Outside Bovril Gate, in the area around Stamford Bridge, a Chelsea protest was organised on Tuesday, February 25.
It has been almost three calendar years since BlueCo, the consortium led by American businessman Todd Boehly, bought Chelsea Football Club in May 2022.
From that moment, the footballing institution as a whole has been entangled in a series of tragicomical events that share the common ground of having led the 2021 Champions of Europe to a full-blown and deep-rooted crisis of identity.
By this logic, it is understandable the majority of the fanbase feels thoroughly disgruntled, to the point of numbness, due to an apathetic three-year span without a single trophy to show for it and a sheer inability to even qualify for Europe’s most prestigious club competition.
However, the Chelsea protest, consisting of around 200-300 fans resonating with the sentiments described before, was opposed and/or sneered at by certain sections.
As a result, it is more than relevant to comprehensively explain the reasons why demonstrations are fundamental in order to protect and enhance the club’s heritage and future.
The motives are elaborated as follows, in no particular order of importance or chronology.
Reason 1: The Autocratic Rule and the Radical Model
Chelsea protest organised last Tuesday, a couple of hours before the kickoff of the match against Southampton.
The protest targeted three prominent figures in the hierarchy’s upper echelons: Todd Boehly, Behdad Eghbali, and José E. Feliciano.
The latter two in particular have been responsible for applying a bizarrely unprecedented modus operandi in an ambitious club.
They offloaded all the experienced players en masse and stockpiled raw youngsters in a clearly erratic, haphazard, and non-cohesive manner.
More precisely put, a staggering sum north of £1 billion has been spent since the consortium took over, yet an extremely drastic host of incomings have been under the age of 25.
Only a handful of them now play for the first team and a myriad are loaned elsewhere.
Without going into too much detail, bar Moises Caicedo, Marc Cucurella, Cole Palmer, and more or less a couple of other individuals, the performances of the rest have ranged between barely playing to ending up as sporadic and rotational at best.
But why is such an environment accustomed to glory, success, and jubilation restricted to such a mind-blowing allergy to ready-made players at their peak?
Why are the wages lower than the league average, plummeting from £200k per week under the previous regime to £60k per week now?
(In his books “Money and Soccer” and “Soccernomics,” professor Stefan Szymanski argues the clubs paying relatively low wages tend to prioritise winning for financial stability.)
Why are the sporting directors, Paul Winstanley and Laurence Stewart, practically scouts with a different job tag, considering the operational and executive strategy is imposed upon them, instead of being devised and put in place by them?
Why should everything go through Eghbali and Feliciano at a time when the most well-functioning clubs in England and beyond embrace a refreshing implementation of autonomy?
In these clubs, the owners provide the funds and focus on expanding the brand, while widely appreciated CEOs and others handle all footballing matters in the short, medium, and long term.
The grim answers can be concisely found in two quotes said by the Clearlake Capital’s founders themselves.
Behdad Eghbali: “He [Tony Bloom] spends 10% of the payroll, wins almost as much [as those who spend far more], and has a very stable, mid-market, mid-table, very profitable club.”
José E. Feliciano: “I think what we are trying to do is reduce the salary and essentially the opex (operating expenses) of the business by over £80 million per year.”
Both remarks are almost self-explanatory. On one side, City Football Group looked up to Barcelona, appointing Ferran Soriano, Txiki Begiristain, and Pep Guardiola in the process.
On the other side, you have Brighton of all teams being taken as the example to follow, as practically shown by the dozen of appointments from the south coast club made in different departments.
To put it bluntly, Soriano emphasises in his book “Goal: The Ball Doesn’t Go In By Chance” the awareness about winning being the core of the project, and everything else revolving around it.
For Eghbali and Feliciano, profitability finds itself at the zenith of priorities, rendering winning as a mere bonus.
All the activities have to be endorsed by them, creating, in effect, a suffocating environment to work in.
No wonder the likes of Michael Edwards, Christoph Freund, Christopher Vivell, or even Luis Enrique, Julian Nagelsmann, and Mauricio Pochettino when it comes to head coaches, either refused to join or left soon after boarding the ship.
Reason 2: The Underwhelming Managerial Shortlists
To say Thomas Tuchel’s successors have been anticlimactic is a mammoth understatement.
Graham Potter’s time in West London turned out to be as dreadful as it gets, accruing 12 wins out of 31 games in total.
