Chelsea and the spectre of the worst-case scenario

As if Chelsea needed that, on top of their problems with overstaffing (and the ego management that goes with it), their inconsistent results (this weekend’s trip to Bournemouth, still unbeaten, will not be a picnic) and the acrobatics that their accountants are forced to submit to in order to balance the club’s balance sheet. But no. Now their owners have chosen to wage a new battle of their own – in which the protagonists are themselves, this time.

This is not a surprise in itself. The alliance between Todd Boehly, the Blues’ chairman, and his co-investors, chief among them Clearlake, the majority shareholder but not the ultimate decision-maker, has never been based on anything other than common interests – and a shared belief that what Chelsea needed most was to transform its modus operandi. According to Boehly and his senior partner Behdad Eghbali, the co-founder of Clearlake, the time had come to accept a new operating model, based on methods that have proven successful in American sport.

This type of discourse is not new. It is in fact the one we hear from most of the investors from across the Atlantic who have been flocking to Old World football for the past ten years. According to them, the soccerand especially the soccer English remains undervalued and underexploited compared to what would be possible if it adopted management methods closer to those that made the NBA or the NFL so rich.

The project is a failure

Where Boehly and Eghbali differ is the way they set about transforming Chelsea, making no secret of their disdain for the vision old school of most of their rivals. But as the months have passed, the outlines of their strategy have become more blurred, to the point where we no longer really know what it consists of. We have already talked about it enough here, particularly with regard to their rather unusual approach to the transfer market and to the multi-ownership of clubs, without dwelling on it.

Behdad Eghbali on the sidelines of the match between Chelsea and Servette

Had they maintained Chelsea at the level they maintained throughout the Abramovich era, they would have been forgiven, willingly or unwillingly, for the fanciful and, at times, arrogant aspects of their approach. They had nevertheless inherited a club that had been crowned European and world champions a year earlier, and qualified for the Champions League; but no title has been added to the Blues’ list of achievements since. Two years and four months after their takeover of the club, the “project” has been a bitter failure.

Given the personalities involved in the management of Chelsea, whose humility has never been a clear trait, it would have been surprising if those most responsible for the Blues’ decline had engaged in a my fault. One rarely becomes a multi-billionaire by doubting one’s abilities. So they have now come to blame each other for the club’s stagnation, since it obviously could not be their own.

Cockfight

According to the Financial TimesBoehly is so frustrated by what he sees as the club’s inability to make strategic progress that he is now considering raising the funds needed to acquire his partners’ shares. The problem is that Clearlake, which owns 60% of the capital, has no intention of parting with it.

Quite the opposite. Clearlake would be willing to take control of Boehly’s shares, whose decision-making prerogatives are equal to those of his partners. In other words, when it comes to defining the direction to be taken by the club, Boehly and his group of private investors

need Clearlake’s approval; and vice versa. We are therefore in an impasse from which no one intends to escape backwards.

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What can we learn from this gathering? “We are no further ahead”

The loss of revenue resulting from Chelsea’s absence from the Champions League in 2023-24 will be felt when the time comes to discover the amount of the club’s losses for that season, which will follow negative balances of 153 and 95 million euros for the two previous years, when the Blues played in the quarter-finals of the Champions League. Chelsea must comply with the financial fair play rules in force in the Premier League, or face sanctions comparable to those imposed on them. hit Everton and Nottingham Forest a few months ago, and to which Leicester City

only escaped by a miracle, on a procedural point that stuck in the craw of the other PL clubs.

Their own fortunes are at stake Chelsea has therefore resorted to financial operations that are at the very least unusual (but approved by the Premier League) to redress – but not completely – a disastrous situation,by selling two hotels to himself for example, as well ashis feminine and hisCobham Training Centre . But these sales were only a way of dealing with the most urgent, of putting a bandage on a hemorrhage that has not yet stopped. Boehly and Clearlake are aware of the seriousness of the situation. It will not have escaped the former that,as revealed by Bloomberg

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The notes decrypted: “Koné is the emergence of a new profile”

This will not be enough to reassure the fans of RC Strasbourg, the second wheel of Boehly’s unicycle; because this risk is nevertheless real. It is not a disagreement over Chelsea’s sporting choices that is at the origin of the showdown between its owners today. It is much more serious. It is the fear of seeing a project in which they have invested 2.5 billion pounds of their own money (and have committed to investing another 2 billion by 2032) lose so much of its value that it would endanger the edifice of their entire fortune. Both parties are convinced that this disaster scenario can be avoided – but on one condition: that they, and they alone, decide how.