Terry demands £60m
deal
JOHN TERRYS contract negotiations with Chelsea have broken
down over the England captains demand to be the best-paid player
at the club for the next nine years. At current rates, the deal
would be worth a minimum of £58.2m, making it the richest in
British sporting history, but with new signings at the worlds
biggest-spending club it would inevitably rise.
The limitless parity clause would guarantee that Terry was the
highest-paid player at the club until beyond his 35th birthday.
While Chelsea were prepared to increase his wages to the clubs
current ceiling of £121,000 a week, which is paid to Michael
Ballack and Andriy Shevchenko, they could not accept the liability
of promising the defender equivalence with the clubs
best-remunerated player for the best part of the next decade.
Having initially proposed a deal until the summer of 2016, Chelsea
are understood to be surprised and disappointed that Terry has
rejected their revised offer of £6.3m a year until the end of
2011-12 season. Club officials are, however, sanguine about
suggestions that Terry might exploit Fifa regulations and buy out
his contract at the end of this season, believing that they appear
to be based on a misreading of the relevant clause. Section IV of
Fifas Regulations for the Status and Transfer of Players dictates
that players under the age of 28 can terminate their contracts a
minimum of three years or seasons after their current deal came
into force. As Terry, who is 26, resigned with Chelsea in November
2004, he cannot utilise the rule until the end of next
season.
Chelsea have been eager to tie down their most important players
with lucrative golden handcuffs deals. The clubs leading scorer
Didier Drogba agreed a revised £91,000-a-week contract in November.
Michael Essien, is the latest to sign.
With Terry the least likely of Mourinhos stalwarts to be invited
abroad by the manager because of his perceived unsuitability to the
foreign game, both Chelsea and their captain expected a new
contract to be agreed long before the end of the current campaign.
Last month Terry believed that all the negotiations had been
completed and that the parity clause had been included. The
contract remained unsigned and further negotiations concluded last
Wednesday having failed to produce a resolution.
Terrys present deal pays him £67,000 a week, a comparatively
limited sum for a central figure at Stamford Bridge. His England
teammate Lampard has been on £5m per annum since improving his
terms in the summer of 2004. A source close to Terry said that
parity with the clubs highest earners rather than the length of
the new deal was his priority. David Beckhams new contract with
the Los Angeles Galaxy is worth a reputed £25.6m a year over five
years.
