Todd Boehly has been, for many outsiders, the face of the American consortium that paid £2.3billion ($3bn) to acquire Chelsea from sanctioned Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich in May 2022, but the ugly public fallout from his breakdown in relations with majority shareholders Clearlake Capital — and in particular the private equity firm’s co-founder Behdad Eghbali — has exposed that he is not the main driver of decision-making at Stamford Bridge.
Clearlake largely flew under the radar during the Chelsea
sale process, but its 61.5 per cent stake in BlueCo — the parent company set up
by the consortium that also includes Ligue 1 club Strasbourg among its assets —
meant its influence on the club’s strategy was baked into the original
ownership arrangement. As its most visible and actively engaged representative
at Stamford Bridge and Cobham, Eghbali has been the most powerful figure for
the last 18 months.
Boehly retains veto power as co-controlling owner; all major
Chelsea decisions require formal sign-off from him, Eghbali and Clearlake
co-founder Jose E Feliciano. But the club’s direction on the sporting and
business sides has been dominated by Clearlake since Boehly relinquished the
‘interim sporting director’ title he assumed for the owners’ first transfer
window in the summer of 2022 and stepped back from day-to-day operations.
Clearlake and Boehly signed a commitment as part of the
purchase agreement in 2022 not to sell Chelsea for at least 10 years, but there
is nothing to prevent them from trading shares with each other. There are also
questions of how that commitment would be enforced, given that the UK
government has since changed and the demand for it to be a condition of sale
came from Abramovich, who remains a sanctioned individual.
The shares owned by Clearlake are Class A senior while those
owned by Boehly, Walter and Wyss are Class B junior, meaning they are exposed
to first loss if the parent company loses value. However, both classes of
shares are guaranteed the same rate of return if they are sold — an important
detail to note in a situation where either side could buy out the other.
Founded in 2006 by Eghbali, Feliciano and Steven Chang,
Clearlake is a private equity firm headquartered in Santa Monica, California,
that has around $80billion of assets under management and is ranked the
16th-biggest private equity firm in the world by Private Equity International.
Chelsea is the only sports team among the 50 companies in
the current investment portfolio listed on the firm’s website, though
Strasbourg is also under the BlueCo umbrella owned by Clearlake, Boehly, Walter
and Wyss.
Since the bulk of their investment in Chelsea comes from
Clearlake’s private equity funds, the personal shareholdings of Eghbali and
Feliciano are lower than that of Boehly. The firm is not required to publicly
disclose the identities of the investors who have stakes in the club through
its funds, and may never do so.
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