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Buy players. Buy more players. Then buy some more. Spend a record amount to get a bottom-half finish. Spend a billion. Then spend some more. Break the British transfer record. Break it again.
Appoint a new manager. Appoint another new manager. Hire an interim manager because they were recommended by James Corden (allegedly). Sack a manager who won his last five games.
Sign wingers. Sign more wingers. Sign even more wingers. Pay Raheem Sterling to play for Chelsea. Pay Raheem Sterling to not play for Chelsea. Pay Raheem Sterling to play for Arsenal. Have eight goalkeepers. Need a goalkeeper. Spend £1.3bn. Need a striker.
Sell Todd Boehly for pure profit. Use the proceeds to buy more wingers. Buy back Boehly but amortise his transfer fee over 86 years. Bury Boehly beneath a car park that was sold for an FFP profit, thus cementing his legend when he is discovered, Richard III-style, in hundreds of years.
Constant revolution stops for no man. Not even Todd Boehly. Especially not Todd Boehly. So when the transfer window closed, perhaps it was unsurprising that Chelsea found another way to bring a prospect of change: to the directors’ box. Todd Boehly apparently wants to buy out Clearlake Capital. Clearlake Capital seemingly want to buy out Todd Boehly.
One of football’s more baffling partnerships, it appears, will barely last a quarter of the length of some of their players’ contracts. The breakdown in the relationship between the consortium who have overseen the biggest and strangest spending in English footballing history may be, if nothing else, an acknowledgement it hasn’t all gone entirely according to plan during their two years of ownership. Chelsea have gone from recent Champions League winners to (just about) Conference League qualifiers via a year out of Europe altogether.
If their owners have blamed the managers and the players, perhaps now they are blaming each other. The problem with Chelsea, therefore, is Clearlake Capital/Todd Boehly; delete as applicable if you are one of the feuding factions. And if you are not, replace the slash with an “and” and it makes rather more sense.
The solution, somehow, is for one half of the ownership to get rid of the other; because then there would be no one to dilute their ideas, because then their genius can run unchecked. All of which might be dependent on one group finding willing investors or having made enough money themselves to fund a buyout. Which, in turn, raises questions if anyone is sufficiently impressed with the way Clearlake and Boehly have run Chelsea in the last two years to want to buy into it. Boehly, whose brash arrival to the footballing scene proved you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression, has been the face of the ownership. Clearlake may have actually wielded more power.
According to Clearlake’s website, they bring a “differentiated approach to investing through deep industry knowledge, operational expertise, flexible solutions and long-term partnerships”. The temptation is to argue they have shown none of those things in two years at Chelsea; not even a long-term partnership with Boehly. But perhaps that is to misunderstand their brilliance. Maybe Boehly’s summer as the Premier League’s most-mocked sporting director will prompt others to back his vision; a lesson of recent years, after all, is that being a billionaire is no guarantee of acumen or judgement, though it can give the super-rich an inflated opinion of their own abilities.
Meanwhile, the brains trust of the sporting co-directors Paul Winstanley and Laurence Stewart remain in situ and remain one of football’s great mysteries. Who are these people? Who trusts them to spend a fortune? And why?
After their frantic June, July and August in the transfer market, however, comes an eventful September in the boardroom. And with every development, it is becoming apparent that the initial mitigation offered for Chelsea’s high-speed trading was utterly incorrect. The argument that they were making hefty and frequent initial investments to plan for the future but it would soon calm down has been debunked. This is permanent upheaval. Chelsea don’t have the attention span to settle for stability. There is no endpoint.
Look at some of their supposed long-term plans: Ben Chilwell, named vice-captain last summer, is out of the squad altogether; Christopher Nkunku, a flagship signing, looks like the fifth-choice left winger now (despite starting the season in the team on the left wing); the squad has the forgotten arrivals of past influxes, a Cesare Casadei here, an Axel Disasi there.
They couldn’t offload all of their unwanted players. Now they face a test if they can unload their unwanted owners. Perhaps Chelsea can sell Boehly for profit when a Saudi Arabian club, for no apparent reason, makes an inflated offer for him. Maybe he will be loaned to Strasbourg. Possibly, having sold two hotels to Clearlake and Boehly, the transfer strategy is now to buy a hotel from him. And that may be no weirder than some of the developments at Stamford Bridge in the Boehly-Clearlake era.
