The part owner of Crystal Palace has revealed that the chance to bid on Chelsea earlier his year was a risk he and his business partner felt they needed to take.
David Blitzer, who owns a significant minority stake in Palace alongside long-time business partner Josh Harris, as well as with chairman Steve Parish and John Textor, was with Harris as part of the consortium that made the final shortlist to potentially acquire Chelsea earlier in the year after Roman Abramovich was forced to put the club up for sale following sanctions imposed after Russia's military invasion of Ukraine.
Blitzer and Harris, who have each held an 18% stakeholding in Palace since December 2015, were part of a consortium that also featured former British Airways and Liverpool chairman Sir Martin Broughton back in April, a bid that also had former London 2012 Olympics chief Lord Sebastian Coe on board.
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The group would eventually lose out to the winning bid of fellow US sports investor Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital, and Blitzer has explained the rationale behind why they entered the race.
Speaking at the Sportico Invest in Sports conference in New York on Wednesday afternoon, Blitzer said: "First off there is a group of four of us who jointly are invested in Crystal Palace and, frankly, my partner Steve Parish runs that team day to day. He is the chairman of the team, he is the CEO of the team, he is the face of the team. He grew up a couple of blocks from the stadium and lives in London.
"It is a little bit different when you are those American investors who live 3,500 miles away. At the end of the day I love Crystal Palace, and people who know me well will know I love Crystal Palace. But there are a handful of teams/brands out there on a global basis, and Chelsea is one of them. The opportunity to invest in that particular situation with a very small number of people, frankly, given it was a complicated situation, we were comfortable giving that our best shot.
"We would have had to divest our interest in Crystal Palace had that come through. If that had happened it would have been a really sad day in one sense, but again back to the investment part it would have been a really interesting investment in terms of what's out there for Chelsea. Then I would have probably had to hide a little bit when I went to London."
Blitzer and Harris are established names in sports investment circles through the fund that they set up in 2017, Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment. Their other sporting investments include the Philadelphia 76ers NBA team and the MLS team Real Salt Lake.
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