Chelsea co-owner Behdad Eghbali believes that Liverpool under the stewardship of Fenway Sports Group are one of the few well managed teams in the Premier League.
Eghbali, co-founder of Clearlake Capital, the private equity fund that completed a £2.5bn (potentially rising to £4.2bn) takeover of Chelsea with a consortium fronted by US businessman Todd Boehly and Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss earlier this year, has already overseen significant changes at Stamford Bridge this season.
With Chelsea having spent more than £270m in the summer transfer window and then sacking Thomas Tuchel just weeks into the season and replacing him with Brighton & Hove Albion's Graham Potter, the landscape has shifted at the club as they target success both on and off the field.
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This week the club moved to appoint Monaco's Laurence Stewart as technical director and Southampton's Joe Shield as co-director of recruitment and talent, with co-owners Boehly and Eghbali also wanting to add Brighton's Paul Winstanley to their recruitment team as they place more emphasis in data and analytics, hopeful of achieving the same kind of success that Liverpool owners Fenway Sports Group have through strategy and structure.
American ownership in English football has a somewhat potted history, with ownership groups such as the Glazer family at Manchester United and the former owners of Liverpool, Tom Hicks and George Gillett, often cited as the examples of when it goes wrong.
While Liverpool's struggles this season, amplified by the 1-0 loss at Nottingham Forest on Saturday, have seen the ownership of FSG come into the crosshairs when it comes to criticism, largely due to the perceived lack of investment in recent transfer windows, the club have enjoyed success in recent times.
Three Champions League final appearances since 2018, one victory, and a Premier League title and FA Cup, League Cup and World Club Cup crowns have meant that it has been arguably the Reds' finest period in the past three decades.
While much of the Premier League have pursued debt financing when it comes to trying to challenge on the field, the FSG approach has been more business and data focused, something that Eghbali believes has presented a pathway for Chelsea to follow.
Speaking at the Sportico Invest in Sports conference in New York on Wednesday, where the ECHO were in attendance, Eghbali said: "These (Premier League) teams generally, in our view, are not well managed.
" Fenway Sports Group with Liverpool and the Abu Dhabi group with Manchester City have done it well but for the most part these opportunities have not been optimised.
"European football is probably 20 years behind US sports in terms of sophistication on the commercial side and sophistication on the data side. I had one super high level sporting director at a top three world club tell when I asked about their approach to data they said 'the data is my eyes, I pick players on my eyes'. He had six scouts and no data.
"In any league in the US there are 20 to 30 data analysts and a wide use of data. That is one place where we think there is a lot of runway in terms of European football, which has a global audience and a global opportunity - 90 to 95 per cent of the top teams in England have their fan bases outside of the UK. These are global assets with global audiences that we think we can help grow.
"Fenway does it well and is nicely profitable and it's worked. We think there is a lot to do around live content and stories. We have content from players in the Chelsea Academy, along with Barcelona probably the best in Europe, and we have video and content from some of the stars from the ages of six, seven and eight. Monetising that content, we'd like to have that instead of sharing it with the leagues."
Like Liverpool, Chelsea are open to adding more football clubs globally to their portfolio, although FSG's initial plan is more focused on adding another US team before embarking on another football club purchase.
But Chelsea, who Eghbali revealed were looking at Portugal, France and Africa as potential destinations for club purchases, also highlighted a multi-club model that Liverpool are understood to be admirers of, that of the Red Bull model that has seen the Reds spend more than £100m in recent years on acquiring talent from Red Bull's RB Leipzig and Red Bull Salzburg clubs.
Said Eghbali: "We think that there is a global pool of talent, and where that comes into play with multi-clubs is that you have pathways for players, where you're managing your content, you're managing your costs much more effectively and not buying the 30-year-old free agent.
"We think there is certainly a path to manage labour costs and, frankly, still produce a winning product using data and using the multi-club model. Multi-club, by the way, is an interesting tool for player trading. The ones that we have looked at who've done it successfully, Red Bull, £15m, £25m maybe £40m payroll for their largest clubs, they generate £50m to £100m per year in profit from player trading and player sales."
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