Dig around the margins of Chelsea’s vast squad, and you find two of the good reasons why Borussia Dortmund are considered modern masters in the business of buying and selling. They are Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Christian Pulisic.
In successive winter transfer windows, Dortmund sold those two strikers for combined fees of more than €120 million ($129m) and upwards of €100m in profit.
That was a few years ago, before the sales by Dortmund of Jadon Sancho and Erling Haaland and just after they had drawn €140m out of Barcelona for a young Ousmane Dembele. It was a period when €120m was far more than might be routinely paid for a deep-lying midfielder with only six months experience in a European league, like it was last month for Enzo Fernandez. But that’s how inflation in the transfer market works.
Chelsea, who visit Dortmund in the Champions League on Wednesday, are the drivers of the latest bout of it, the €120m Fernandez, their recruit from Benfica, just one of the huge new pricetags in their catalogue.
The Chelsea team selected by Graham Potter, a manager whose debut in the knockout stage of the European Cup is bound to be judged on what use he makes of expensive new signings, will not include Pulisic, who is coming back from a knee injury.
It cannot include Aubameyang, whose fall down the Chelsea hierarchy is one knock-on effect of the spectacular splurge on talent the London club have made in the last six months. Aubameyang, who joined Arsenal from Dortmund in 2018 and Chelsea last summer from Barcelona, has been left out entirely from Potter’s Champions League squad and now finds himself in the logjam of stars feeling suddenly surplus.
The frenzied turnover of personnel at Stamford Bridge makes Chelsea a puzzle for opponents.
“It means they are not easy to analyse,” said the Dortmund coach Edin Terzic. “We started looking at them after the draw [for the last-16] was made last year, and then they brought in a lot of players.”
Chelsea salaries after 2023 transfer window
Eight in the winter window at a cost of more than €300m, only three of whom can be added, midseason, to the squad for European competition under Uefa rules. The chosen trio are Fernandez, Mykhailo Mudryk and the on-loan Joao Felix, who played respectively in the group phase for Benfica, Shakhtar Donetsk and Atletico Madrid.
“They have brought in truly top players,” added Terzic. “There’ll be some on the bench who won the Champions League final only two years ago. We know the quality: Joao Felix has been in form recently, and moving across positions in a way that teammates are finding him. He and Fernandez can unlock games. Mudryk showed his ability on the wing at Shakhtar. But you can’t predict exactly what line-up they will use.”
What Terzic can do is second-guess, with some authority, Potter’s instincts. The two managers, both in their 40s, got to know each other on coaching courses run in England, where Terzic worked as an assistant to Slaven Bilic at West Ham. He and Potter remained in touch.
“He’s an impressive character,” said the German, who was promoted from within the Dortmund hierarchy to caretaker coach two seasons ago – just as Potter was enhancing his reputation at Brighton – and returned to the Dortmund post permanently last summer, just before Potter was poached by Chelsea.
“Two years ago, we probably wouldn’t have forecast that we’d be seeing each other in the Champions League last-16,” the German said with a smile.
Nor, given Chelsea’s January spending and the fact that Dortmund came into the new year sixth in the Bundesliga after successive defeats, would it have been predicted six weeks ago that Terzic’s side would be the form team going into the first leg. While juggling which of his new stars to pick and where to position them, Potter has overseen just one win in seven league games. Dortmund won their sixth on the trot at the weekend.
That’s the sort of consistency that speaks of stable ideas, even if some of those wins, like the 4-3 see-saw against Augsburg or the stoppage-time comeback against Mainz, shredded Terzic’s nerves.
Dortmund have strengthened in the winter window too. If the €5m addition of full-back Julian Ryerson is hardly the sort of transfer that would excite the Chelsea of 2023, the major good news of Dortmund’s new year was the return to action of striker Sebastien Haller, who joined last summer from Ajax but was almost immediately diagnosed with testicular cancer.
His treatment has been successful. Haller made his debut for Dortmund last month and scored his first goal against Freiburg 11 days ago.
On Wednesday evening he returns to a competition he has a special affinity with, having had his first taste of it last season with Ajax. He promptly scored 11 goals in just seven and a half games.
“He’s important for us,” said Terzic, “and I feel not just his excitement but everybody’s.”
