Big-spending Chelsea head into the wilderness, their next destination unknown
Out of the Champions League and with no chance of a top four finish in the league, the Blues need to reflect and rebuild
TODD Boehly was supposed to be the smartest man in the room. That was the pitch, anyway, when the American businessman first descended on Chelsea, on the English Premier League (EPL) and on European football almost a year ago.
He was the guy who spoke to a hushed audience at the Milken Institute Global Conference. He was onstage at the Salt forum. Other people described him as a “thought leader”.
His ideas, he knew, might be received by traditionalists as a little provocative. He suggested having an EPL all-star game and a relegation playoff.
He said English football could learn something from American sports, a long-standing euphemism for finding new ways to extricate more cash from fans. He evangelised the idea of buying a whole network of teams. It was 2022, so at some point he talked — rather more than hindsight would suggest was wise — about NFTs, or non-fungible tokens.
Boehly did not seem to mind the criticism and the resistance. He was likely expecting it, the price to be paid for daring to disrupt an industry as fearful and staid and conservative as English football.
He claimed to be a person with a “modern, data-driven approach”, someone who sought “structural advantages”. He had worked out that paying players for longer somehow made them cheaper. He was the cutting edge. And it would not be the cutting edge if it was comfortable.
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Grim reading
A quick status update on where Chelsea stands now – a year into the ownership tenure of Boehly and his less visible colleagues – makes for grim reading.
They are 11th in the 20-team EPL table, having won only two of their past 12 games; employing their third manager of the campaign, and simultaneously searching for his replacement; a whopping US$600 million poorer after embarking on the largest single-season transfer spending spree in history; and, as of Wednesday (Apr 19), out of the lucrative Uefa Champions League, their last, distant shot at glory gone.
There was no particular shame in that. In the end, this was as straightforward a quarter-final as Spain’s Real Madrid could have hoped for – winning 4-0 over the two legs, a low bar confidently cleared. But Frank Lampard, Chelsea’s interim manager, was not clutching at straws when he suggested his team had “caused Real a lot of problems” for the first hour or so in that second leg in London.
Chelsea had chivied and harried and unnerved Real Madrid, the reigning European champions. In patches, anyway. With better finishing, as Lampard observed, things might have been different.
A portion of the credit for that should go to him: It was his deployment of N’Golo Kante in a more advanced role that caused Real Madrid to “suffer” so much, as Real’s manager Carlo Ancelotti admitted. Chelsea went down, as it was always going to, but it did so with pride intact.
That has not always been the case in the first year of what is probably best described as the Boehly experience. Chelsea have long nursed something of a soap opera streak, one that has provided a curiously accurate reflection of the shifting nature of the part of London they call home.
In the 1960s, the club was home to the Kings of the King’s Road — chic, hip and cool. In the 1970s, the freewheeling mavericks arrived, the club nursing a sort of alternative, pre-punk energy. By the 1990s, it was home to a set of impossibly stylish European imports.
Gaudy monument
And then, from 2003 onwards, the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich turned it into a sort of gaudy monument to the power of the vast wells of new money pouring into the capital from across the globe, Russia in particular.
There have been various points in all of those incarnations when Chelsea have veered perilously close to lapsing into self-parody. Abramovich appeared to have absolutely no interest in running a sensible, steady sort of a football team. He may or may not have been a Kremlin apparatchik, but he was certainly thirsty for drama.
He fired managers for not winning trophies. He fired them for not winning the right trophies. He fired them after they won trophies. He appointed at least one manager whom the fans hated, and another because he was his friend. There was one season when the players effectively ran the show. There was infighting and politicking and dark talk of plots, and all of that was just a quiet weekday for Jose Mourinho.
This club has a relatively high tolerance for the unusual and even, at times, the absurd. But even by those standards, Boehly and his consortium have pushed it to the limit.
Signing so many players that the locker room at the club’s training facility is not even big enough to accommodate them all is not indicative of judicious planning. Likewise spending so much money that the club, in the absence of Champions League football and the income it brings, will not only have to indulge in a fire sale of players this summer but quite possibly also breach the EPL’s financial rules next season.
It may well be, as Lampard loyally and hopefully suggested, that Chelsea are “back” sooner rather than later: guided by one of the six managerial candidates being considered for the job, boasting a trimmed-down squad full of bright young things, the fat excised to make way for the lean.
As Boehly said last year, the EPL is designed in such a way as to give the “big brands” a number of his beloved structural advantages. One of those is the privilege of having money to solve problems. Another is a limit to how much it is possible to fail.
From this vantage point, the ultimate vindication of Boehly and his group seems almost impossibly distant. Chelsea are out of the Champions League. They will not be back next season. Still, there is hope. It is up to Boehly to plot the club’s way back to the top. He is, after all, supposed to be the smartest man in the room. NYTIMES
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