A recent article from Football.London makes some intriguing assertions regarding what led to the failure of negotiations for Mason Mount to receive a new contract.
Owners of Mount and Chelsea, Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali, allegedly reached a “eye to eye” verbal agreement just before the World Cup.
However, the hiring of Paul Winstanley and Lawrence Stewart altered the offer’s mechanics, and when Mount arrived from Qatar, he learned that the deal was no longer on the table:
In order to extend the 24-year-old’s stay at the club, Chelsea and Mount finally appeared to have made some concessions. After reaching such an agreement with the athlete and his advisors, the Blues were eager themselves.
Meetings resumed after the World Cup ended and England was eliminated by France in the quarterfinal round. Boehly and Eghbali took a little bit of a step back from the day-to-day activities, but there was a little different structure to how the club was operating behind the scenes with a new-look transfer staff, with people like Paul Winstanley, Joe Shields, and Christopher Vivell in place.
What we are hearing abroad, where Boehly and the other owners are mostly taking the responsibility for the failure to agree on a new arrangement, is an interesting inversion of what we are hearing here.
Even when the sporting directors are now giving the bad news, there are still many reasons why they are to blame. If the club had not made such extravagant and reckless purchases, Stewart and Winstanley would have had much more leeway to reach a compromise with Mount.
Perhaps the owners are using this as yet another covert brief to deflect attention from themselves before to Mount’s departure.