Just over 100 days into his tenure at the helm of Chelsea and we’ve heard far more from Todd Boehly than we did from Roman Abramovich in nearly two decades. From a fan’s perspective, it doesn’t really matter in the long-term. As long as the club is seen to be well-run and successful, most can do without communication from the owner, which is why Abramovich was loved by most Chelsea supporters while Manchester United’s silent owners, the Glazers, are loathed by most United fans.
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The issue with Boehly, who leads the investment consortium that acquired Chelsea for around $3 billion in the summer, is that the club isn’t doing well. To the natural angst of a new owner after 20 years of stability and success, you throw in the sacking of manager Thomas Tuchel — especially after the summer’s massive investment — and a turgid start to the campaign and naturally, every word will be scrutinized.
So when Boehly sat down on Tuesday with Anthony Scaramucci — yes, the same guy who was White House Director of Communications for a whole 10 days and who famously explained the difference between him and Steve Bannon — for a half-hour chat, the world was watching.
Inevitably, some will focus on Boehly’s blunders, malaprops and general things that will rub seasoned fans the wrong way. I’d be remiss not to chronicle them though in the larger scheme of things, they’re nowhere near as relevant as to the main takeaway. Which, to me, is simply that Boehly’s group isn’t offering anything new.
But let’s get the missteps out of the way first, because that’s undoubtedly what you’re reading in the headlines.
Boehly said that every club in the Premier League gets “north of a few hundred million” (he didn’t specify pounds or dollars) per year, which isn’t quite true. Last season, the highest earner, Manchester City, received £164m ($190m) and the bottom club, Norwich City, got £98.6m ($113.8m).
When rattling off a list of players who came through Chelsea’s youth system, he included Kevin De Bruyne and Mohamed Salah. In fact, they were signed at 21 and 22 years old respectively from Genk and Basel. While they weren’t particularly expensive and were young, both were internationals (for Belgium and Egypt) who had already played Champions League football.
He also managed to butcher the name of Barcelona’s academy — somehow making “La Masia” sound like “La Messiah” — which suggests that after a summer of talking to Barca regarding Frenkie de Jong, Marcos Alonso and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, he didn’t quite pick up on how the Catalans pronounce it, and nobody around him has the confidence to correct him.
OK, get your snarky giggles out of your system. It’s true that most people immersed in the sport — whether fans, coaches or executives — wouldn’t make such mistakes, but then he’s only been in this space a few months, and frankly, they don’t really matter. The substance doesn’t change whether Salah came through the academy at Cobham or Cairo, and it doesn’t matter what Boehly calls Barcelona’s youth set-up.
Considering that from the start, the Premier League has been partly modelled on U.S. sports — where do you think they got the idea, in 1992, of giving players individual numbers and having their names on the back of shirts? — and more importantly, that U.S. owners have been a part of it for the past 15 years (and they’re often owners of successful U.S. sports franchises, too), it’s not a great look. It not only implies you want to borrow aspects of U.S. sports (which is a touchy subject to begin with), but it also suggests these things didn’t occur to your fellow U.S. owners or, indeed, other owners who might have attended a baseball or football game across the pond.
The majority of media outlets focused on his first proposal, a “North vs. South” Premier League All-Star game. Without getting into the minutiae of scheduling, whether clubs can compel players to play — there’s no collective bargaining agreement in the Premier League — how it might work with teams in the Midlands or whether anyone would actually enjoy this, this sort of suggestion, or variants thereof, isn’t new. Heck, way back in 1891, an All-Star team of top-flight players from the English League faced off against their colleagues in the Scottish League, a tradition that continued into the mid-1970s.
– Liverpool’s Klopp mocks Boehly’s All-Star Game pitch
More to the point, given how American sports fans have been responding to All-Star games (the NFL’s version has seen viewership decline since 2011, the NBA’s was the lowest since at least 2007 and, in baseball — Boehly’s wheelhouse — viewership was at a record low and one-fifth of what it was in 1980) maybe the lesson to learn from American sports is that fans don’t want this. Why? Because they like to see competitive games, not exhibitions.
His other proposal — a relegation playoff — is actually a good idea, if you get the format right. (The biggest concern is fairness, when one team is well ahead of the other in terms of points.) But again, it’s not something they need to learn from American sports. Relegation playoffs have been around other European leagues (like the German Bundesliga) for a while, in different divisions and with different formats.
His admiration for the “multi-club model” (like the Red Bull group or City Football Group) as a means of sharing know-how, developing Academy stars and, as he puts it, “building out the footprint,” was interesting though obviously nothing new. From David Blitzer to Bob Platek, to the folks at RedBird and the 777 Group, a host of other (mostly American) investors are doing this. It’s basically a vision of baseball’s farm system.
It’s the sort of idea that makes a ton of sense on paper, though to what degree it helps the “parent club” remains to be seen. City Football Group has been around since 2013, but you can count on one hand the number of junior partner alumni who have ever suited up for Manchester City in the Premier League, let alone had much of an impact.
The impression is that making such a set-up work, given the cultural differences and local biases in the game, is actually very difficult. Which, by the way, may explain why governing bodies such as UEFA and FIFA haven’t seriously cracked down on it or why other top clubs around Europe (other than City) haven’t pursued it: Ultimately, it’s not clear that it gives you an advantage.
