Can We Stop Pretending Chelsea are well run?

The Battle for Chelsea's future between Todd Boehly and Clearlake only reflects a club that have massively lost control of sanity

"Fugayzi, fugazi. It's a whazy. It's a woozie. It's fairy dust. It doesn't exist. It's never landed. It is no matter. It's not on the elemental chart.

In one of the pivotal early moments in the Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Leonardo Dicaprio’s very green stockbroker Jordan Belfore, is told the truth of his new industry by Matthew McConaughey’s cocaine snorting Mark Hanna.

One of the most famous lines from the three-hour epic iconically captures a very shallow system masquerading as something more meaningful and intellectual.

In case you did not know where this intro was going. Clearlake’s Chelsea is a fugazi. It's a whazy. It's a woozie. It's fairy dust. It doesn't exist. It's never landed. It is no matter. It's not on the elemental chart.

Whatever way you take the weekend reports of the now apparent wide disconnect between co-owners Behdad Eghbali and Todd Boehly, let’s start by making clear this is not normal, this is not sane, this is not acceptable.

In no reasonable reality does this reflect a harmonious culture, a great project, a seamless set of logically sound ideas. In very plain English, if the bloke you bought something with two years later no longer wants to own it with you, and is considering buying you out, something has gone wrong.

That is the first point, and most obvious one. Chelsea are a complete mess.

The second and more complex one is what happens next? Sure, the club is thrown “into chaos and uncertainty” but I mean, compared to what we had in the spring of 2022? What we have witnessed since this consortium took charge in that same year?

Does that uncertainty lead to people in positions of power being actually held accountable for their own failings? The club not spouting a series of puffy lines to favoured media outlets about how wonderful they are whilst the actual team fails to achieve anything of note on the pitch?

Boehly has his faults. It would be insulting to suggest he bears no responsibility for this mess, one he’s consistently come out to publicly defend in the past six months. He also oversaw the initial summer splurge that set the club back and created the media perception of a tone deaf and over-confident American, barging into an environment he had no expertise in and claiming he was smarter than everybody else.

The irony here is that description actually suits Eghbali much more than Boehly. Although the media perception still has projected the idea that Boehly is making every single decision over coaching changes and player acquisitions.

Anyone with half an eye on Chelsea should have known this already, Boehly has not been the guy in charge for a long time now. That is Eghbali, Clearlake and Sporting Directors Paul Winstanley and Laurence Stewart.

Boehly probably has had input, but one striking story stands out in the now growing timeline of conflict that has emerged between the club’s co-owners.

Back in May, on the eve of Chelsea’s final Premier League game with Bournemouth, it was widely reported that Boehly took Mauricio Pochettino out for dinner. This on its own, seems pretty innocuous. Only becoming more relevant when you factor in that under a week later Pochettino was no longer at the club following a meeting with we believe, Eghbali, Winstanley and Stewart.

Reports over this past weekend have only confirmed the disagreement over Pochettino, with Boehly wanting to persist with him, whilst it became very clear the other trio felt another way. Which led to Enzo Maresca being handed an eyebrow raising 6+1 year contract.

There is a clear difference in how Boehly and Eghbali see their role in the day-to-day running of Chelsea.

Boehly, as he has detailed before, believes you hire people with expertise to handle the team. Whilst Eghabli believes in a hands-on approach. This is where we get to that media perception of Boehly being at least misguided. Their actual belief in buying younger players is not radically different actually.

Boehly expressed as much in September of 2022 at the Salt Conference, where all the headlines came from his suggestion of a Premier League All-Star game.

There also is a clear timeline of Boehly’s interest in not only Chelsea and the Premier League stretching back to interviews he did in 2019 talking about the sport, his belief in its potential and growth opportunity.

I even wrote about this back in March 2022 for Football.London during that very stressful and messy sanctions period.

Now whether Boehly means it, or by doing this his way will see the club become any more coherent remains a mystery. However, if we are talking about a track-record of caring about football or just interest in owning a Premier League club, the answer is clear.

Clearlake probably spotted an opportunity for a potentially devalued asset in 2022 and jumped in with widening eyes to the prospect of bigger profits. Now let’s not be naive here: football ownership at the very top level cares about money. Boehly is a billionaire, the idea he has no interest or care for the club making money is naive.

However, and this where, for me, the answer of who out of the two I’d rather see be in charge becomes clearest. I think only one part actually cares about creating a winning football team, and it is not Clearlake.

Shock! Gasp! How could I say such a thing? Don’t you know about their PROJECT! Have you not seen how much they have spent! They have AMBITION!

Just spending a lot of money is not the sign of great or coherent ownership. Neither is saying it ad nauseam to preferred media outlets how wonderful everything is. That does not replace actual results, actual tangible success and improvement.

And those briefs do not hide the mess of this past summer, where Chelsea made a series of baffling recruitment choices that did not spark the mass excitement previous windows have.

