Atalanta and Boston Celtics owner Stephen Pagliuca, one of the contenders who hoped to become owner of Chelsea, has criticised the process that decided that Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital won the bid to take control of the Blues. Pagliuca led a group that included North American sport magnate Larry Tanenbaum and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin and described the endeavour as "politics at its worst".
Raine Group were in charge of the whittling down process with Chelsea drawing a great deal of interest during the sales process, with the idea of being a steward of the club being heavily promoted as well as a record £4.5billion fee to complete the takeover. Having made the final three groups, Pagliuca thought his bid would be the successful one.
He told the Boston Globe: “I thought we had the strongest group — that was the impression I had and I thought we were going to win it."
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Ultimately, that turned out not to be the case, with Pagliuca believing that the most important thing became the financial aspect of the deal. An additional £500million was said to have been requested when only the bids of Pagliuca, Boehly and Martin Broughton remained.
It was a source of frustration for the Celtics chief whose bid had won the endorsement of a group fronted by John Terry named 'True Blues', a smaller consortium hoping to have a smaller stake in the club by allowing supporters to buy tokens in exchange for voting rights.
Pagliuca believes the process became very political with misinformation being released about potential bids.
He said: “When they began this auction, the mantra was, they wanted a great steward, someone who would be involved with the team — that was the No. 1 thing; it wasn’t the price. It was when it started. Didn’t end that way.”
He added: “It was intense. It was a political process, and it was kind of like politics at its worst, because they were leaking things out. I assumed it was coming from Boehly, but then he got some bad stuff, too. There was misinformation coming out every day about the different bids.”
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