Chelsea have an arrangement unique in football: Chelsea Pitch Owners (CPO), a supporters’ group which holds the freehold to the land on which Stamford Bridge, the club’s home stadium since they were founded in 1905, sits. The creation of CPO is part of the bigger story of how Chelsea almost lost their ground. For the uninitiated, here’s a brief summary: in 1992, at the end of a long, attritional battle with property developers who wanted to evict the club from a hugely valuable plot of land in south-west London, Chelsea’s chairman at the time, Ken Bates, and his lawyer Mark Taylor set out to devise a novel plan to ensure it could never happen again. Bates’ initial idea was to divide up the freehold for the pitch into 70,000 squares and sell them to supporters for £100 each, but that ran into problems with VAT (a tax on nearly all goods bought and sold within the European Union), land registry and corporation tax. Bates and Taylor realised the same result could be achieved by esta
Shareholder loans are money loaned to a club by their shareholders. They amount to a form of funding, a means for owners to inject cash into the football project without seeking equity in return. Typically these are long-term arrangements, often free of interest payments. Following the recent legal case involving Manchester City and the Premier League, they are coming under more scrutiny in terms of APT rules. And clubs are certainly fond of them. Fourteen of the 20 Premier League teams in the 2022-23 season had shareholder loans recorded in their most recent set of accounts and City’s legal team were only too happy to highlight the extent of their use during this case. It was cited that £1.5billion ($1.96bn) out of £4bn total borrowings across the division — 37 per cent — were through shareholder loans. “The main motivation (behind shareholder loans) is that it’s an easier mechanism for an owner getting their money back,” says Chris Weatherspoon, an accountant and financial anal