Roman Abramovich's £210m Chelsea windfall gifts new owner Premier League plan for bold new era

For many years, it had been said that Roman Abramovich dreamed about having a Chelsea team full of academy products.

For the years when Chelsea was one of the heaviest spenders in the transfer market, and John Terry remained the sole academy breakthrough in the first-team, those ambitions were met with great cynicism.

Although it took a transfer embargo by FIFA and a rookie coach, Abramovich finally got to witness that vision take form in the last four years of his ownership.

It says so much about how fruitful Cobham has been to the first-team that when a lineup without an academy product dropped for the game away at Manchester City in January, there was a great surprise.

As Chelsea Youth pointed out, the run of an academy graduate in the matchday squad lasted for 199 games.

Estimated by TalkSport, Chelsea has made £210million from selling products of their academy set-up since 2015, nearly £100m of that came in 2021 via the sales of Tammy Abraham, Fikayo Tomori, Marc Guehi, Tino Livramento and more.

But it's not just selling these talents that provide Chelsea with value. It is the way those players have clearly benefitted the first team since 2019.

Mason Mount, Reece James, Andreas Christensen, Trevoh Chalobah, Callum Hudson-Odoi and Ruben Loftus-Cheek, to name a few.

The aforementioned Abraham and Tomori were highly impressive under Frank Lampard in the 2019/20 season and provided priceless internal solutions during a challenging period.

It speaks volumes that if you were to pick the most influential Chelsea players since 2019, the names of Mount and James would likely be brought up.

Both played brilliantly in last season's Champions League final.

If you had suggested after Didier Drogba's winning penalty in Munich