Chelsea's first team players and coaching staff have paid and organised for all their academy youngsters to get tickets to attend the FA Cup final at Wembley.
Usually this would be organised by the club, but the ability to purchase tickets was taken away due to the current sanctions imposed on them by the UK Government.
Mason Mount is thought to have played a key role, along with several other youth team graduates in the squad, to organise tickets for academy director Neil Bath to give out.
What did Tuchel say about buying the tickets?
Shortly after the story came out, Tuchel went on the record to confirm that they bought the tickets for their youth players.
“That’s what we did. It’s a big competition. It is one club. Normally the club would buy these tickets to provide it for the players’ parents of the academy so we stepped in and bought the tickets for them,” he said in a press conference at Cobham Training Centre.
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What are the current sanctions on Chelsea?
The Blues are limited with what they can purchase through the Government's newly proposed Russia regulations which seek to clamp down on oligarch wealth in the country.
It saw Roman Abramovich targeted, among several other billionaires, in sanctions that effectively froze all their assets.
It risked ending Chelsea's season and plunging them into a crisis but a special operating licence has been given.
Although the Blues can still spend some money to keep the club running close to normal, it has meant the club shop has remained closed and that new tickets can't be sold at Stamford Bridge for home games, leaving a proportion of the seats empty.
There have been several small problems along the way, including this academy issue, but the first team and Thomas Tuchel's staff have been generous when needed.
When will the Chelsea sanctions end?
The Clearlake Capital takeover led by Todd Boehly is expected to go through in the next few days with the Premier League soon to complete its due diligence.
After that, the transfer of funds and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) will work to resolve issues around where they go with Abramovich asking for the entire sum to be donated to charity.
Abramovich has said he is willing to write off his entire £1.5 billion ($1.8 bn) loan, which Chelsea owes to his parent company Fordstam, and donate the entire sum to a charity related to the war in Ukraine after Russia's invasion.
However, there are thought to be some complexities needing resolving around the loan, which is currently frozen like all his other assets in the UK.
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