Remember Todd Boehly? There was a time when Chelsea’s chairman and co-owner was an almost ubiquitous figure in English football. Not only did Chelsea spend a record-breaking $1 billion on transfer money while trying to rewrite its accounting principles, but Citizen Todd was happy to tell the world about his exciting plans for the Premier League.
He hasn’t completely disappeared. Wearing a baseball cap and dressed against the cold, he attended Chelsea’s match against 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 defeat, have all reduced the Marylander’s need to hold out in the manner that quickly made his name.
In the summer of 2022, Boehly was the public face of an ownership group that included Clearlake Capital, Mark Walter and Hansjörg Wyss, but today it is Behdad Eghbali, Clearlake’s co-founder, who has become the most exposed and visible club hierarchy in the club. influential presence. This season, Eghbali has been seen heading into the locker room after games, while Boehly was heavily criticized last season for such visits, which were seen as evidence of someone not knowing his place and overstepping his mark.
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When Boehly publicly espoused the virtues of an All-Star North-South match, a relegation play-off series and multi-club models, you felt like he was speaking out loud for his fellow American owners.
Ownership in the United States is not a new phenomenon in English football, but Boehly’s hucksterism and unapologetic, sweaty capitalism were still something of a novelty in the well-dressed, mostly secretive world of Premier League ownership. “Ultimately, I hope the Premier League learns some lessons from American sports,” Boehly said at the September 2022 Salt conference, which quickly cemented his reputation as the opposite of a quiet revolutionary.
Premier League owners are usually seen and not heard; their rare public statements are limited 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 front in the manner that is common in the US. Roman Abramovich said nothing in public and people like Daniel Levy at Tottenham are hardly outgoing. Public speaking is done by the manager, it is relatively rare for even a sporting director to go on record, as is common in America.
Should the proposed and much-delayed takeover of Everton by 777 Partners go ahead, American ownership will represent half of the 20 Premier League clubs. And while that group does not operate as a cabal, their influence has been leveraged in tightened financial rules to prevent Abramovich-era Chelsea and state-owned Manchester City and Newcastle from spending unlimited amounts of money.
That influence is exercised behind closed doors. Boehly’s bluster particularly brought back memories of Tom Hicks and George Gillett, who came to Liverpool in free agency in 2007, talked a lot, fell out with each other and almost led the club to ruin in 2010. The Fenway Sports Group that replaced Hicks and Gillett, led by John Henry, have followed the template of speaking when only absolutely necessary.
Many American owners, including now-departed types such as 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 that the NFL’s owners club is. If only parochial English and European minds could think like American business brains. Boehly, both to his credit and detriment, has expressed his thoughts publicly, although it has now been a considerable time since he did so; Chelsea’s executive communiques have returned to the business language of their colleagues.
He also started his task with unprecedented strength. Even at Chelsea, the club whose takeover by Abramovich in 2003 brought to English football the kind of spending that only the richest clubs in Spain and Italy had ever done, the spending was shock and awe. But there was a knot in the deals Chelsea were doing, particularly the length of contracts given to newcomers.
Arrivals like Mykhailo Mudryk and Enzo Fernández may have cost $111 million and $136 million, but their contracts were spread over eight years. Depreciation, the accounting principle that allows payments to be spread over the life of contracts, has been stretched to its limits. This allowed Chelsea to reduce their annual expenditure under financial fair play (FFP), profit and sustainability rules. Boehly appeared to have bucked the system by implementing a “buy now, pay later” policy of the type most recently made infamous by Shohei Ohtani’s $700 million arrival from the LA Dodgers, the MLB club that, little coincidentally, was 20% owned by Boehly.
And yet elastic depreciation won’t be around for much longer, with UEFA and the Premier League taking steps to ensure a five-year contract is the maximum compensation that can be spread across accounts.
Meanwhile, the feeling of such recruitment policies and a low wage structure – one that has cost the club fan favorite Mason Mount and most likely Christian Pulisic – has not proven to be successful on the pitch. having just won the 2021 Champions League, was a disaster for Graham Potter, who was more holistic and receptive to a statistics-based approach. Potter was sacked in April 2023 and lasted just seven months, and Mauricio Pochettino, something of a centrist option between his two predecessors, has looked no less confused. The orgiastic scenes of celebration that followed the Carabao Cup victory over Newcastle on December 19 were a reflection of a club lacking success since winning the Champions League and the Club World Cup.
Inheriting European champions was certainly not the only legacy of the previous ownership. The peeling back of layers of Abramovich’s financial structure revealed irregular payments and practices and led to an $11 million settlement with UEFA for breaching historical rules, although a Premier League investigation, without a statute of limitations, is likely to find greater will cause problems. Sporting sanctions are looming, given the 10-point penalty Everton recently received for irregularities. The fact that the new owner voluntarily indicated that “incomplete financial information” had been provided to the football authorities between 2012 and 2019 may soften their case, but will not provide full leniency.
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Abramovich’s legacy poses even more problems when it comes to the fan base, for whom the Russian can do little harm, despite the associations with Vladimir Putin that have dethroned him. Abramovich was sympathetic to fans and subsidized travel to away games, something the new regime banned in August, to outrage. Chelsea paid for the fans’ away trip to Wolverhampton on Christmas Eve and served as a partial rapprochement. Meanwhile, Club Chelsea, a premium package that allows fans to sit in luxury above the players and managers, is also being dismissed as an attempt to commercialize/Americanize Stamford Bridge, a beloved stadium but aging and itself with an uncertain future.
Boehly may still be the name mentioned in vain in Chelsea’s battle, although the increasing influence of Eghbali, an Iranian from Santa Monica, suggests the chairman’s role is becoming less prominent. Representing the club in meetings with other Premier League clubs and associations, and on business development trips, Boehly, someone who is more attracted to the social side of the sporting world, remains the frontman. But Chelsea’s ownership is much more of a partnership than was suggested in the early days when Boehly unilaterally announced himself as interim sporting director.
Can two-person leadership succeed? There are suggestions that the pair may not quite share the same vision for Chelsea’s future, and with heavy spending and a failed off-piste accounting policy still delivering success, a coming power struggle is not impossible. The January transfer window, in which Pochettino has expressed the need for even more players, will likely be instructive as to where the power – and Boehly – now lies.