Mutu Owes Chelsea €17.17 Million. Does That Seem Fair?

By: Daryl | August 14th, 2008

It wasn’t widely report at the time, but back in June FIFA decided that Adrian Mutu owed Chelsea €12 million (£9.6 million) compensation. Why? For putting some special Colombian powder up his nostrils, getting his contract terminated and then signing for Juventus on a free transfer before moving on to current club Fiorentina.

After two months of appeals, FIFA’s grandly titled Disputes Resolution Chamber has now decided that that figure was ridiculous. How can one man owe a massive club like Chelsea such an insane sum of money like €12 million? So today they’ve put things right and ruled that a far more sensible figure would be €17.17 million (£13.8 million).

That’s one expensive line of nose candy.

Here’s Chelsea’s reaction:

“Chelsea is delighted with the DRC’s decision.
“This is an important decision for football. Not only did the DRC make us a very significant monetary award, the decision also recognised the damaging effect incidents involving drugs has on football and the responsibilities we all have in this area.”

No shit they’re delighted. €17.17 big ones for a player they fired? That money will come in handy for paying some of Frank Lampard’s humungous wages over the next five years.

I think there’s an argument here that it makes no sense for one man to have to pay €17.17 million to a club owned by a Russian billionaire. There’s also an argument that – though drugs are bad, etc – Chelsea terminated Mutu’s contract, not the other way around. They could have stuck with him for the seven month drug ban and then sold him on for some cold hard cash. I always felt that Chelsea fired Mutu mostly because they could afford to.

Of course, this isn’t final. Mutu can still appeal the Court of Arrbitration for Sport. And it’s hard to say which side of the argument CAS will come down on based on their recent high profile Olympic judgement. On one handed they sided with the big clubs and against the players by ruling that players must return from the Olympics if the clubs request so. But on the other hand they seemed to enjoy pissing off FIFA by contradicting their ruling.

They can’t do both this time, since FIFA and the clubs are on the same side.

Fiorentina Offside already has a computer simulation of what Mutu will look like in ten years time, and are hoping this doesn’t mean Mutu will be after a big money move to pull down a few extra million euros. My suggested solution is that Fiorentina (or some other club) should offer him a money per goal contract. Who knows, maybe the motivation of massive debt will see Mutu banging in a lot more beauties like these..