If the object of the window was to make the first-team squad significantly stronger, they did not achieve that. In fact, on paper and on evidence of what we have seen, albeit a small sample size, you can seriously argue the squad has become weaker.

Loaning your best performing keeper from last season out to a satellite club, loaning and banishing your best performing defender to Crystal Palace, selling your best midfielder from last season to Atletico Madrid. Paying silly wages to a bitter rival for a player you don’t want to play for them.

Logically, none of this makes any remote sense to those who care about seeing a better football team.

In the boardroom, Clearlake have already gone through two CEO’s, with their most recent appointment Chris Jurasek stepping down after being a complete disaster. Antagonizing supporter groups and making tone deaf comments which prompted an open letter from the Supporters Trust referring to the club as “a laughing stock.”

What about the apparent commercial wisdom that Clearlake could bring? We are weeks now from October and for the second season running one of England’s biggest football clubs have begun the season without a front of shirt sponsor.

For all Clearlake like to demean what came before them, this literally never happened under the previous regime. Fly Emirates, Samsung, Yokohama and Three all came in pretty seamlessly throughout the near 20 years in charge.

Let us not forget on the eve of this season, via a piece by The Telegraph’s Sam Wallace, that Eghbali’s view on his predesccors is “understood to be less than complimentary on that front: that the club was run more like a family business. To the extent that in at least one department, more than one generation of a family were employed. Certainly, that is no longer the case as the wind of change whistles through the club.”

It is also explained in that same piece that his way is not going to change and the slamming of Abramovich continues.

“The new ownership sees fault everywhere with the club they inherited. From the shortcomings on digital and licensing revenue, to why it was that Chelsea academy players needed extensive loans to prepare themselves for the senior team while Manchester City’s young talent have been Premier League ready.”

Now there is the Clearlake bubble and then just the plain reality. Sure there were things I criticized in the latter years of the Abramovich regime. The fact the club went seven years without winning a Champions League knockout tie, not seriously competing for a Premier League title since 2017’s triumph, the carousel of different coaching appointments and jumbled recruitment.

All of that can be said, whilst also acknowledging Clearlake have come absolutely nowhere close to the success we even had in the final 12 months before the sanctions.

Chelsea were literally Champions of Europe, they were Champions of the World. They finished 3rd in the Premier League at the end 2021/22, two penalty shootout wins away from lifting both domestic cups. For all the social media talk of standards, for some reason now even expecting a fourth place finish is unfair.

And for the snide comment about “Chelsea academy players needed extensive loans to prepare themselves for the senior team while Manchester City’s young talent have been Premier League ready.” is comically shattered by the REALITY Chelsea won the Champions League against Manchester City with an eleven that included Reece James, Andreas Christensen and Mason Mount (who played the winning pass).

You cannot insult the intelligence of supporters. People have eyes, people have memories. If you spend over a billion and get worse, that is not a project, nor it is everyone being unrealistic when they ask where the return is.

I fundamentally believe that Boehly’s end goal is winning things, I have little reason to believe the same about Eghbali. Ticket prices will continue to rise no matter what happens on the pitch, the sporting directors wild pursuit of every young talent will continue no matter whose career it hurts. Academy players will continue to be sacrificed at the alter of PSR- which is just a smokescreen to excuse what they current leadership wants to do anyway.

Jurasek’s “customer” comment was a mask-slipping moment more than “one bad egg”. If Clearlake could reduce the number of season-ticket holders, play Premier League games in the United States, sell sponsorship rights to Stamford Bridge, I believe they would go for all of them.

If people think these are baseless concerns. Let us look at the scrapping of away bus subsidy’s, the insane ticket prices for a pre-season game with Inter Milan, the selling of hotels back to BlueCo.

It is telling that both Reece James and Armando Broja were handed long-term deals when Boehly was acting as sporting director, as were the advanced contract talks with Mason Mount preceding the 2022 World Cup, along with a contract extension for Trevoh Chalobah. I believe that Boehly, more than Clearlake, at least has the capacity to make better decisions when it comes to academy talent, which is a damning indictment on the current sporting directors.

As was proven in that first summer and by The Dodgers, he also probably grasps that wages generally correlate to success. And to buy the biggest names, there is a level of finance you simply have to commit or you will be left behind.

We also cannot forget that both Neil Bath and Jim Fraser are no longer at the club, two instrumental figures who helped build the great success that is the club’s world-renowned academy. This was another red flag moment which should have made more people realize how badly things had gone, but alas, more excuses were made and the gaslighting continued.

Overall, I hold greater contempt for those who have chosen to blame supporters for “being negative” rather than hold accountable the people actually responsible for creating this entire farce.

It is greatly dispiriting that it comes down to hoping one billionaire is less bad than another. But that is where football is now, largely helped by Roman Abramovich’s tenure which brought us glittering success but ensured a greater distance between supporters and the club’s decision makers.

That trade-off is a much bigger conversation than just what is currently happening at Stamford Bridge.

But the mess continues and it is time for people to wake up and smell the coffee; this isn’t right.

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