Company Fact Box
Company name/date started: Abwaab Technologies / September 2019
Founders: Hamdi Tabbaa, co-founder and CEO. Hussein Alsarabi, co-founder and CTO
Based: Amman, Jordan
Sector: Education Technology
Size (employees/revenue): Total team size: 65. Full-time employees: 25. Revenue undisclosed
Stage: early-stage startup
Investors: Adam Tech Ventures, Endure Capital, Equitrust, the World Bank-backed Innovative Startups SMEs Fund, a London investment fund, a number of former and current executives from Uber and Netflix, among others.
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
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Will the pound fall to parity with the dollar?
The idea of pound parity now seems less far-fetched as the risk grows that Britain may split away from the European Union without a deal.
Rupert Harrison, a fund manager at BlackRock, sees the risk of it falling to trade level with the dollar on a no-deal Brexit. The view echoes Morgan Stanley’s recent forecast that the currency can plunge toward $1 (Dh3.67) on such an outcome. That isn’t the majority view yet – a Bloomberg survey this month estimated the pound will slide to $1.10 should the UK exit the bloc without an agreement.
New Prime Minister Boris Johnson has repeatedly said that Britain will leave the EU on the October 31 deadline with or without an agreement, fuelling concern the nation is headed for a disorderly departure and fanning pessimism toward the pound. Sterling has fallen more than 7 per cent in the past three months, the worst performance among major developed-market currencies.
“The pound is at a much lower level now but I still think a no-deal exit would lead to significant volatility and we could be testing parity on a really bad outcome,” said Mr Harrison, who manages more than $10 billion in assets at BlackRock. “We will see this game of chicken continue through August and that’s likely negative for sterling,” he said about the deadlocked Brexit talks.
The pound fell 0.8 per cent to $1.2033 on Friday, its weakest closing level since the 1980s, after a report on the second quarter showed the UK economy shrank for the first time in six years. The data means it is likely the Bank of England will cut interest rates, according to Mizuho Bank.
The BOE said in November that the currency could fall even below $1 in an analysis on possible worst-case Brexit scenarios. Options-based calculations showed around a 6.4 per cent chance of pound-dollar parity in the next one year, markedly higher than 0.2 per cent in early March when prospects of a no-deal outcome were seemingly off the table.
Bloomberg
The biog
Hometown: Cairo
Age: 37
Favourite TV series: The Handmaid’s Tale, Black Mirror
Favourite anime series: Death Note, One Piece and Hellsing
Favourite book: Designing Brand Identity, Fifth Edition
The rules on fostering in the UAE
A foster couple or family must:
- be Muslim, Emirati and be residing in the UAE
- not be younger than 25 years old
- not have been convicted of offences or crimes involving moral turpitude
- be free of infectious diseases or psychological and mental disorders
- have the ability to support its members and the foster child financially
- undertake to treat and raise the child in a proper manner and take care of his or her health and well-being
- A single, divorced or widowed Muslim Emirati female, residing in the UAE may apply to foster a child if she is at least 30 years old and able to support the child financially
From exhibitions to the battlefield
In 2016, the Shaded Dome was awarded with the 'De Vernufteling' people's choice award, an annual prize by the Dutch Association of Consulting Engineers and the Royal Netherlands Society of Engineers for the most innovative project by a Dutch engineering firm.
It was assigned by the Dutch Ministry of Defence to modify the Shaded Dome to make it suitable for ballistic protection. Royal HaskoningDHV, one of the companies which designed the dome, is an independent international engineering and project management consultancy, leading the way in sustainable development and innovation.
It is driving positive change through innovation and technology, helping use resources more efficiently.
It aims to minimise the impact on the environment by leading by example in its projects in sustainable development and innovation, to become part of the solution to a more sustainable society now and into the future.
BMW M5 specs
Engine: 4.4-litre twin-turbo V-8 petrol enging with additional electric motor
Power: 727hp
Torque: 1,000Nm
Transmission: 8-speed auto
Fuel consumption: 10.6L/100km
On sale: Now
Price: From Dh650,000
Most sought after workplace benefits in the UAE
- Flexible work arrangements
- Pension support
- Mental well-being assistance
- Insurance coverage for optical, dental, alternative medicine, cancer screening
- Financial well-being incentives
The specs
Engine: 2.2-litre, turbodiesel
Transmission: 6-speed auto
Power: 160hp
Torque: 385Nm
Price: Dh116,900
On sale: now
