Football clubs have become something of a much-sought after commodity in recent years. That has especially been the case if owners believe that they’re getting their hands on something that isn’t as lucrative as they feel that it should be, whilst others have seen it as a chance to sports-wash the reputation of a person or a country.
In the case of Chelsea, the club has been used for all of the above at one point or another, which helped the club to become one of the best in the world and gave supporters plenty to cheer about.
Chelsea’s founder, Gus Mears, passed away just eight years after establishing the club, but ownership remained with the Mears family until 1982 when purchased by Ken Bates. After two decades Bates then sold Chelsea to Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich who transformed the club both on and off the pitch. Following an enforced sale in 2022, the club passed to the current ownership group, BlueCo, headed by American businessman Ted Boehly.
| Owner | From | To | Purchase Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| BlueCo Group | 2022 | Present | £4.25bn |
| Roman Abramovich | 2003 | 2022 | £60m (+£80m debt cover) |
| Ken Bates | 1982 | 2003 | £1 |
| Mears Family | 1912 | 1982 | Inherited |
| Gus Mears | 1905 | 1912 | Founder |
The Mears Family
In 1904, a businessman named Gus Mears bought the Stamford Bridge athletic stadium, which was located in the London borough of Fulham. Because there was already a football club there named after the location that it was based in, Mears decided to name his new club after the adjacent borough of Chelsea. The club was founded on the tenth of March 1905, slowly making its way up to the First Division before yo-yoing between there and the Second Division, making it to the FA Cup final in 1915, ultimately losing to Sheffield United.
Mears himself died three years before that FA Cup final appearance, meaning that control of the club moved down to other members of his family. By the 1930s, the Mears family had successfully established Chelsea as a First Division club, signing star players even whilst major success eluded the Blues. More FA Cup finals had been reached in both 1920 and 1932, but still the idea of silverware was something that couldn’t be found. It wasn’t until the 1954-1955 season that the Mears family finally brought the First Division title to Stamford Bridge.
In spite of the league success, the manager, Ted Drake, couldn’t bring any more silverware to the Mears and the Chelsea supporters. As a result, he was sacked and Tommy Docherty was brought in to replace him, but it would still be untrue to say that the trophies came flooding in. The family invested money where it could, winning the League Cup in the 1964-1965 campaign, then in 1970 the Blues won the FA Cup for the first time, following it up with the UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup the following season, but it was dribs and drabs rather than a flood.
The 1971 UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup had been Chelsea’s final piece of silverware in what was considered to be their successful era. What followed was a period of major instability, with the Blues being relegated down to the Second Division as financial trouble hit. The family had attempted to launch a redevelopment of Stamford Bridge, putting the club’s financial future in doubt. Star players had had to be sold, whilst the notorious hooligan aspect of the support plague Chelsea throughout the 1980s and damaged the club’s reputation.
Ken Bates
In 1982, Chelsea were close to the club’s lowest point since its foundation. Ken Bates stepped in and bought the club for £1 from Brian Mears, the great-nephew of Gus Mears. At the time, the freehold for Stamford Bridge had been sold to property developers, putting the club in a position whereby it might end up losing its home ground. By the end of the 1982-1983 season, the Blues were close to being relegated down to the Third Division, only just surviving and resulting in Bates promising fans that they would never again come so close to disaster under his Chairmanship.
Bates spent money putting together a decent team for manager John Neal, getting promoted out of the Second Division by winning the 1983-1984 title, attempting to establish themselves in the top-flight before being relegated again in 1988. They won the Second Division again at the end of the 1988-1989 campaign, all whilst Bates was engaged in a complicated legal battle over the future of Stamford Bridge. Eventually he managed to strike deals with banks and property developers, winning back the freehold in 1992.
Bates looked to add more international players to Ruud Gullit’s squad, winning the first major honour since 1971 when they lifted the FA Cup. In some ways, Bates began the process of chopping and changing managers that would become commonplace in the future, replacing Gullit with Gianluca Vialli, who won the League Cup, UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup and the Super Cup as manager. Bates’ ownership also saw Chelsea mount the club’s first serious title challenge in decades, ending up four points behind Manchester United in the 1998-1999 season.
Bates continued to invest in the squad, spending nearly £26 million on new players during the summer of 2000, but it wasn’t enough to avoid having to sack Vialli and bring in another Italian manager in the form of Claudio Ranieri. He managed to revitalise things at Stamford Bridge, getting them to the League Cup semi-finals and the FA Cup final, but trouble was brewing off the pitch. Bates had done what he could for the Blues, but rumours about difficult finances meant that Ranieri couldn’t spend any money on signings ahead of the 2002-2003 campaign.
Roman Abramovich
Although finances are never that simple, especially when it comes to football clubs and the investment that owners have to make, the fact that Ken Bates bought Chelsea for £1 and sold it to Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich for £60 million has to represent one of the best returns on investment ever. Abramovich’s ownership was arguably the first example of sports-washing in the Premier League, although the Russian wasn’t exactly doing it to improve the reputation of the country of his birth. Regardless, he started spending huge amounts of money on player acquisition.
