The Political Economy of Football V2

Mark Walter and Todd Boehly have agreed to sell their stakes in Chelsea FC to Clearlake Capital in a deal that values the club at about £5bn including debt and will help the US financiers alleviate pressure on their insurance empires. The deal will put US private equity firm Clearlake, an existing investor in Chelsea, in control of the football club and give both Walter and Boehly a small gain on their investment, according to people familiar with the matter.   The pair are set to receive £950mn in cash for their combined 25 per cent holding, the people said. “Chelsea Football Club today announced affiliates of Clearlake Capital Group will acquire the ownership interest of Todd Boehly   .   .   . Clearlake will also acquire Mark Walter ’ s ownership interest and therefore acquire full control of the club, ” Chelsea said in a statement, which did not disclose financial terms of the transaction. Clearlake will finance the purchase using its own capital and large direct inve...

Chelsea still believe there is a chance of them building a new stadium at Earls Court, even though an alternative plan for the land has been approved by both councils involved. The Earls Court Development Company (ECDC) is now close to receiving full planning permission for a mixed-use development on the same land that had been mooted as a potential site for a new stadium for Chelsea. However, club sources, on the condition of anonymity as they were not authorised to speak publicly, have indicated to the   New York Times that they are still considering all options for the future of their stadium — including a new ground at Earls Court. The future of Chelsea’s stadium is not a new debate. Under previous owner Roman Abramovich, the club submitted an offer for the Battersea Power Station site in 2012, in which they proposed to build a 60,000-capacity ground, but a Malaysian consortium purchased the site instead. In 2017, Chelsea secured planning permission for a 60,000-seat stad...

Chelsea understandably feel constrained by having a smaller stadium than London rivals Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur and West Ham.   Match day revenue is smaller and there is little opportunity for the kinds of alternative uses pursued by Spurs. The possibility of Chelsea building a new stadium at Earl’s Court has hit a setback after an alternative plan for the land was approved by one of the councils involved.   Personally I never thought it was viable. At a meeting on Wednesday night, Hammersmith and Fulham council approved proposals for a development on the site of the old Earls Court Exhibition Centre which will include a mix of new homes, retail and hospitality, and workplaces. The plans are led by the Earls Court Development Company (ECDC). The land had also been mooted as a potential site for a new stadium for Chelsea, who are looking at future options to develop or move away from Stamford Bridge. The ECDC’s plans do not include a football stadium. Hammersmith...

The RFU would be open to the lucrative prospect of hosting Chelsea at Twickenham during the redevelopment of Stamford Bridge but expects that Richmond upon Thames borough council would block the move. Chelsea will be in the market for a temporary home for up to seven years if they choose to build a new 60,000-capacity stadium on the site of Stamford Bridge. The club’s alternative option, to build a stadium in Earl’s Court, would not require a groundshare arrangement. If Chelsea were to rebuild Stamford Bridge, they would have to groundshare with Premier League rivals, hire out Wembley as Tottenham Hotspur did, or revive interest in playing at Twickenham. Chelsea first made a request to play at the home of rugby in 2014. The RFU was interested at the time but the proposal never got off the ground.   Quite a lot of Chelsea's support is within easy reach of south-west London. The RFU, which made record losses last year and is struggling to break even over i...

Todd Boehly has suggested that divisions among Chelsea’s owners on the future of Stamford Bridge could lead to them splitting. Boehly has an uneasy relationship with Clearlake Capital, the club’s majority shareholder, with it emerging last September that both sides have explored the possibility of buying each other out. The Times understands that Clearlake, jointly owned by Behdad Eghbali and José Feliciano, has no intention of selling its 61.5 per cent stake in the club. Reports earlier this season suggested Boehly and Clearlake did not agree over the best way forward for a new stadium — whether to redevelop Stamford Bridge or move to new site at nearby Earls Court. The US billionaire, who holds a 12.8 per cent stake in Chelsea — the same as allies Mark Walter and Hansjorg Wyss — has now confirmed as much in an interview with Bloomberg. Boehly hinted that the plan is to build a multisport stadium, similar to Tottenham Hotspur’s, which hosts NFL, rugby, boxing and m...

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...

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 anoth...

