Chelsea owners look to buy more clubs to develop flow of football stars

Chelsea’s new US owners are planning to buy more football clubs to help develop young superstars and prepare them for its premiership team.

US financier Todd Boehly said he would consider buying teams in other European leagues to add to the £2.5bn acquisition of the English top-flight club, highlighting Belgium and Portugal as target countries.

That vision hints at how Boehly and private equity group Clearlake Capital are aiming to make a return on the record sum they paid to acquire Chelsea in May from sanctioned Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who put the London club up for sale in the fallout from Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

“The challenge is that when you have 18, 19, 20-year old superstars, you can loan them out to other clubs but you put their development in someone else’s hands,” Boehly told the Salt financial conference in New York on Tuesday.

“Our goal is to make sure we can show pathways for our young superstars to get them on to the Chelsea pitch while getting them real game time.”

Boehly said he is keen to build a multi-club ownership group, emulating the example set by City Football Group, which controls English champions Manchester City and owns stakes in teams in New York, Australia and Japan.

The US investor defended the decision to sack former manager Thomas Tuchel, who won the Uefa Champions League at Chelsea, and replace him with Graham Potter from Brighton & Hove Albion. The move came after the new owners signed off a £251mn gross spend on new players in the summer transfer market, the largest of any European club.

“You have to make sure you are aligned,” said Boehly, who said that removing Tuchel was about finding a shared vision

Although acknowledging that Tuchel was “obviously extremely talented and had great success at Chelsea”, Boehly said the new owners wanted a manager who really wanted to collaborate with them.

He said there are “a lot of walls to break down at Chelsea”, including data sharing between the first team and the youth academy.

The Premier League should consider a money-spinning all-star match for the best players in the top flight of English football, he suggested

Such a fixture could increase revenues for clubs and help fund teams in the divisions below the Premier League, Boehly said on Tuesday.

His comments show how US investors are continuing to push for format changes in European football following a dealmaking spree that has brought billionaires and institutional backers into the heart of the sport.

Boehly suggested a “North vs South” match and a battle between the bottom four sides in the league, with proceeds to help fund lower-ranked teams in the English football pyramid.

“Ultimately, I hope that the Premier League takes a little bit of a lesson from American sports and really starts to figure out: ‘why wouldn’t we do a tournament with the bottom four teams? Why isn’t there an All-Star game?’”

All-star games are popular fixtures among the core US professional sports leagues, in which the regular season is paused to allow the top stars from around the league to take part in a friendly competition against one another. The fixtures amount to a small tourism boom for host cities and are often surrounded by other friendly television ratings draws, such as the National Basketball Association’s Slam Dunk Contest and Major League Baseball’s Home Run Derby.

“[Major League Baseball] did their All-Star Game in LA this year — we made $200mn from a Monday and a Tuesday,” said Boehly, co-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers franchise.

It is unclear how fans would react to players from major rivals, such as Manchester United and Liverpool, lining up for the same team. However, players from opposing clubs already co-operate for national duty.

“I think that everyone likes the idea of more revenue for the league,” said Boehly. “I think there’s a cultural aspect that is real and I think evolution will come.”

Over a year before the takeover, Chelsea was among 12 elite clubs that tried to establish a breakaway European Super League. The project collapsed after huge opposition from fans.

Chelsea and the Premier League declined to comment.