Deepening intsability at Chelsea

The biggest story at Chelsea is finally out in the open: a little more than two years after their £2.3billion ($3.02bn) takeover of the club from sanctioned Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, majority shareholder Clearlake Capital’s marriage to co-owner Todd Boehly is in tatters.

Rumblings of discontent have been audible behind the scenes for some time, but specific accusations of a breakdown in relations between Boehly and Clearlake co-founder Behdad Eghbali — the most visible and actively engaged member of Chelsea’s ownership consortium over the past 18 months — were always denied until now.

Now, in the wake of a Bloomberg report last week that revealed Clearlake and Boehly are each exploring the ownership options, all parties have for the first time acknowledged the scale of the rift. People familiar with Boehly’s thinking say he considers his relationship with Clearlake and Eghbali to be “irreconcilable”, and others claim the two men barely speak to one another.

Amid the many other points of contention, there is broad agreement that three factors in particular have contributed to the fracturing of Chelsea’s owners:

• A fundamental cultural difference in how the Premier League club should operate, with Clearlake and Boehly each believing the other has sought to unduly influence sporting decisions
• The decision to mutually part ways with head coach Mauricio Pochettino at the end of last season, which exposed the first public fault lines between Boehly and the club’s leadership structure
• A lack of tangible progress in the stadium project over the last two years, with the club not yet resolved on a revamp or rebuild of Stamford Bridge or moving to a nearby site at Earl’s Court.

Boehly and associates have received approaches from investors in recent weeks with a view to buying out Clearlake, while Clearlake has aspirations to buy out Boehly.

In the two years since Clearlake and Boehly’s takeover, Chelsea have disrupted and dominated football’s global transfer market, committing more than £1.2billion in transfer fees and generating more than £500m in sales. Players have been bought and sold at a speed and scale that has been as divisive as it has been dizzying.

In Boehly’s view,  the major continuing tension with Clearlake: is a cultural difference over how the co-owners operate.   Boehly’s approach, as evidenced by his work with Major League Baseball’s Los Angeles Dodgers, is to hire specialists and allow them to get on with their jobs, while Clearlake, particularly Eghbali, has taken a role considered by Boehly to be micromanaging — a source close to Boehly’s side described Eghbali as being “obsessed with player trading”.

People familiar with Boehly’s thinking say he wanted Chelsea to retain Pochettino, but he did not formally veto when the final decision was mutually reached. These sources add he considers Eghbali to be trigger-happy and the driver of the call to move on — an accusation that is strenuously denied on Clearlake’s side.

There is also a belief on the Clearlake side that being overruled by Chelsea’s sporting leadership on Pochettino was the tipping point for Boehly to begin exploring his options within the ownership structure — a move that has, in recent days, spilt out into the public discourse as media reports about a potential bid to gain full control of the club.

The tensions between Boehly and Eghbali tested Pochettino’s patience during his tumultuous single season as head coach at Stamford Bridge, and the way his departure played out exposed the fault lines among Chelsea’s owners, which have now fractured.

Boehly’s investment is personal money and he views his sporting investments as long-term, lifetime plays. Clearlake, as a fund, is managing money on behalf of investors.

Chelsea’s time in stadium purgatory since Abramovich paused his ambitious redevelopment project indefinitely in 2018 has cost them; their 40,173-seater historic home is now only the ninth-largest by capacity in the Premier League, placing a relatively low ceiling on matchday revenue even with the unpopular decision to raise general admission season-ticket prices, for the first time in more than a decade, for the 2024-25 season. The club also do not have a front-of-shirt sponsor this season, further increasing the need to up prices.

Last year’s tentative target for Chelsea to be playing in a new home by 2030 already looks optimistic and there will come a time when either revamping or rebuilding Stamford Bridge are the only viable options. 

There is suspicion on the Clearlake side that this schism being played out in the public domain is actually a ploy to disguise the true motive of Boehly’s camp, which they believe is an attempt to put pressure on them to make a big offer to purchase his stake.

Nobody knows how or when this will end.  What is clear, however, is that the public litigation of these grievances only deepens the sense of disorienting instability Chelsea have failed to escape since the ‘For Sale’ sign went up outside Stamford Bridge more than two years ago.