I haven't been a great fan of Ken Bates in the past.  I am not a Chelsea supporter, although I have nothing against the club.  Indeed, I remember Charlton playing Chelsea in the mid-1950s.   In those days supporters mixed and one of the Chelsea fans gave me a blue balloon.  However, when I got off the 53 bus some miserable so-and-so said, 'Wrong colours for round here.' I suppose I was a bit suspicious of people living in Monaco, part of a location once described as 'a sunny place for shady people.' Bates is now 90 years old but gets back for Chelsea games when he can.   An interview in The Times with him on Saturday was very interesting.   It is behind a pay wall and protected by copyright. He talks about when he bought a debt-ridden Chelsea in 1982.   The club was losing £12,000 a week (£45k in current prices) and the bank was threatening to bounce its cheques.   He joined the board for a Saturday match and found 36 peop...

There has been some relief at Chelsea that the stadium redevelopment plan has been abandoned. Many of the club are not unhappy that the grand designs for a 'cathedral of football' produced by the architects Herzog & De Meuron have fallen through. There wasn't really a business case to spend more than £1 billion to add just 18,000 seats to Stamford Bridge. Unlike Liverpool, which had to expand Anfield to create more capacity for the prawn sandwich crowd, Chelsea has always had a lucrative corporate hospitality business. The majority of the new seats would have gone to ordinary fans. There were also concerns about the limited relocation options available during the four years that would have to be spent away from Stamford Bridge. Egg chasers did not want them lowering the tone at Twickenham and the London Stadium, leaving aside its shortcomings, is well away from the main fan base in West London and Surrey. That left Wembley which is in the process of being acquire...

Chelsea have shelved plans to build a new stadium at Stamford Bridge 'due to the current investment climate': Stamford Bridge It is not clear when Chelsea will revive their plan, if at all. The estimated cost for a new 60,000 seat Stamford Bridge has increased to £1bn after delays, which included a dispute with a local family. The news comes after Roman Abramovich's 'investment' visa to the UK was not renewed and he subsequently took up Israeli citizenship. Abramovich is unwilling to invest in a major project in a country where he is not allowed to work. With Arsenal having built their new stadium and Spurs near to completing theirs, the stadium redevelopment was seen as key as securing Chelsea as a leading London club in the long term. With a capacity of just over 41,000, Stamford Bridge is the eighth largest stadium in London.

Chelsea will have to pay considerably more than the £11m rent that Tottenham Hotspur are paying this season if the club want to move there while Stamford Bridge is being redeveloped. Chelsea will not be moving until 2021, the year in which they were originally planning to open the rebuilt stadium. Twickenham is one option, but rugby bosses have ruled this out in the past, some egg chasers regarding it as sacrilege: Oval balls only The London Stadium is another possibility, but that would mean a ground share with another club.

Plans for the redevelopment of Stamford Bridge have hit a new snag. The plans have been halted by a family who claim that the 60,000-seater stadium would block light from their home. Nicholas Crosthwaite and his family took out a High Court injunction in May against the stadium. The family, who have lived in the three bedroomed house for 50 years, are understood to have rejected a six-figure sum in compensation from the football club. Planners at Hammersmith and Fulham Council have said that the work cannot go ahead while there is a risk the injunction would stop the development. The house is in the neighbouring borough of Kensington and Chelsea whose council opposed the plans. The family argue that amendments could be made to the design. Planners at Hammersmith and Fulham Council are to meet on Monday to decide the next step.

Chelsea's stadium redevelopment plans have been hit by a further delay with the date for moving out of Stamford Bridge being put back to 2021. The club were hoping that their re-built stadium would open for the start of the 2021-22 season. However, it is a complex project and there have been delays with planning applications and infrastructure work. Chelsea officials told a fans' forum in November that they would stay at least two seasons beyond the present one at Stamford Bridge, but they are now planning to stay for another three years. It has been put back another year because of the complex nature of the pre-demolition work, which involves acquiring small pieces of land next to the ground and obtaining a succession of planning permissions. Chelsea estimate that the building work will take three years, but the scale of the project means that it could take four. The club have spent most of the last 15 years attempting to relocate to a new site or expand Stamford Bridge....

Chelsea have significantly increased the cost of redeveloping Stamford Bridge to more than £1bn, which would make it the most expensive stadium in Europe. This is double the £500m that was estimated when they received planning permission for the 60,000 capacity stadium. The cost of building Tottenham Hotspur's new ground has almost doubled to £800m. Chelsea attribute the spiralling cost to the length and complexity of the build which will take five to six years compared with two at Tottenham. They will not vacate the stadium until 2020 when they will move to a temporary home for three or four years. Chelsea have to build over the District Line and the Southern main line which pass close to Stamford Bridge. Their 'cathedral of football' will have a lavish external design. Chelsea are talking to several investment banks about funding the project rather than relying solely on funds provided by Roman Abramovich. They will also attempt to sell a naming rights package that ...