bought a Premier League team. My new-world ideas are going to revolutionize your sport because it's stuck in the past.
Chelsea were the third- or fourth-best team in England when Boehly and BlueCo took over. Chelsea are, currently, the third or fourth best team in England.
Almost all of their innovations have just been accounting tricks -- selling hotels and stadiums to themselves, stretching out transfer fees over super-long contracts -- that allow them to spend more money than other clubs without violating the Premier League's new spending rules. They've built up an incredible amount of young talent at the club, but they still haven't shown a capacity -- or even a desire -- to make the decisions that get you those hardest-to-reach marginal points that turn you from a Champions League qualifier into a title contender.
What they're doing with their second club, though, does feel like a genuine innovation that will create a competitive advantage for Chelsea -- at the cost of Strasbourg.
Why an academy system is worse than a farm system
Every major European club has an academy where the goal, broadly, is to develop young players into adult professionals who will be good enough to play somewhere in Europe.
Best case: they're good enough to play for your club. But there's still a missing link in the model. The gap between the competition at the academy level and the competition for a first-team in a major European league is massive.
With the NFL, college football is probably the second-most competitive environment for football in the world, and NFL teams refresh their talent with a collegiate draft every year. But the gap between Chelsea's academy team and Chelsea's first team is closer to the gap between high school football and the NFL.
And so, there are two imperfect solutions.
The first is what we're seeing with Arsenal this season. Two of their star prospects, Myles Lewis-Skelly and Ethan Nwaneri, are members of the first team. They train with Bukayo Saka, Martin Ødegaard, and Declan Rice every day. But since they're playing for arguably the best team in the world, they rarely play in games. After promising seasons as teenagers last year -- thanks to a team-wide injury crisis -- they've fallen back down the pecking order. The two have combined for zero Premier League starts over the first half of the season.
The other solution: a loan. You send a player to another club and essentially hope that he gets along with the new manager, the club prioritizes his health, and he gets experience playing for a team somewhere below you on the competitive period but still higher than the academy level.
But once you take a step back and think about it, the loan model quickly seems absurd. You're sending a young player to a team that has no real incentive to play him: the coach is more likely to favor more experienced players because he wants to win games and keep his job, while the club hierarchy isn't going to demand that the manager plays this talented new prospect because the club has nothing invested in him beyond the current season.
Take, for example, Liverpool's Harvey Elliott. The 22-year-old was loaned to Aston Villa after only starting three games under Arne Slot last season. At Villa, he's played 91 total minutes and hasn't featured in a Premier League match since September.
To solve this problem, Chelsea have an entire team, in one of the most competitive leagues in the world, where their young players can go. They're guaranteed playing time, and they've guaranteed to play in a tactical environment similar to what they'd eventually see with the Premier League club.
Strasbourg can also serve as a managerial farm system, too. Their current manager, Liam Rosenior, is only 41 years old. BlueCo will get more information about his managerial abilities than anyone else they might eventually hire to manager Chelsea.
Chelsea manager Enzo Maresca has revealed that reports linking him to the Manchester City job is only speculation.
"We are a farm team," Alexandre, a representative from Strasbourg's four major supporters groups, told ESPN. (He asked that we don't use his last name.) "We don't want to be a farm team because we feel we have a very strong history, we have a very strong local tradition, and we feel that the decisions for Strasbourg should be taken for Strasbourg's interest. That's not the case."
Now, people at Chelsea would probably tell you that this premise -- the idea that Strasbourg is merely a farm team for Chelsea -- is based on incorrect information. (The London club did not respond to our request for comment.) After all, only three Strasbourg players are currently on loan from Chelsea. But that's just semantics. The French club is clearly being used as a development hub and a weigh station for the Premier League team.
It was already announced in September that Strasbourg's best player, Emmanuel Emegha, will be moving to Chelsea next season. Among the 13 Strasbourg players who have featured in at least 500 minutes this season, only one of them is older than 23 -- and that's 28-year-old Ben Chilwell, who joined on a "free" transfer over the summer.
But nothing sums up the situation better than what happened back in August. When the media broke news of a pending transfer for Brighton's Julio Enciso, the reports didn't say that he was being approached by Chelsea or Strasbourg. No, the reports -- including from ESPN's James Olley -- said that he was being targeted by BlueCo.
The future is multi-club ownership
Of course, multi-club ownership has been on the rise for a while now. The most famous -- or infamous -- example is the Red Bull group, who own RB Leipzig in Germany, RB Salzburg in Austria, the New York Red Bulls in MLS, plus others in Brazil and Japan. That whole network is now overseen by ex-Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp.
City Football Group is the biggest multi-club owner, with teams in 13 different countries. Manchester United's de facto owner Jim Ratcliffe owns multiple clubs. Arsenal's Stan Kroenke also owns the Colorado Rapids. Newcastle's owners own nearly an entire other league. And plenty of other Premier League clubs are part of these sprawling portfolios, too.
UEFA has rules aimed at preventing clubs under the same ownership from competing in the same European competition, but nothing to prevent the groups from existing in the first place.
The consultancy Twenty First Group frequently works with groups looking to buy soccer clubs, and most of them are either attempting to add to their ownership portfolio, or they're first-time buyers who eventually want to have their own multi-club empire.
"Most see it as a lever to access, develop and sell talent, which is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, but so far evidenced by very few groups," Omar Chaudhuri, Twenty First Group's Chief Intelligence Officer, told ESPN. "Our analysis indicates that clubs in multi-club organizations do not perform better than equivalently-sized clubs not in multi-club organizations, and that moving players between clubs is generally harder than it seems on paper. The barriers to groups acquiring more clubs are therefore low, but the barrier to success is usually operational challenges."
None of these groups, though, have weaponized the process as aggressively as Chelsea have. And none of them, really, have spoken so openly about it.
"Our goal is to make sure we can show pathways for our young superstars to get onto the Chelsea pitch while getting them real game time," Boehly said shortly after buying Chelsea. "And for me, the way to do that is through another club, somewhere in a really competitive league in Europe."
What's missing from Boehly's analysis -- both here and everywhere -- is an understanding of what soccer clubs mean to most of their fans. While it's inarguable that Strasbourg have gotten better since BlueCo took over, the fans don't really care. Some more casual Strasbourg fans "enjoy the fact that we have more money to spend on the transfer market and that we have some pretty good players," according to Alexandre. But members of the supporters groups hate it.
"The big picture is very bad for the way people have a strong emotional relationship to this football club," Alexandre said. "In Europe, a football club is really a part of a community, and Strasburg is part of a community. It doesn't match with having this club being owned by a private equity fund somewhere in the U.S. in conjunction with an English Premier League team. There's something very weird, very fishy about that."
The emotional connection you make with a sports team -- the fuel to this massive, global industry -- isn't driven by efficiency or improved results. It comes from the shared communal experience of watching the game every weekend and how the different texture provided by each different club helps to shape your unique identity. There is an alienating aspect to having something that meaningful turned into a financial lever designed to help a bigger, much richer club succeed in order to increase the value of the investment portfolio for a billionaire who lives in another country.
But for as long as clubs need investors and for as long as there are no laws preventing the same investors from buying up multiple clubs, then the Chelsea-Strasbourg situation seems more like the beginning than the end. The new reality of European soccer is that the Premier League comes first -- at the cost of everyone else.