JOHN TERRY’S contract negotiations with Chelsea have broken down over the England captain’s 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 world’s 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 club’s 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 club’s 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 Fifa’s 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.

Fearing that Jose Mourinho will seek to take his most-trusted lieutenants with him in the likely event that the manager leaves the club this summer, Chelsea have been eager to tie down their most important players with lucrative “golden handcuffs” deals. The club’s leading scorer Didier Drogba agreed a revised £91,000-a-week contract in November. Michael Essien, the midfielder, has been offered, but is yet to sign, a similar deal. Frank Lampard, who is the most interested in following Mourinho to pastures new, is set to be offered the Ballack-Shevchenko terms.

With Terry the least likely of Mourinho’s 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.

Terry’s 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 club’s highest earners rather than the length of the new deal was his priority.

David Beckham’s new contract with the Los Angeles Galaxy is worth a reputed £25.6m a year over five years, but only £5.1m is in guaranteed salary, the rest being dependent on a series of bonuses relating to the franchise’s financial performance.