How a dodgy failed deadline-day move proves Chelsea are the worst-run club in Britain, writes IAN HERBERT

Those Manchester United fans staring into an uncertain future and wondering where the old days went might care to reflect this week on those who follow Chelsea - a club being calmly dismantled and diminished by a bunch of Californian private equity cowboys, for whom a British football institution is just another speculative punt for their investment portfolio.

Football players are transactional commodities for Clearlake, the club's owners, as the extraordinary deadline day story of Deivid Washington only went to show. Clearlake's punt on the 19-year-old Brazilian for Chelsea hasn't exactly delivered – he's played 25 minutes' football since arriving a year ago – so they tried to weigh him off to Strasbourg, another club in their ownership group, for a £17million sum which would have turned their initial outlay on the utterly unproven player into a £5m profit.

In grey finance-speak, this looked a whole lot like 'associated party transaction' – flogging yourself stuff that already belongs to you, to bring some money in. Clearlake have so far sold themselves two Chelsea FC hotels for £75.6m, the Chelsea FC women's team (which they valued at £150m) and, as the New York Times put it on Friday, were now adding 'a human being in the form of Brazilian player Washington.' Chelsea cancelled the transfer after concerns were raised about the deal and whether it complied with competition rules.

This is not exactly an original idea. Manchester City sold their players' image rights to a company run by… themselves and charged one of their sister clubs for professional football advice when they needed to raise cash for their accounts. But extreme financial engineering is needed when, like Chelsea, you've punted well north of £1billion on players and are careening towards a breach of UEFA and Premier League spending regulations.

Clearlake have been peddling a line all summer about recouping £200m from sales, to pay for their latest punts on players. And precisely how much had they brought in by Friday night? The three substantial deals, for Conor Gallagher, Ian Maatsen and Romelu Lukaku, yielded barely £100m. The rest of the players they shifted on were loans or small change.

The Saudis proved extremely helpful on Monday, when Al-Nassr paid Chelsea £19.1m for the 19-year-old Brazilian winger, Angelo Gabriel, who has not played a single minute's football for Chelsea, and yet leaves for £6m more than they paid for him. The Saudi sovereign wealth fund, PIF, which controls Newcastle United, has invested in Clearlake and are enhancing that investment by helping Chelsea out of a hole. You can cut with a knife the cynicism that surrounds Chelsea depositing surplus players into the desert.

The Greek leagues may take more of Chelsea's discarded punts. Olympiacos and Nottingham Forest owner Evangelos Marinakis was in the Chelsea directors' box on Sunday. That could see Chelsea balance the books for this summer.

We're talking about a club who begin the season with no shirt sponsor and with a stadium which belongs to the last century, with narrow, steep stairways and toilets which are 'less than sanitary,' as my colleague Alex Brummer put it in a piece here last week. Welcome to the worst run elite British club in living memory.

The collateral damage is almost forgotten amid the rank incompetence. How, you might ask, does Strasbourg – refuge for the Chelsea rejects - feel about their club paying a record fee for unproven Washington?

You guessed. The French side are groaning under the sheer volume of Clearlake hedge bets. They were forced to buy winger Diego Moreira from Chelsea last month because, already saddled with Stamford Bridge loanees Andrey Santos, Caleb Wiley and Djordje Petrovic, they'd already reached the maximum three they are permitted to loan from any one club.

L'Equipe describes a bloated squad of Strasbourg young players and the uncertainty of a second season under Clearlake ownership. 'Patrick Vieira's team has undoubtedly paid for the sporting policy of its leaders, obsessed with youth at all costs,' the paper have reported. Sound familiar? Vieira and the club parted company 'by mutual consent' a few days after that piece ran.

And then there are the discarded players themselves, who these risible owners calculate they can afford to treat like dirt under their feet, because popular opinion will always tend to favour new recruits. Agents describe the Chelsea ownership they're now dealing with as classless and unprofessional. 'The worst club I've ever dealt with,' one tells me. Some British clubs describe a cocky and aggressive approach to negotiations which leaves them disinclined to engage. Todd Boehly is less involved now, leaving more to co-investor Behdad Eghbali.

Clearlake were swimming in their bigger pool on Tuesday - making headlines in the Financial Times after paying several hundred million dollars to buy a 'credit investment shop.' It took the assets under their management from $2bn, a decade ago, to more than $90bn. 

Viewed against that portfolio, Chelsea are a fleck of dust. A name in the margin. A beautiful British football club, stewarded with care and pride for decades, now lacking the most basic level of attention, thought and executive competence.

Radiance in the darkness of blind football 

There was an obvious and most unspeakable sadness about watching the Paralympic blind football tournament kick off against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower, under an azure Paris sky on Sunday. We could take in such beauty. The players could not.

The experience of watching Colombia play Japan and Argentina go up against Morocco was indelible; each side giving their all and playing with such skill through their own individual darkness, acting on the sound of a bell within the ball. 

There were collisions, of course, between players who had no sight of opponents, and though yellow cards were occasionally brandished, there were embraces, mutual forgiveness, apologies accepted before the game moved on. Brazil have started well and - so, too, Argentina. The final is on Saturday at 7pm, UK time, with bronze medal match preceding it.

But to be there, in that sublime arena, was a football experience which those of us present will be remembering, years from now. In its own way, football from the Gods.

Team USA in the hunt for 2028 competition

Those leading the British Paralympic team in Paris told us last week that the Americans may be 'coming over the hill' in a competitive sense, looking to eclipse the British at their LA Paralympics. It would be no bad thing for us to be looking over our shoulders a little more.

In some Paralympic sports, the abundance of golds has bred a complacency in some quarters – a medal fatigue - and the tougher the fields, the greater the fascination. 

'Density' is the word bladerunner Jonnie Peacock used for the sheer weight of competition in his own field. We need Hannah Cockroft's own wheelchair final to be rather more than a breeze. Let's hope the Americans are coming.