Chelsea are one of the wealthiest football clubs in Europe following Clearlake Capital and Todd Boehly's takeover ten months ago.
The takeover ended Roman Abramovich's 19 year spell at Stamford Bridge, with the group led by Boehly paying £4.25 billion. The U.S billionaire has been the most public figure seen over the course of the last year but he is far from the only person involved in the consortium.
As well as Mark Walter and Hansjoerg Wyss, Clearlake Capital co-founders Behdad Eghbali and Jose E. Feliciano are key figures in the football club's structure at the highest level. The company is an investment firm operating across private equity, credit and other related strategies.
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The Financial Times claimed that 'Clearlake finances' made up 'about two-thirds of the purchase' of Chelsea. They developed a relationship with Boehly in the midst of a bidding war to buy debt manager CBAM in the early stages of 2022.
Feliciano, who plays a rather silent role compared to Eghbali and Boehly, has seen his net worth increase by $1.3 billion in the last two years. The Puerto Rico-born businessman co founded Clearlake Capital in 2005 with Eghbali and is co-controlling owner of the Blues.
According to Forbes, Feliciano's net worth has shot up to $3.4bn from $2.1bn in 2020. Forbes lists the Chelsea co-controlling owner as the 244th richest American - 60 behind Boehly.
Back in October, the Clearlake capital founder spoke at Bloomberg's Bloomberg Invest event to break down the thinking behind the investment. "Forget it's Chelsea Football Club and the Premier League," he said. "We are talking about a situation where we had a forced seller, a very unusual situation where basically the government of the UK was forcing the sale of the asset.
"You had an asset that even though people would consider it a prize asset it was not really run as a business, it was run for other purposes. Profit was not the ultimate goal, or one of the more significant goals of the business. At the same time, it was a business that most people would call a beachfront property, one of the best properties in that sector, in that league in this case.
"Again when you think about sports, what are we really talking about? We're talking about live content, media and how to monetise that media depends on some of the things we've talked about - technology, data, trying to understand consumer behaviour.
"Now go back to Chelsea, we thought we had a really interesting opportunity to buy a business in a very unique situation where there was a forced seller, significant parts of the buyer market were not able to access the transaction. We felt all the core competencies of Clearlake came into play. On top of that we were able to partner with Todd Boehly and his group, a group that has a lot of experience in other significant leagues and significant teams, the Dodgers and the Lakers etc. In many ways, it was again the prototypical Clearlake type of transaction where we had a great partner, a really interesting situation, we were buying at what we thought was a great, very interesting price and a significant opportunity to transform the business and create a lot of value.
"Then, if you add on top of that the overlay that the English Premier League in our opinion is one of the better leagues to invest in, one of the ones with the most significant upside on a long-term basis, we got pretty excited about it."
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