The race to become the next owner of Chelsea appears to be close to reaching its conclusion.
Ever since the UK Government took over the handling of the sale of the London club following the sanctions placed upon Roman Abramovich following Russia's military invasion of Ukraine, due to his historical ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin, the billionaires and private equity firms have been circling Stamford Bridge, with a price tag of around £3bn slapped on the Blues.
Numerous consortiums have been linked with a takeover bid, with British property tycoon Nick Candy, New York Jets owner Woody Johnson, former Liverpool chairman Sir Martin Broughton and, with a late bid, INEOS founder and OGC Nice owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe all among them. But one name remained a constant throughout and now looks to be close to winning the race according to multiple reports, with American financier Todd Boehly's bid, which has been considerably backed by investment fund Clearlake Capital and also features Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss, looking the likely new custodians.
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It will bring an end to 19 years of Abramovich in English football. The Russian changed the landscape of the game in this country when he arrived on the scene in 2003 with enormous wealth and a willingness to spend and underwrite huge losses. At the time of selling the club the debt to Abramovich, which he has written off, was around £1.5bn.
His spending was a catalyst for the value of the transfer market taking off and wage bills rising as the rest of football attempted to keep pace with a bold new era, and as more clubs became owned by people with deep pockets who it seemed were happy to lose large sums of money, the economics of football changed dramatically, with transfer fees and wages having been on a steep upward trajectory for the best part of two decades.
Things are likely to be different at Chelsea from now on, however, should the new ownership be confirmed. Boehly and his group will invest in success, in ensuring that Chelsea compete at the very highest level that Abramovich's billions took them to. The lucrative nature of media rights and involvement, and success, in the Champions League means that it provides them a seat at the very top table already, the challenge being how to keep them there for the long term as the gap between the elite and the rest grows ever wider.
Boehly is a figure known well to Liverpool owners Fenway Sports Group through his part ownership stake in the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, a Major League Baseball rival of John Henry and FSG's Boston Red Sox.
Out of the consortiums who were vying to take over at Liverpool it is the Boehly/Wyss bid that is likely to most closely emulate what FSG have implemented at Liverpool, where a deeper focus on strategy and analytics has helped them identify talent that has required less financial outlay than their rivals. The model at the Reds has seen them turn from a football club that stood on the brink of administration in 2010 prior to FSG arriving, to one that is one of Europe's most financially robust football clubs, one that has managed to ally a sound business model with unprecedented success on the pitch.
The pockets for the Boehly/Wyss bid aren't as deep as what Abramovich had, nor are they a group that is in this venture to lose money and use the club as a hobby. After all, much of the financing for the deal will be provided by private equity, and that is an investment move. All this points to Chelsea having to do things differently under the new owners. The spend will still be high, as will the wage bill, but identifying the kind of targets that Liverpool do and spending less by making the best use of data analytics and the now famed 'Moneyball' method will be an important business strategy, one that will likely see the end of the £100m deals for the likes of Romelu Lukaku. The focus will be on seeking the kind of players that Liverpool have, the likes of Luis Diaz and Diogo Jota.
It is understood that Boehly is a fan of FSG's model at Liverpool. Given they have spent less than their rivals and achieved phenomenal success that is hardly surprising. But all this has been done with the backdrop of investment in infrastructure at Anfield, increasing capacity through stadium renovation and bringing on board new and improved revenue streams. There is much work to be done in terms of investment into Stamford Bridge to help them deliver the kind of results that they want financially, and making that happen at the same time as competing and succeeding on the pitch will be their biggest challenge to begin with. That is something where FSG have provided a blueprint, one that the new Chelsea owners will surely follow.
The mistakes of some US owners such as the Glazers at Manchester United, whose absentee ownership and debt piling on the club has seen them become villains in United fans eyes and responsible for the club's fall from grace, is straight from the 'How Not To Run A Football Club' manual. A total lack of strategy has seen the answer consistently arrive at spending large sums of money on the wrong kind of players to fix a system in the short-term, and that has led to long-term chaos.
Chelsea's potential new owners will have watched and seen what has worked, and from a US perspective much of that has been done by Liverpool and FSG. But there will be a lot of catching up to do to get to a point where such a strategy is part of the DNA of the football club, but expect them to be far more closely aligned to what the Reds are doing from now on, leaving their era of excess under Abramovich in the past.
FSG, with a value of around $10bn, are the third biggest sporting empire in world sport, behind only Arsenal owner Stan Kroenke's Kroenke Group and Formula One owners Liberty Media. With Kroenke unable to deliver success to Arsenal the very clear frontrunner when it comes to growing the business and the trophy cabinet has been FSG at Liverpool.
