Prior to the sale of Chelsea Football Club to the consortium led by Todd Boehly, Chelsea’s ownership had been reasonably easy to understand. Owned by the Mears Family for the majority of the club’s existence, it was then sold to Ken Bates who owned it for a couple of decades. Bates then sold it to the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, who spent huge sums of money turning the Blues into a winning machine. When he was forced to sell the club after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he sold it to a consortium known as BlueCo, which is a lot less easy to understand the structure of.
The Makeup of BlueCo
When Roman Abramovich was all but forced to sell Chelsea in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, having been hit with sanctions by the British government, it was bought not by an individual owner but rather by a consortium. The fact that the American billionaire Todd Boehly was at the forefront of the consortium meant that it was he who was seen as the club’s new owner when, in actual fact, it was the private equity firm Clearlake Capital that boasted the lion’s share.
BlueCo was founded in 2022 with the specific aim of buying Chelsea Football Club. Not that the people who helped to make up the consortium were entirely alien to one another, however. In the case of Todd Boehly and Mark Walter, for example, they were already well-versed in what it takes to run a sports business, given the fact that they co-owned the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Los Angeles Sparks, a baseball and a basketball team respectively. Working as part of a consortium is always going to be a different beast, though.
Todd Boehly
Todd Boehly was born on the 20th of September 1973 in Maryland, the United States of America. If you think that his name looks to have a German edge to it then you would be correct; his grandparents had emigrated from Germany. He went to school in Bethesda and left the College of William & Mary with a Bachelor of Business Administration in finance. Not knowing exactly what he wanted to do, he spoke to his former geometry professor for advice and was told he should move to London owing to the huge opportunities there.
He got a BUNAC visa and moved to the English capital, studying at the London School of Economics whilst working at Citibank and then Credit Suisse First Boston. After graduating from LSE and working with CS First Boston, Boehly got a job with J.H. Whitney & Company. In 2001 he joined Guggenheim Partners, launching that firm’s credit investment arm and taking on the responsibility of managing its assets, as well as serving as President. His first involvement with sport came in the early part of 2013 when he helped to lead a deal over broadcasting rights.
That was between Time Warner Cable and the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Major League Baseball team. It resulted in the formation of SportsNet LA, which resulted in the broadcasting of the team’s games and any Dodgers-related programming from the channel, starting in 2014. In 2015, Boehly moved to buy some of the assets that he had put together whilst at Guggenheim, which included the likes of the Hollywood Reporter and Dick Clark Productions. He used his assets to Eldridge Industries, which invested in numerous different industries.
In the years the followed, Boehly invested in countless different industries and saw Eldridge Industries grow to become a huge player in the business world. He also bought a 20% stake in the Los Angeles Dodgers, winning the 2020 and 2024 World Series, alongside the eSport organisation Cloud9. In the July of 2021, he and Walter acquired a 27% stake in the Los Angeles Lakers, with the National Basketball Association side being considered to be one of the highest-valued teams across the NBA, valued at around $5.14 billion in the February of that year.
Boehly had attempted to buy Chelsea Football Club in 2019, offering $3 billion to Roman Abramovich but being turned down. When Abramovich was forced to sell the Blues in 2022, Boehly was back in the conversation as part of the BlueCo consortium, naming himself as the Interim Sporting Director once the sale went through. In addition to being an investor in numerous different media endeavours, Boehly has also been the Interim Chief Executive Officer of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and has been involved in numerous philanthropic exercises.
Mark Walter
Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in the United States of America on the first of January 1960, Mark Richard Walter graduated from Cedar Rapids Jefferson High School in 1978 before attending Creighton University. He studied accounting and earned a bachelor’s business degree in 1982, at which point he went to Northwestern University Law School and graduated three years later. A notoriously private person, any sense of how much he is worth is entirely guesswork, with Bloomberg Businessweek estimating in the May of 2024 that he was worth around $6 billion.
