The truth about Liverpool and FSG made clear by Chelsea’s £500m mayhem
Chelsea owners have pursued a high spending strategy in the transfer market since the takeover
Liverpool owner John Henry and Chelsea owner Todd Boehly
When it comes to their respective football clubs’ approach to ownership, it’s fair to say that John W. Henry and Todd Boehly are different.
When Boehly and Clearlake Capital completed their acquisition of Chelsea last year, they pursued a strategy in which they wanted to incorporate some of the lessons learned from Fenway Sports Group’s decade-plus tenure in Liverpool.
Strategy and structure were seen as the bedrock of success at Stamford Bridge, although the approach to such change largely focused on borrowing key chess pieces from other clubs to achieve their footballing utopia.
Next month the Boehly/Clearlake regime at Chelsea will celebrate its first anniversary, with the purchase of the club resulting from Roman Abramovich’s forced sale of the London club following sanctions imposed on him by the UK government following his the Russian military invasion of Ukraine and its historic ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Abramovich’s move to Chelsea in 2003 forever changed the landscape of football in England. His approach of being ready to bring world-class talent to the Premier League at a time when Financial Fair Play rules were not in effect meant the transfer market would trigger inflation which has not stopped since. .
Nineteen years later and Boehly and Clearlake, whose co-founder Behdad Eghbali also played a hands-on role alongside Boehly at Chelsea, they have continued to transform the transfer market as they embark on a shopping spree which has seen over £500m spent over two transfer windows, whereby the club offers players seven, eight and nine year contracts in order to keep their recovery costs (how the transfer fee is calculated) at a more manageable level.
European football’s governing body UEFA has since had to step in and make changes to regulations that limit the length of contracts to five years from this summer, ending the usual moves in North American sport to offer longer contracts.
The likes of Enzo Fernandez, Mykhailo Mudryk, Noni Madueke and Benoit Badiashile all arrived, all players with budding reputations on the world stage, signed to a club where that reputation would be further enhanced. But the sacking of Thomas Tuchel, the manager who won the Champions League with Chelsea in 2021 and who steered the club to third place in the Premier League last season, has left the club stranded so far.
Graham Potter was seen as the visionary who would spearhead Chelsea’s bold new future, winning the likes of Paul Winstanley of Potter’s former club Brighton & Hove Albion to become co-director of sport, and the likes of technical director of the Monaco’s Laurence Stewart, for a similar role, Boehly and Eghbali’s story would be that change was needed to deliver long-term success and that the ownership group would stay on track.
But now they have Frank Lampard back in the shop through the end of the season following Potter’s firing in early April. The owner’s plans have spiraled out of control and Chelsea have a manager with a poor record at the helm, heading a bloated squad that needs to be significantly reduced in the summer.
They are 11th in the Premier League and Lampard suffered a fifth defeat in his five games in charge after being beaten 2-0 at home by Brentford on Wednesday night. European football is far beyond them, with Champions League participation having been a big part of their strategy from the outset. Where Abramovich has been largely aloof when it comes to his ownership of Chelsea, Boehly has always been at the forefront of the operation since he and Clearlake took over. policy saw them attempt to suck up every available young talent in an effort to become a dominant force for years to come.
It may yet turn out to be a strategy that pays off in the long run, but with the thread running through the project already starting to unravel after 11 months and little room for maneuver to make massive changes given the heavy spending and need to shorten the squad and fly under the radar of the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules, something even more difficult without European football, there is a lot of risk involved in the path taken.
Speaking at the Sportico Invest In Sports conference in New York in October, attended by ECHO, Eghbali spoke of how FSG was seen as the “best in class” in the US and that much of what had worked for them and how her success at Liverpool would be usurped by the new regime at Stamford Bridge, with a specific focus on data.
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Eghbali said: “These (Premier League) teams are generally not managed well in our opinion.
“The Fenway Sports Group with Liverpool and the Abu Dhabi Group with Manchester City have done well, but for the most part these opportunities have not been taken. “European football is probably 20 years behind American sport in terms of sophistication on the business side and sophistication on the data side. I had a senior sporting director at one of the top three clubs in the world who told me that when I asked him about his approach to data they said ‘Data is my eyes, I select players through my eyes.” He had six scouts and no data.