ON THIS DAY in 2003, @chelseafc announced they had signed Claude Makelele, moments before the transfer window shut pic.twitter.com/HXIaGJ6Bss
— Premier League (@premierleague) September 1, 2013
He decided to replace Claudio Ranieri with José Mourinho, who had just won the Champions League with Porto, investing £100 million on players as well as helping the Blues out of its debt. Thanks to the combination of Mourinho’s management and Abramovich’s willingness to invest huge sums of money, the club won the Premier League in back-to-back season, witnessing the first top-flight title at Stamford Bridge since the 1950s. At the start of the 2007-2008 season, however, the Russian’s trigger-happy nature came to the surface.
He sacked Mourinho and appointed Avram Grant, then sacked him for Carlo Ancelotti. The Italian was replaced with Roberto Di Matteo who was then himself sacked in spite of winning the Champions League. Abramovich then proved that he didn’t care about the feelings of Chelsea supporters by bringing in Rafa Benítez, the former Liverpool manager, as an interim manager, with the Spaniard winning the Europa League. Mourinho was brought back for a second spell, winning the League Cup and then the Premier League.
When Mourinho had another poor start to the season, Abramovich once again brought the axe down upon his management and appointed Antonio Conte, who won another Premier League under the Russian ownership in the 2016-2017 season. Next to come in was Thomas Tuchel, who won Chelsea’s second Champions League trophy, which ended up being the final one of the Abramovich era. His time as owner of the club had been an incredibly successful one, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine eventually brought it to a close.
Todd Boehly & Clearlake – BlueCo
When the British government decided that Russian investors would be forced to divest their portfolio, Roman Abramovich made the decision to sell the club to US billionaire Todd Boehly. Boehly didn’t buy the club entirely on his own, however. Instead he led a consortium that included the California-based investment firm Clearlake Capital, with around £4.25 billion being spent to acquire the Stamford Bridge side. That included a guaranteed amount of £1.75 billion that would be put towards investment and was the most expensive takeover in sporting history.
Although Todd Boehly is considered by many to be the Chelsea owner, in reality it is Clearlake Capital that boast the majority share, with Boehly having joint-control and equal governance of the club as part of a consortium known as BlueCo. Hansjoerg Wyss and Mark Walter were also part of the consortium, holding shares in the club that Abramovich had bought for around £140 million. As with Bates’ improvement of his £1 purchase, the Russian also saw an incredible return on investment when it sold to the American consortium for multiple billions.
The Chelsea ownership part of the Clearlake Capital investment is fronted by José Feliciano and Behdad Eghbali. Seven games into the new ownership, Champions League winning manager Thomas Tuchel was sacked and replaced by Graham Potter, with the Blues having to pay around £21.5 million for his signing from Brighton & Hove Albion. In spite of huge investment into the playing squad, Potter was sacked after seven months, even though he had signed a five-year deal to become the manager when he took over from Tuchel.
Frank Lampard, the former Chelsea midfielder, was brought in as a caretaker manager, with ex-Tottenham Hotspur boss Mauricio Pochettino taking over on the first of July 2023. It was a sign that Boehly and Clearlake were going to follow the trigger-happy approach that the former owner had taken, as well as one demonstrating little care for the Chelsea supporters’ feelings considering the fact that the Argentinian had managed one of the London club’s main rivals prior to being given the Stamford Bridge job.
In the end it didn’t matter, with Pochettino lasting just one season before being replaced by the Italian Enzo Maresca, who had got Leicester City promoted out of the Championship the previous season. As with other managers before him, Maresca was given financial backing by Boehly and Clearlake, with the ownership group bending the rules of Financial Fair Play by signing players up onto long-term contracts in order to ensure that they would cost less when amortised over the period of their contracts.
The Current Chelsea Ownership Structure
When Clearlake Capital and Todd Boehly agreed to buy Chelsea Football Club from Roman Abramovich, Boehly appointed himself the ‘interim Sporting Director’. Since then, however, the American has relinquished the role in a somewhat confusing structure of ownership. Clearlake Capital has a parent company called BlueCo, which also owns the French Ligue 1 club Strasbourg. They have a 61.5% stake in BlueCo, but Boehly became the public-facing member of the new ownership structure at Stamford Bridge during the early period.
Because of Clearlake’s stake in BlueCo, the company has been an important part of the new ownership from the outset, putting Behdad Eghbali front and centre as the co-founder of Clearlake. As a co-controller, Boehly still has the power of veto on any decisions made and anything that happens requires his sign-off. Eghbali and Clearlake co-founder José Feliciano also have to give their go-ahead, meaning that much of the club’s direction has been dominated by Clearlake since Boehly gave up his self-appointed Sporting Director role.
As is so often the case in business, but particularly in football, there has been something of a fracturing of the boardroom relationship that resulted in Boehly looking to see if he could buyout Clearlake’s shares in the Blues. When the consortium bought Chelsea in 2022, they also signed an agreement that said that they wouldn’t sell Chelsea for a decade or more. That doesn’t meant that they can’t sell their shares to one another, however, whilst the actual legality of such a clause remains very much under scrutiny.
The shares in Chelsea that Clearlake own are what are known as Class A senior shares, whilst those that Boehly, Mark Walter and Hansjorg Wyss have got in the Blues are Class B junior shares. That means that the latter three are exposed to the first losses if the parent company’s value takes a nosedive. The good news for Boehly and co, though, is that both share types are owed the same rate of return in the event that any of the shares are sold, which is why both sides are looking at the possibility of buying out one another.