Remember Todd Boehly? There was a time when Chelsea’s chairman and co-owner was a near-omnipresent figure in English football. Not only were Chelsea spending $1 billion of transfer money in record-breaking fashion while attempting to rewrite accounting principles, but Citizen Todd was only too happy to tell the world of his exciting plans for the Premier League.
He hasn’t disappeared completely. Baseball-capped, dressed for the cold, he attended Chelsea’s match with Brighton in early December, but it has been some time since the football public heard from him. Club politics, wider football politics and perhaps most of all, Chelsea’s rather embarrassing slide, have each served to reduce the need for the Marylander to hold forth in the manner that quickly made his name.
Back in the summer of 2022, Boehly was the public face of an ownership group that included Clearlake Capital, Mark Walter and Hansjörg Wyss, but these days, it is Behdad Eghbali, Clearlake’s co-founder, who has become the club hierarchy’s most visible and influential presence. This season has seen Eghbali venture into the dressingroom after matches where last season saw Boehly widely criticised for such visits, seen as evidence of someone not knowing his place and overstepping the mark.
When Boehly was publicly espousing the virtues of an All-Star North v South match, a relegation playoff series and multi-club models, there was a sense he was doing the talking for his fellow American owners out loud.
Stateside ownership is not a new phenomenon in English football but Boehly’s hucksterism and unapologetic, sweat-panted capitalism were still something new to the suited-and-booted, mostly secretive world of Premier League ownership. “Ultimately I hope the Premier League takes a little bit of a lesson from American sports,” said Boehly, during the September 2022 Salt conference that swiftly enhanced his reputation as being the opposite of a quiet revolutionary.
Premier League owners are usually seen and not heard, their rare public statements clipped down to club releases. In a media environment where necessary information is conveyed to journalists via off-record briefings, there is little to no requirement for an owner to be a frontman in the manner that is common in the US. Roman Abramovich said nothing at all in public and the likes of Daniel Levy at Tottenham are hardly much more outgoing. Public talking is done by the manager, it is relatively rare even for a sporting director to go on the record, as is usual in America.
Should Everton’s proposed and much-delayed takeover by 777 Partners go through, American ownership will represent half the 20 Premier League clubs. And though that group doesn’t operate in concert, their influence has been brought to bear in tightened financial regulations to prevent the likes of the Abramovich-era Chelsea and the Gulf state-owned Manchester City and Newcastle spending limitlessly.
That influence is exerted behind closed doors. Boehly’s bluster most invoked memories of Tom Hicks and George Gillett, who arrived at Liverpool in freewheeling fashion in 2007, talked big, fell out with each other and then ran the club close to ruin by 2010. The Fenway Sports Group that replaced Hicks and Gillett, headed by John Henry, have followed the template of speaking when only absolutely necessary.
Many American owners, including now-departed types like Ellis Short at Sunderland and Randy Lerner at Aston Villa, have arrived in the hope that the Premier League can be the no-lose cartel the NFL’s owners’ club is. If only parochial English and European minds could think like American business brains. Boehly, to both his credit and his detriment, expressed his thoughts publicly, though it is now a significant time since he did so; Chelsea’s executive communiques have reverted to the boilerplate business-speak vernacular of their peers.
He also set about his task with an unprecedented vigour. Even at Chelsea, the club whose 2003 takeover by Abramovich brought to English football the type of spending that only Spain and Italy’s richest clubs had ever embarked on, the outlay was shock and awe. But there was a knot in the deals Chelsea were doing, specifically the length of contracts being given to new arrivals.
Arrivals like Mykhailo Mudryk and Enzo Fernández may have cost $111 million and $136 million, but their contracts were spread over eight years. Amortisation, the accounting principle which allows fees to be spread over the length of contracts, was being stretched to the nth degree. That allowed Chelsea to dip their annual spending under financial fair play (FFP), profit and sustainability rules. Boehly looked to have bucked the system, operating a buy now, pay later policy of the type recently made most notorious by Shohei Ohtani’s $700 million arrival at the LA Dodgers, the MLB club by little coincidence 20 per cent owned by Boehly.
And yet, elasticated amortisation will not be around for much longer, as Uefa and the Premier League have taken steps to make sure that a five-year contract is the maximum fees can be spread over accounts.
Meanwhile, the sense of such a recruitment policy and low wage structure – one that cost the club Mason Mount, a fan favourite, and most likely Christian Pulisic – has not been borne out in success on the field.
The removal of Thomas Tuchel, who had won the 2021 Champions League, for Graham Potter, more holistic and receptive to a stats-based approach, was a disaster. Sacked in April 2023, Potter lasted just seven months, and Mauricio Pochettino, something of a centrist option between his two predecessors, has not looked any less befuddled. The orgiastic scenes of celebration that followed the Carabao Cup win over Newcastle were a reflection of a club starved of success since winning the Champions League and the Club World Cup.
Inheriting European champions was by no means the sole legacy of the previous ownership. Peeling away layers of the Abramovich financial structure revealed irregular payments and practices and led to an $11 million settlement with Uefa for historic rule-breaking, though a Premier League investigation, with no statute of limitations, is likely to present greater problems.
Sporting sanctions loom, given the 10-point penalty Everton recently received for irregularities. That the incoming ownership volunteered that “incomplete financial information” had been submitted to the football authorities between 2012 and 2019 may help their case in mitigation but will not offer complete clemency.
The Abramovich legacy presents further problems when it comes to the fanbase, where there is a faction for whom the Russian can still do little wrong, despite the associations with Vladimir Putin that unseated him. Abramovich was benevolent to fans, subsidising travel to away matches, something the new regime removed in August to outrage. Chelsea paying for fans’ away travel to Wolverhampton on Christmas Eve served as a partial rapprochement.
Meanwhile, Club Chelsea, a premium package allowing fans to sit in luxury above the players and managers is also dismissed as an attempted commercialisation/Americanisation of Stamford Bridge, a stadium beloved but ageing and itself with an uncertain future.
Boehly may continue to be the name called out in vain as Chelsea struggle, though the increasing influence of Eghbali, a Santa Monica-based Iranian, suggests the chairman’s is a less prominent role. In representing the club in meetings with fellow Premier League clubs and associations, and on business development trips, Boehly, someone more drawn to the sociable side of sport business, continues to be frontman. But Chelsea’s ownership is far more of a partnership than was suggested in those early days when Boehly unilaterally announced himself as a temporary sporting director.
Can a two-headed leadership succeed? There are suggestions the pair might not completely share the same vision for Chelsea’s future, and with heavy spending and a failed off-piste accounting policy yet to deliver success, a forthcoming power struggle is not an impossibility. January’s transfer window, with Pochettino having expressed the need for yet more players, is likely to be instructive on where the power – and Boehly – now lie. – Guardian
