Five years is a short time in football club ownership – and that is exactly how long Todd Boehly will have had to impose himself as head honcho at Chelsea once his chairmanship winds down in 2027.
Broadly speaking, the regime at Stamford Bridge is split into two factions. Todd Boehly is on one side alongside American co-investor Mark Walter and the Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss. On the other, Clearlake Capital, the US private equity firm fronted by Behdad Eghbali and Jose Feliciano.
Under the terms of the takeover from Roman Abramovich in 2022 – the proceeds of which, incidentally, remain frozen in a UK bank account – the two elements of the ownership take it in turns to appoint a chairman every five years. And despite owning significantly more shares in Chelsea, Clearlake drew the short straw once the deal was completed in 2022.
Credit: Adam Williams/GRV Media/The Chelsea Chronicle
That means Boehly will remain in situ until at least 2027, after which it is presumed that Eghbali will step into the breach. That feels significant given the ongoing row over the future of Stamford Bridge that has riven Chelsea’s ownership. Given how the boardroom and voting structure is set up in SW16, the change of chairmanship won’t resolve that situation overnight, but it could eventually tip the scales in favour of Clearlake, whose preference is to remain at a significantly expanded Stamford Bridge.
By some accounts, Eghbali has been the ultimate decision maker at Chelsea for some time anyway. However, The Chelsea Chronicle is routinely told that the characterisation of Boehly as a lame duck chairman is wildly inaccurate.
As well as being the public face of the club, the 51-year-old multi-sport investor is the man with the big ideas. And while his grand vision for Chelsea is considered quixotic by some, there was always a huge amount of risk appetite with this project. How else could BlueCo justify the £2.5bn fee and £1.75bn funding commitment?
They want to add a zero to their valuation of the club. To get there, qualifying for the Champions League and winning the Conference League isn’t enough. In fact, it’s barely about what happens on the pitch at all.
In 2001, Alan Sugar – the then-owner of Tottenham – compared the money in football to “prune juice”. It goes in one end, out the other. Almost 25 years later, nothing has changed. Revenues are booming, yes, but so too are costs, and nowhere more so than Chelsea, who have lost more money than any club in the history of football.
Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR) haven’t stifled spending as intended, either. On the contrary, they have acted more as a floor than a ceiling.
Chelsea have exploited several loopholes to bypass PSR. Their accounts for 2024-25 show wage expenditure of around £1.1bn since the BlueCo takeover, while transfer amortisation is running at around £200m every season. Their spending far exceeds revenue, which means the owners need to subsidise it, either in the form of cash injections (of which they have made around £450m) or third-party debt.
Credit: Adam Williams/The Chelsea Chronicle/GRV Media
So, how on earth do Boehly, Eghbali and the rest of the Chelsea top brass plan on making any money out of this investment?
Generally speaking, there are three ways that owners can extract cash from a football club:
- Loan the club money and charge interest
- Take dividends from profits
- Sell the club for more than you have invested
For BlueCo, the loan option wouldn’t generate substantial enough returns. Options two and three meanwhile are related – after all, who is going to buy the club for more than £4.25bn unless it is consistently profitable? There at least has to be a pathway to profitability, otherwise where is the value?
To create profit, the owners need to increase revenue and reduce costs proportionately. For either of those things to happen, something systemic within football needs to change.
Boehly thinks he has the answer…
‘Premflix’ could supercharge Chelsea revenues, says Todd Boehly
For years, media income has been the golden goose of any Premier League club’s revenue streams. In 2024-25, Chelsea are expected to have earned around £171m from the central pot.
However, while the international portion of the league’s TV rights continues to become exponentially more lucrative, the domestic media package’s financial growth is slowing.
The latest iteration of the deal struck with Sky Sports and TNT Sports is worth £6.7bn, which is an increase on the previous rights cycle but, on a per-game basis, is actually a step down.
There are only so many matches that the Premier League can sell, with diminishing returns each time.
For that reason, several clubs are exploring a system reset in the way fans consume the Premier League.
The idea of an over-the-top streaming service is one of the ideas floated most regularly. You might have heard this referred to as ‘Premflix’.
In this model, fans would pay a modest monthly fee to access a convenient Premier League streaming platform, with the aim of recapturing the audience lost to illegal streaming and surpassing the value of the traditional broadcast deal with sheer volume of subscribers.
League chairman Richard Masters has forecasted that the Premier League will ultimately move in this direction, as has Boehly.
“I’m not saying this is the blatant answer right this minute,” he told the Financial Times Business of Football Summit earlier this year, “but I think that’s where we’re headed.”
“And of course, in order to repackage all of that, the owners have to be willing to take some level of risk.”
“How many global platforms are there? Probably just Netflix. If you’re thinking about how do I launch a global product, you do it in partnership with content like this. If you really think about what it could do to unlock a global media platform, there’s nothing like this.
“It’s a long conversation, and [the Premier League] are on it. They are thinking about media rights going forward, they’ve got great leadership in that area, and they are thinking about how to get everyone to row simultaneously and be pulling for each other.”
Recently, a review of football finance from the global consultancy services firm Deloitte also suggested that an OTT model is one of the only ways to arrest flatlining growth.
Chelsea will destroy Premier League’s competitive balance with D2C model
Alternatively, one solution favoured by the elite clubs is to cut out the middle man and sell matches direct to the consumer.
However, speaking exclusively to The Chelsea Chronicle, University of Liverpool football finance lecturer Kieran Maguire says this would have grave consequences for the integrity of the Premier League.
“We saw with both project Big Picture and the Super League proposals that Chelsea would have been able to sell a proportion of their home fixtures direct to the consumer,” observed the Price of Football author.
“This will be very beneficial if all of those monies are kept by the selling club. It will also accelerate the gulf in revenue between the franchises – and that’s the word that some of the American owners – and the also-rans, who are making up the numbers in terms of the Premier League’s appeal.
“Todd Boehly would love for Chelsea to be able to sell matches direct to the consumer but, if it does take place, it will have devastating consequences in terms of competitive balance.
“But as we have seen with some of Boehly’s proposals at Chelsea, he has no interest in competitive balance. His sole aim is for Chelsea to be successful regardless of the broader principles of fair play in football.”
