Todd Boehly’s Chelsea stake, Trump and Infantino reunited – The Business of Football

On Sunday, when Chelsea host Arsenal in the Premier League, it will be 10 weeks since Bloomberg reported that Chelsea co-owner Todd Boehly was exploring ways he could buy out his majority partner Clearlake Capital, as his relationship with the private equity firm’s co-founder Behdad Eghbali had broken down.

In the following days, several outlets, including this one, chipped in with their own takes of the “irreconcilable differences” at Stamford Bridge and how Clearlake had, in fact, no intention of being bought out; it wanted to buy out Boehly.

We revealed that both sides blamed the other for meddling in sporting matters since they teamed up to buy Chelsea in May 2022, with Clearlake’s decision to part ways with manager Mauricio Pochettino at the end of last season being the final straw for Boehly. A lack of progress on building a new stadium at or near Stamford Bridge was another source of mutual frustration.

So, what has happened since September’s declaration of war?

Well, nothing.

As everyone has now grasped, Clearlake is the real power at Chelsea, as it owns 61.5 per cent of the club. It took a while for that to become apparent, as Boehly was the frontman of the group’s bid when the UK government seized control of Chelsea from former owner Roman Abramovich after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Team Boehly, as they seemed back then, won the auction for the west London club and the 51-year-old American became their chairman and interim sporting director.

Boehly, however, only owns just under 13 per cent of the club himself, with his partners Swiss businessman Hansjorg Wyss and American investor Mark Walter holding identical stakes. Broadly speaking, they have two-fifths of the club, with Clearlake owning the rest.

Under the terms of their partnership, Boehly got first dibs on being a Premier League club chairman, with Eghbali expected to take over in 2027. And, after a chaotic first season in charge, Boehly got out of the sporting director game, handing over control of the club credit card to recruitment double act Laurence Stewart and Paul Winstanley. Eghbali has been a far bigger presence than Boehly at Stamford Bridge for over a year.

According to most industry experts, the club’s overall value has not changed much from the £2.5billion ($3.2bn at current rates) they paid in 2022, which is no surprise when you factor in the £210million Chelsea lost in the two years before the end of June 2023, with another significant deficit expected for last season.

That means, roughly speaking, Boehly would need to find at least £1.5billion for Clearlake to walk away with its money back, which is not how private equity firms tend to operate, so its asking price will be more like £2billion.

Boehly’s stake, on the other hand, is worth just over £3oomillion. But the question for Clearlake is not whether it can afford that or not, it is: why does it need another 13 per cent of Chelsea when it is already calling the shots?

At the end of the day, Clearlake’s responsibility is to its limited partners, the dozens of big-time investors who have entrusted the fund with their money and expect a healthy return one day. Getting Boehly and Eghbali out of an awkward situation is not what that money should be doing.

Boehly could sell his stake to a new party but there is not a huge line of people looking for £300million-plus minority stakes in loss-making teams that need new stadiums. Not when you can buy all of a club like Newcastle United for the same price.

Therefore, the most probable way out of this tangle is for Boehly to sell his shares to Walter or Wyss, or to split them between the two. But, again, we run into the question of why would they do it, apart from as an expensive favour.

Walter is certainly rich enough and has also teamed up with Boehly to own stakes in the World Series-winning Los Angeles Dodgers and NBA powerhouse LA Lakers. But he has shown no sign of wanting a bigger slice of Chelsea or a larger say there.

Wyss, meanwhile, is 89 and appears to be more focused on giving his money away to environmental charities and scientific research. He might like Boehly a lot but is he a good cause?

This column’s hunch, for what it is worth, is that Boehly and Eghbali have already realised how hard it is to break up and will sit back to watch, separately, how far Enzo Maresca, Cole Palmer and co can take their investment.

There is one thing that could break the truce and that is Boehly needing to exit Chelsea so he could invest in another English club.

As he and fellow Chelsea director Jonathan Goldstein have previously tried to buy Tottenham Hotspur twice before, the possibility of a third crack can never be ruled out, particularly as at least some of Spurs are currently on the market. It is, though, for the moment, just a hypothesis.

Funnily enough, there is another London club that Goldstein is looking at and — if he was to get it — Boehly would almost certainly join him. They are London Spirit, The Hundred franchise based at the home of English cricket, Lord’s. That, however, is a whole different ball game.

Infantino and Trump reunited

Having opened this column with an item about a potential divorce, let us turn to one of football’s great bromances: FIFA president Gianni Infantino and his soon-to-be opposite number at the White House again, Donald Trump.

The latter’s convincing win over Kamala Harris reunited the team that helped to deliver the 2026 World Cup to Canada, Mexico and United States when FIFA’s members had to choose between the U.S.-led group and Morocco, whose bid fared only slightly worse than Harris did on Tuesday in the FIFA vote in 2018.

