There is nothing wrong with having the courage to adopt a radical plan in football – unfortunately for Chelsea there has never been one as expensive as the grand disruption BlueCo has devised. The current debt in the BlueCo network of clubs relating to Chelsea and RC Strasbourg stands at £1.4bn with recent analysis estimating the total repayment cost of the junior portion of that debt, £500m borrowed from Ares Management, at £926m.
Ares’ agreement is payment-in-kind loans (PIKs) that roll interest costs up into the principal sum – the same instrument used by the Glazers in their original 2005 borrowing to acquire Manchester United. For Eghbali’s Clearlake Capital fund to successfully sell Chelsea in the future at a profit for investors, a figure of £5bn would have to be realised, according to analysis. Who will pay that?
This is the backdrop to the search for whoever might be the next manager – the critical obligation to make this thing work. Whatever this thing might be. Chelsea want to win trophies but the club are on course to miss Champions League qualification for the third BlueCo season of four. One of their eminent fans, now director, Lord Finkelstein, declared to a gathering of fellow fans that it was “f—–g obvious” the club were building “one of the best teams in the world”.
Obvious? There are lots of things about modern Chelsea that might come to pass, even possibly the realisation of the BlueCo plan. If the club can navigate a £10.8m Premier League fine for much of the financial trickery of the Roman Abramovich era, then anything is possible. But there is nothing obvious at all about the direction in which Chelsea find themselves currently stumbling.
£1.5bn in players yet still no sign of a title challenge
On his podcast The Boardroom this week, Christian Purslow, the former Chelsea executive and private equity investor, outlined his own questions about the club’s direction. He has one foot in the worlds of Eghbali and Boehly – private equity, successful investor turnaround – and another in football itself. He wondered aloud why Chelsea had not followed the private equity creed of installing the best talent when it came to installing chief executive, sporting director and manager. Purslow had his own missteps at Aston Villa but it was hard to disagree.
Boehly was Chelsea’s first BlueCo sporting director and since Eghbali took over operations in the January 2023 window, he has accumulated recruitment generals at a dizzying rate. Chelsea currently have five sporting directors.