In the October of that year, however, Bloomberg’s estimate was raised to $12 billion on the assumption that he owned 20% of Guggenheim Partners. It was through his work there that he met Todd Boehly, with whom he would later make numerous different investments. In 2012, Walter bought the Los Angeles Dodgers thanks to the financial firepower provided by numerous different Guggenheim-related insurance funds. Although this faced criticism and regulatory investigations, it was ultimately seen as being a perfectly valid investment type.
It was believed that Walter contributed $100 million of the $2.15 billion purchase of the Los Angeles Dodgers by the Guggenheim Baseball Management body. In 2014, Walter bought a one-sixth stake in the Los Angeles Sparks, a WNBA team. In 2021, he joined forces with Todd Boehly to buy Philip Anschutz’s 27% stake in the Los Angeles Lakers, with the pair reportedly having first refusal if the Buss Family ever decided to sell the time. He is also the co-owner of numerous motorsports teams that included the Cadillac Formula One team.
In addition to owning several other sports enterprises, such as the Professional Women’s Hockey League, and being the main financial backer of the PSA World Squash Championships in 2018-2019, Walter also owns 12.7% of BlueCo. Although it is Clearlake Capital that owns the majority stake in BlueCo, Walter’s business partner Todd Boehly has a veto over major decisions and is therefore considered to be looking out for his interests. He sits on the board of Chelsea, but tends not to play any form of active role in the club’s day-to-day operations.
Clearlake Capital
The largest shareholder of BlueCo and, by extension Chelsea, is Clearlake Capital Group L.P. The private equity firm was founded in 2006 and has mainly been known to focus on technology, industry and consumer sectors. Headquartered in Santa Monica, Clearlake Capital also has affiliates in Dallas, Dublin and London. The company was created by Steven Chang, José Feliciano and Behdad Eghbali, boasting a strategy of shifting between distressed securities and buyouts, depending on the economic conditions in play.
Chang left the firm in 2015, which left Eghbali and Feliciano in charge, which is why it is their names that are associated with Chelsea and not Chang’s. If you were wondering just how complex the Chelsea ownership situation could possible be, Clearlake Capital sold a 20% stake to Dyal Capital, Petershill Partners and Landmark Partners in the May of 2018. Across recent years, Clearlake’s model has been to be the biggest user of what are known as ‘General partner-led Private-equity secondary markets’, which has helped to make the group incredibly profitable.
Behdad Eghbali
As one of the two main partners behind Clearlake Capital, it is obvious that Behdad Eghbali is also an important member of BlueCo and therefore a key voice in the running of Chelsea. Born in Iran on the sixth of May 1976, Eghbali moved to the US with his family when he was a child, later attending the Haas School of Business as well as the University of California, Berkeley. His career as an investment banker banker at Morgan Stanley, later going on to join the San Francisco-based firm TPG Capital, focussing on buyouts and turnarounds for the private equity firm.
He worked with José Feliciano and Steven Chang to create Clearlake Capital in 2006, quickly making it into one of the ‘fastest growing buyout firms in the world’. His work at Clearlake Capital involves him sitting on the boards of numerous different companies in which they have invested, including the likes of Cornerstone OnDemand, EagleView and Ivanti. He is also a board member at Chelsea, taking his role seriously enough to decide to spend £56 million buying a Grosvenor Square penthouse in Mayfair in 2024.
José E. Feliciano
Puerto Rico-born José E. Feliciano graduated from Princeton University in 1994, leaving with a degree in aerospace engineering before gaining an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. His career began as an investment banker, working at Goldman Sachs in the Mergers and Acquisitions group as well as in corporate finance. From there, he moved on to become the Chief Financial Officer at govWorks, then took on a senior position at Tennenbaum Capital, which specialised in alternative investment management.
It was in 2006 that Feliciano and Behdad Eghbali created Clearlake Capital with Steven Chang, allowing him to become even richer. He is married to a fellow Princeton graduate in Kwanza Jones, with the pair co-founding the Kwanza Jones & José E. Feliciano Supercharged Initiative. The philanthropic grant-making organisation has contributed to the likes of Bennet College and put $20 million towards student housing at Princeton. He was one of four winners of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Awarding 2021 and serves on numerous boards, including at Chelsea.
