Some football club owners are happy to fly under the radar, keep themselves to themselves and leave the management of the team to others. Todd Boehly is not one of those owners.
The American billionaire has been front and centre at Chelsea ever since his Clearlake Capital consortium completed a takeover from Roman Abramovich in May last year. Boehly has played the role of enthusiastic maverick, turning his hand to everything and anything, despite a lack of experience.
The 49-year-old has experience of sports club ownership as co-owner of the LA Dodgers and LA Lakers. But his lack of understanding of football and his extremely hands-on approach has led to many missteps inside his first year at the club.
With Chelsea 11th in the Premier League after three straight defeats under interim boss Frank Lampard and facing a tough Champions League quarter-final second leg against Real Madrid on Tuesday, Mirror Football takes a look at how Boehly has guided the club down a bumpy path this season.
Shedding expertise
Boehly’s takeover was always going to spell massive changes at Chelsea, especially considering the nature of Abramovich’s departure following sanctions from the UK Government. A smooth transition was not assured, but the way the new owners cleared out the boardroom never looked wise.
Chairman Bruce Buck leaving the club made sense, given his close ties to the previous ownership. And the same could be said of director Marina Granovskaia, who was brought in by Abramovich before rising through the ranks at the club.
But Granovskaia’s departure, alongside that of technical and performance advisor Petr Cech, left a vacuum during an extremely important time at the club. Award-winning Granovskaia was widely respected in the industry and while the club announced she would stay as an advisor during the summer, it was clear who was directing things behind the scenes.
Boehly appointed himself as “interim sporting director” – a farcical decision which undermined the club immediately and led to many further issues.
Splashing the cash
Chelsea now have a proper backroom set-up, with sporting directors Laurence Stewart and Paul Winstanley and technical director Christopher Vivell leading the search for a new manager. But they were not appointed for quite some time, leaving Boehly at the reins.
The American has splashed a staggering £600million on 17 new players in just two transfer windows. Even if they were all solid buys, there is no way those players could all be given the opportunity to impress, given nowhere near as many players were sold.
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Chelsea have been left with a bloated, unhappy squad that is not conducive to creating a harmonious atmosphere at their Cobham training ground. Club record signing Enzo Fernandez is settling in, while Wesley Fofana, Raheem Sterling and Marc Cucurella are regular first team contributors.
But £88m January addition Mykhaylo Mudryk has not hit the ground running, Noni Madueke cannot get into the side, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang has been left out of the Champions League squad and players like Carney Chukwuemeka, David Fofana, Malo Gusto and Andrey Santos are nowhere close to making the team.
Chelsea have undoubtedly overpaid for players, bought too many of them, and failed to address the one glaring issue: a lack of goals.
Management mistakes
Thomas Tuchel was sacked on September 7 after a 1-0 defeat by Dinamo Zagreb – just the seventh game of the 2022/23 season. The experienced German manager had overseen the club’s Champions League victory over Manchester City and had only just been in conversations about extending his contract.
Boehly’s decision to sack Tuchel and appoint Graham Potter was a disaster. The club paid a record £21.5m just to hire Potter from Brighton, but he won just 12 of 31 games in charge and looked out of his depth. He managed just six months of his five-year contract.
There had been tensions between Tuchel and the new owners over the summer over transfer strategy, but he was sacked in a knee-jerk reaction which has contributed to the spiralling of Chelsea’s season, which sees them on their third manager.
Moving too fast, breaking too many things
Boehly has a lot of ideas, but perhaps like Elon Musk’s ill-fated takeover of Twitter, he has tried to implement all of them at once, while alienating people along the way.
Not long after buying Chelsea he announced his intention to purchase more clubs and follow the trend of multi-club ownership. “We know people and human capital. We understand game plans and strategies. We're not expecting to be the football experts to find the best talent, we are going to put those people in place,” he said at the SALT conference in New York.
“The challenge that Chelsea has, when you have 18, 19, 20-year-old superstars, you can loan them out to clubs, but you put their development in someone else's hands. Our goal is to make sure we can show pathways for our young superstars to get onto the Chelsea pitch while getting them real game time.”
Those plans are yet to come to fruition but are emblematic of Boehly’s chaotic approach. His lack of a personal touch was showed last month when he sacked head groundsman Jason Griffin after 30 years at the club, as well as removing his assistant and son Reisse.
Too involved
Boehly has been a visible presence at Stamford Bridge this season, which in itself is admirable. It shows he is interested and is a marked difference from Abramovich, who was increasingly an absentee owner during his latter years, for a variety of reasons.
But Boehly does not seem to know where the boundaries are. After reportedly taking TV host James Corden’s advice to re-appoint Lampard as manager, he has taken to visiting the dressing room to speak directly to the players.
Goalkeeper Kepa Arrizabalaga has claimed that it is normal to see the American in the dressing room. He said: “Todd comes to the changing room in every game. He had different chats with us after different games. I am not going to say what he said. It is normal when he came into the changing room.”
Lampard has insisted he is happy with Boehly’s presence, but it can’t help. He reportedly slammed them for their “embarrassing” season following the most recent defeat, by Brighton.
“I am comfortable with that,” Lampard said. “If an owner wants to come in and be positive and speak to the players, they can do that. No problem with that, it shows passion and that's the first thing that I like.”
Passionate, yes. But Boehly’s passion has not been put to the best of use.
