Why are Raine handling the sale of Chelsea?

Why is Joe Ravitch, the co-founder of Raine, handling the sale of Chelsea for Roman Abramovich?

According to the Financial Times, Ravitch won the billionaire’s trust while on holiday in the Caribbean around a decade ago.  The meeting was made possible through an old contact from Ravitch’s days as an attorney in Moscow in the early 1990s, while working for Boris Yeltsin’s Russian Federation.

Ravitch went into banking, working in London, Hong Kong and New York, while the contact Tenenbaum became one of Abramovich’s “closest associates”, according to Chelsea’s website, and a board member of the club.

That meeting got Raine in the door, consulting on commercial strategy and the potential for modernisation and expansion of Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge, which lags behind the capacity of major rivals. When bidders looked at Chelsea in 2018, Raine put a value on the club for Abramovich, who resisted the urge to sell.

In the view of the Pink Un unique, longstanding bonds of that nature help explain Raine’s competitive advantage in deal making, particularly in sports, which is seen as an especially relationship-driven business.

Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala, the sovereign fund and an early shareholder in Raine, is also a longstanding partner. Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who controls Manchester City and parent City Football Group, is on Raine’s board.

CFG turned to Raine for advice on a $500mn investment by US private equity firm Silver Lake in 2019, just four years after a similar deal to sell a $400mn stake to China Media Capital.

In a global world of big capital seeking to take advantage of sport who you know is important and good money can be made out of deals.