Behdad Eghbali and Todd Boehly appear to have divergent visions for Chelsea and how to justify their £2.5bn investment in the football club which, at an operating level, loses hundreds of millions annually.
The future of Stamford Bridge is the crux of the issue.
Todd Boehly wants to uproot Chelsea from their home since 1905 and move them to a new site, potentially at Earl’s Court, where a more commercially-orientated stadium could be built.
Behdad Eghbali meanwhile wants to remain at Stamford Bridge, albeit with a major makeover that could see them vacate the stadium temporarily. Chelsea have been offered Twickenham Stadium for up to seven years.
Either way, it doesn’t look like this will come to a head any time soon. Boehly says the BlueCo consortium that bought the club in 2022 outlined a 15-20-year timeline to figure out the plans for the stadium. Meanwhile, the American investor has also played down talk of a schism within Chelsea’s ownership.
The mood music from Chelsea HQ, however, suggests that there are certainly tensions at board level if not full-blown hostilities.
Perhaps the most interesting detail to emerge from the saga is confirmation of the timeframes that BlueCo are dealing in. The group – which consists of dozens of individual investors in total – is thinking in decades, not individual seasons, when it comes to both infrastructure and sporting strategy.
Credit: Adam Williams/GRV Media/The Chelsea Chronicle
This is why there is continued faith in their left-field recruitment and retention policy despite limited returns on their £1bn-plus investment in the transfer market in terms of results on the pitch.
Chelsea’s payroll and contract structure points to a regime that thinks they have figured football out – it’s all about locking in value, securing buy-in and incentivising performance with ultra long-term, bonus-heavy deals. It’s why Chelsea have almost 150 years’ worth of contracted players on the books.
| Player | Contracted years | Player | Contracted years |
| Robert Sánchez | 5.1 | Filip Jørgensen | 6.1 |
| Marcus Bettinelli | 1.1 | Lucas Bergström | 0.1 |
| Levi Colwill | 4.1 | Wesley Fofana | 4.1 |
| Benoît Badiashile | 5.1 | Tosin Adarabioyo | 3.1 |
| Trevoh Chalobah | 3.1 | Aarón Anselmino | 6.1 |
| Marc Cucurella | 3.1 | Malo Gusto | 5.1 |
| Reece James | 3.1 | Josh Acheampong | 4.1 |
| Moisés Caicedo | 6.1 | Roméo Lavia | 5.1 |
| Enzo Fernández | 7.1 | Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall | 4.1 |
| Mathis Amougou | 8.1 | Cole Palmer | 8.1 |
| Omari Kellyman | 5.1 | Mykhaylo Mudryk | 6.1 |
| Jadon Sancho | 0.1 | Tyrique George | 2.1 |
| Pedro Neto | 6.1 | Noni Madueke | 5.1 |
| Nicolas Jackson | 8.1 | Christopher Nkunku | 4.1 |
| David Datro Fofana | 4.1 | Marc Guiu | 4.1 |
It’s not just the footballing side of the business where BlueCo are thinking big picture. For better or for worse, they are being equally disruptive in the commercial department.
Boehly’s involvement with multiple ticketing firms, including the controversial resale site Vivid Seats, suggests that he wants Chelsea to control secondary markets in some way.
Chelsea’s new interim front-of-shirt partnership with real estate firm DAMAC meanwhile – launched at a glitzy ceremony in Dubai this week – reflects the ownership’s strategy to use the club’s brand and intellectual property to enter industries and geographies far beyond Stamford Bridge.
Excuse the buzzwords, but it’s all about scale. BlueCo are adamant that globalisation will make their huge investment in football pay off, whether that is in 10, 20, 30 years or longer.
The masterplan is surreal, perhaps quixotic, and completely alien to what bedrock Chelsea fans would consider the soul of their club.
One element of BlueCo’s global strategy is the multi-club network.
Chelsea’s owners also control Ligue 1 side Strasbourg and have been linked with further takeovers in Europe and South America.
The Strasbourg project isn’t going particularly well, at least not in terms of fan sentiment towards BlueCo.
With six games remaining, the French club are one point off the Champions League places and on track for their best season in decades under the management of the excellent Liam Rosenior.
Incidentally, if both Chelsea and their counterpart in Alsace are in the Champions League in 2025-26, that would require BlueCo to freeze their ownership of Strasbourg to satisfy UEFA’s conflict of interest rules.
Supporters, however, are anxious about the club losing its identity and being treated merely as a feeder club, development pathway, or a subsidiary of Chelsea.
Those concerns are valid. Three of Strasbourg’s standout performers this season in Andrey Santos, Djordje Petrovic and Diego Moreira are Chelsea loanees, while the Blues are also said to be in talks to sign 22-year-old striker Emanuel Emegha this summer too, though deals between the two clubs could also be complicated by UEFA’s dual ownership rules.
Eghbali held talks with Strasbourg’s ultras in April to try and soothe tensions between the ownership and the fanbase. That parley has had limited impact, with Strasbourg fans still protesting BlueCo’s model.
And things are getting worse for BlueCo with the broader situation in French football.
Ligue 1’s five-year, £1.7bn TV deal with DAZN has collapsed, leaving Strasbourg and their peers without their single biggest source of revenue. Ligue 1 are now said to be gearing up to launch their own in-house streaming service, which will be a first for a major European football league.
That may well have been why Eghbali was in the house for Paris Saint-Germain’s Champions League semi-final second-leg win over Arsenal on Wednesday.
PSG are owned by the sovereign wealth fund Qatar Sports Investments (QSI), whose president Nasser Al-Khelaifi is one of the most powerful men in football and media rights. QSI own BeIn Sports, Ligue 1’s other major broadcaster and Al-Khelaifi will be central to whichever direction the league takes.
Chelsea’s multi-club masterplan: Could Strasbourg be just the start?
There are different types of multi-club networks.
Some, like Manchester City’s City Football Group and the Red Bull system, operate under a shared brand identity and have a clear mothership that the rest of the network serves.
Others are more diffuse and, while they have shared ownership, operate distinctly from one another. Often, this is a way for investment companies to hedge their risk when buying into football.
Credit: Adam Williams/The Chelsea Chronicle/GRV Media
For Chelsea, it’s clear that Strasbourg relationship is one that serves BlueCo’s interests in the Premier League. As well as a holding pen for future Chelsea stars and talent ID hub on the continent, the club also represent a possible PSR workaround. BlueCo can pool costs in the multi-club vehicle, easing the burden on free-spending Chelsea.
But if their movements in football finance so far are anything to go off, it seems likely that the owners have grander visions for their sports empire.
South America and the United States in particular are seen as huge growth markets and it wouldn’t be at all surprising to see Chelsea acquire a sister club in Brazil or the MLS in future.