Hansjörg Wyss
Johann Georg ‘Hansjörg’ Wyss was born on the 19th of September 1935 in Bern, Switzerland. His mother was a homemaker, whilst his father sold mechanical calculators. The family, which included two sisters, grew up in a flat, with Wyss attending the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and leaving with a civil and structural engineering degree. He later earned an MBA from Harvard Business School, working in numerous positions in the textile industry before becoming the President of Synthes USA in 1977.
As well as being a staunch environmentalist, Forbes declared him to be ‘among the most philanthropic people in the world’, with estimates that he has given away hundreds of millions and that the assets of his charitable foundations are equal to nearly $2 billion. In 2023, Forbes estimated Wyss’s worth to be around $4.7 billion, putting him 523rd in their list of billionaires. As founder of the Wyss Foundation, he was part of the BlueCo takeover of Chelsea when the consortium bought the club in 2022, although his direct involvement is believed to be limited on account of his age.
Who Owns What at Chelsea?
It is fair to say that the ownership structure at Chelsea is complicated at best. It is also worth pointing out that it is part of a multi-club model, on account of the fact that BlueCo also bought RC Strasbourg Alsace on the 22nd of June 2023. Reports suggested that BlueCo invested €75 million buying a 100% ownership stake in the club, but that it has no impact on their ownership or investment in Chelsea. Even so, the complex nature of BlueCo and who has what rights when it comes to the Blues is worth taking a slightly closer look at.
The waters are certainly muddied somewhat by the fact that Todd Boehly has been the most public-facing member of the consortium, leading many to believe that he is the club’s outright owner. In truth, Clearlake Capital boast a 61.5% stake in BlueCo, meaning that the organisation is easily the majority shareholder in the Blues, as well as in Strasbourg. Given the fact that Eghbali has been the most actively engaged member of the Clearlake team, it is fair to say that he has been one of the most powerful figures around Stamford Bridge since the takeover.
Part of the reason why Boehly’s position has been over-inflated in the minds of many is that he has had a veto power and is co-controlling owner throughout. He also appointed himself as the club’s Interim Sporting Director in the immediate aftermath of BlueCo’s purchase of Chelsea, in spite of the fact that the sporting and business side of the project has been dominated by Clearlake Capital’s strategy. Boehly was only the Interim Sporting Director until the January of 2023, stepping back from day-to-day operations around then.
The result was something of a fracturing of the key boardroom relationships, with Boehly saying that he wanted to buyout Clearlake and them saying the same in return. The public discourse began to grow toxic, leading some to believe that the status quo couldn’t continue for too much longer. As part of the purchase agreement, however, the parties signed an agreement that said that they could not sell Chelsea for a decade, with the plan being to ensure a form of continuity. Of course, that doesn’t mean that they can’t sell their shares to one another.
Because of the fact that the majority of Clearlake Capital’s investment in the Blues comes from the company’s private equity funds, neither Eghbali nor Feliciano have the same level of personal investment in the Premier League club that Boehly boasts. It is all somewhat more complicated on account of the fact that Clearlake has no obligation to publicly disclose who the investors are that have stakes in Chelsea, which is information that may never come to light. All we do know is that Clearlake’s website declares it to be proponents of a ‘patient, long-term capital’ strategy.
One of the main things that is likely to concern Chelsea supporters is the fact that co-owners might work in American sports, but they rarely do when it comes to football. Although there has been a rivalry with Liverpool since the two clubs went head-to-head repeatedly in the Champions League in the mid-2000s, they might want to ask how the co-ownership of the Anfield club by Americans George Gillett and Tom Hicks worked out, for example. There are similar issues at Crystal Palace, thanks to the co-ownership structure in place there. How long it will last at Stamford Bridge will be the major concern.