I don't agree with those saying the clubs failure to renegotiate contracts is embarrassing.
These players are holding clubs to ransom and it simply has to stop. Rudi wanting £200k + per week, is crazy.
We messed up in the past by paying stupid salary's to players like lukaku, werner, kante (albeit he has been world class), kepa and CHO - to name a few. It has to stop somewhere, and if the club think that players are not worth what they are asking , then credit to them for stopping it.
I agree. Every club in the major leagues would benefit from a salary cap. Very few clubs, especially the big ones, are able to break even, sometimes even in a successful trophy-winning season. The whole thing is totally out of control. Agents is my bug bear. Why do the clubs have to pay these parasites ? If the players want to use an agent, then the player should pay for them, not the club.
Where we have screwed up, is in letting talented homegrown players like Tomori, Guehi, Lamptey, Livramento leave for relative peanuts because there is no perceived clear path into the first team. There is perhaps some mitigation for the latter two, as they had James in their way (I still think there should have been a way to keep them), but Tomori was effectively frozen out (most of us didn't understand why Lampard did that), and Guehi didn't really ever get a chance, despite promising pre-season appearances. As academy graduates, they would not cost as much in wages as an expensive foreign recruit, nor would they necessarily perform any worse, and they'd have the "Chelsea DNA", and correct motivation etc for having come up via Cobham.
Tomori, Guehi, Chalobah, Colwill, James, Livramento, Lamptey, Chilwell would have been a great home-grown nucleus for the defence for a decade.
Anyway, that ship has sailed unfortunately ...