Potter failed to contextualise with the natural demands of such a win-accustomed territory.
He was inevitably dismissed on the 2nd of April 2023, at a time when the toxicity levels had reached a stratospheric altitude.
Then the fiasco surrounding the dynamics around Mauricio Pochettino’s appointment and his eventual departure a year after makes for a tragicomedy.
Two full months were taken to allegedly find the perfect Potter replacement, the man who would tick all the boxes and would get Chelsea back on track.
Yet, as mentioned before, Luis Enrique was snubbed twice, despite his palpable desire to join, whereas Julian Nagelsmann withdrew from the race, citing structural issues he deemed messy to deal with.
These occurrences aside, the most baffling scenario reared its head in May 2024, when Pochettino left the club by mutual consent, having given more than enough clues and hints about his displeasure in the build-up to the season review meeting after the last fixture.
Two months went to waste.
In many other clubs, such a farce would have surely been accompanied by the dismissal of sporting directors and/or a change of strategy altogether.
At Chelsea? Neither happened.
In a demonstration of mediocrity glorification, staff remained intact. The managerial shortlist designed to find the Argentinian’s replacement was somehow even more devoid of the splendidness of previous names who used to sit in Stamford Bridge’s home dugouts over the years.
Leicester City’s Enzo Maresca won the race, beating Brentford’s Thomas Frank, Ipswich Town’s Kieran McKenna, and his compatriot Roberto De Zerbi in the process.
Anyway, more than the choice, you could easily sense a disingenuous approach to the matter by the hierarchy.
It was constantly reported they aimed to appoint a young manager, applying a proactive brand of football to the extent of embodying the football teacher role for the young personnel.
However, Thomas Frank is more or less the same age as Thomas Tuchel, who was a free agent at the time, and his brand of football relies a lot on physicality and relentless threat generation from dead ball situations.
Young enough to be labelled “a young manager”? Not really. Progressive football? Not really either.
It is clear then that it had little to do with the aforementioned tags, rather than finding somebody who would swallow everything thrown at him, without making any complaint, with the view to avoiding another Pochettino-like disjuncture.
Reason 3: The Boehly-Clearlake Rift
In principle, one of the worst aspects an ownership consortium can be easily identified with is the numerous precedents of misalignment and lack of coherence in direction, stretching beyond the footballing landscape.
Such a motive was widely reported to have been behind a substantial conflict between Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital.
The former had apparently grown frustrated with the lack of progress regarding stadium development plans, among other points, including the absence of autonomy explained earlier.
In a recent public appearance, Boehly dismissed the news related to the fallout but did not deny the prospect of the status quo changing in the near future.
Liverpool have proved to be the case in the last few years, that a stable, trophy-winning, constantly competitive institution strictly requires all the departments to be on the same page.
For Chelsea, the polar opposite is true.
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Reason 4: The Business Side
Let’s ignore the footballing activities for a moment and concentrate on the commercial and other similar facets in isolation.
Stadium plans? Nothing. Front-Of-Shirt Sponsor? Nothing. (The shirts were emblazoned with the Infinite Athlete logo for less than a full season in 2023-24.)
Asset stripping? Yes, including Cobham training centre and hotels.
No more needs to be said, typical private equity actions at the expense of the club’s well-being.
Conclusion
Since BlueCo completed Chelsea Football Club’s purchase, a deep-rooted crisis of identity has been a prominent feature.
The Chelsea fans protest should be treated with encouragement, and considering it is in its infancy, it becomes even more crucial to avoid the petty backlash/derision towards an extremely valid stance.
Long-term processes simply don’t exist when you possess deep pockets.
The point of having this particular privilege is to accelerate the stages of a process a small-sized club on a tighter budget would have to undergo.
The present and the future are equally relevant; they are intertwined.
Stability in mediocrity is not stability; it is mediocrity.
The Chelsea protest was a byproduct of these facts. While similar demonstrations are necessary and should be more cohesive in organisation and alignment, it sent a meaningful message against one of the most reckless, irresponsible, and unambitious ownership groups ever.
Chelsea’s identity must be restored, protests should continue, and the owners must be put into a position of not being able to toy around anymore with the club’s prosperity for their own benefits.
Main Photo
Credit: IMAGO / Action Plus
Recording Date: 03.02.2025