Chelsea co-owner Todd Boehly has broken his silence on a tough few weeks for the club ahead of their Champions League quarter-final first leg with Real Madrid on Wednesday.
Boehly and his Clearlake Capital co-owners hired Frank Lampard as a replacement for Graham Potter after a bad run of form and that continued with a 1-0 defeat to Wolverhampton Wanderers last time out. Chelsea are in 11th place after 30 games with 39 points, 17 points away from Manchester United in fourth place, with success in the Champions League almost certainly the only route into Europe's premier club competition next season.
Boehly, meanwhile, was interviewed by Sky Sports ahead of Wednesday's clash at the Santiago Bernabeu Stadium and predicted a 3-0 win for his side. The American businessman was also asked for his thoughts on the Blues' last ten days, with a second manager sacked by the club's owners after the departure of Thomas Tuchel earlier this season.
"We look at this as a very long-term process and we had a lot of work to do," Boehly said. "We are excited about the future, the future is bright and we are excited about tonight."
As far as Lampard is concerned, he has acknowledged that European football can offer struggling Premier League teams a different perspective. "I've viewed it from the outside, there have been challenges this year," he said.
"But the Premier League is also one of the greatest challenges in world football, those challenges have obviously taken us to a place where we don't want to be. The Champions League sometimes offers you a bit of escapism from that - a different speed of game, knockout football.
"Those things can contribute to getting different success in the same season. When you get to this stage in the competition, playing teams of the level of Real Madrid, those sorts of comparisons are pretty worthless.
"It's all about what's in front of you."
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