Infantino, who has previously cosied up to Russian president Vladimir Putin, the Emir of Qatar and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, was among the first world leaders to send his congratulations to Trump with a post on his Instagram page that said, “We will have a great FIFA World Cup and a great FIFA Club World Cup in the United States of America”.

Of those two predictions, the first is a far better bet than the second. The 2026 World Cup will break all financial records and should be a fantastic spectacle — they usually are. The 2025 Club World Cup, on the other hand, is far harder to call.

As this column has previously explained, we are still waiting for FIFA to tell us who is broadcasting/streaming the event next summer, as nobody has met the asking price for the media rights just yet.

Last week, though, world football’s governing body did finally announce its first new sponsor for the expanded tournament, Chinese consumer electronics giant Hisense. Perhaps Infantino can persuade Trump not to impose tariffs on their flat-screen televisions until after the final next July.

And when describing Hisense as the first “new” sponsor of this tournament, that is because Adidas and Coca-Cola have taken FIFA to arbitration in Switzerland as they believe their long-standing commercial deals with the federation should automatically give them sponsorship rights next summer.

Until that case is settled, it is difficult to see many American multinationals rushing in to fill the breach. The sensible money is on the next big cheque coming from a Saudi-based firm, or perhaps several, as soon as Saudi Arabia’s hosting of the 2034 World Cup is nodded through next month.

Football’s independent regulator — careful what you wish for

FIFA is not the only football stakeholder to hide a potentially contentious sentence in its regulations recently or, in this case, remove one.

The regulations in question are the UK government’s Football Governance Bill, the piece of legislation that ran out of parliamentary time when former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called an election this summer.

Sunak’s successor Keir Starmer has brought the bill back to parliament, as promised, and has tweaked it a bit, much to the annoyance of its biggest critic, the Premier League.

The bill’s most important element is the introduction of an independent regulator for the men’s professional game in England, but it will also bring into effect a licensing system designed to boost financial sustainability and greater fan engagement.

As this column has previously explained, the Premier League hates the idea and has spent the last three years ignoring it, having tantrums about it and lobbying against it. The irony is if it had just accepted it, Sunak’s version of the bill would be law by now. And the league hated that version less than Starmer’s.

The main reason for that is the decision to widen the regulator’s remit slightly so they can, if necessary, decide to reduce the amount of money the Premier League gives to relegated clubs in parachute payments. The regulator will only do this if the English Football League complains about them — triggering what is known as the “backstop mechanism” — and comes up with a decent idea for changing the status quo. The regulator will not simply scrap them.

Sunak’s bill, however, excluded parachute payments from the regulator’s remit. Many members of parliament thought was a strange state of affairs and clearly a concession to the Premier League, which is adamant that parachute payments are essential for giving promoted clubs the confidence they need to invest in talent on the way up. The fact they massively impact competition in the Championship and force clubs without them to overspend is not something the Premier League has dwelled on.

But that is not the only change to the bill that has caused consternation at Premier League HQ.

Clause 56(7) of the original bill allowed the leagues to agree a period of time that would have to elapse before one of them could trigger the backstop. This was another gift to the Premier League as it had hoped it could agree a very long-term financial distribution deal with the EFL which the regulator could not unpick. One Premier League owner had even suggested this deal could last forever, rendering the regulator redundant.

The new bill has removed that option and any distribution agreement can only last for a maximum of five years, which makes sense when you consider the regulator will conduct a state-of-the-game review every five years, TV deals do not last that long, the composition of the leagues can change significantly and owners come and go.

On this week’s Unofficial Partner podcast, former sports minister Tracey Crouch — asked by the then-prime minister Boris Johnson to carry out a fan-led review of Football Governance in 2021, leading to the recommendation of the creation of an independent regulator for the game — says she is “no longer welcome in football” because some blame her for interfering.

Crouch knows a thing or two about football (Nigel Roddis/The FA via Getty Images)

“There are a lot of men out there who don’t like the fact that a woman looked into football and came up with this conclusion,” she told the podcast. “I’ve made peace with the fact that there is misogyny in football — one very senior person in football referred to the review as a ‘vanity project for the girl’ in a public forum, by the way — but if anything happens, it will be my fault.

“The regulator is not there to stop clubs going bust, it’s there to prevent it as much as possible, but, if the worst happens, it’s going to be my fault. If there is a distribution deal done by the EFL and it doesn’t work, it will be my fault.

“This is because football never looks at itself and comes to the conclusion that it could have done it better, and it will always blame someone else for its failings.”

Crouch ends the conversation by ruling herself out of contention to be the regulator’s chair or chief executive. She points out it would look like she had invented a job for herself, which is a fair point, but it is still a shame she thinks she is no longer welcome in a game she so clearly understands.

 (Top photo: Mike Egerton/PA Images via Getty Images)