Boehly is going to ruin Chelsea (hopefully)

Chelsea fans @Mb194dc @duffer @VP89 @WeePat @Orc and whoever else might be reading..

I have a question. Chelsea have been one of the most successful English teams over the last couple of decades. But what would you say has been the best period in your lifetimes?

For example, most United fans might say either the late 90's or the 2006-09 period with Rooney, Tevez, Ronaldo. Liverpool's would have probably just been with Klopp. Arsenal I imagine the invincible period with Henry.

I ask because the Mourinho 2004-06ish period is the time I remember them being most dominant, but the CL wins seemed to come randomly much later when Chelsea weren't title challengers.
 
LawCharltonBest said:
Chelsea fans @Mb194dc @duffer @VP89 @WeePat @Orc and whoever else might be reading..

I have a question. Chelsea have been one of the most successful English teams over the last couple of decades. But what would you say has been the best period in your lifetimes?

For example, most United fans might say either the late 90's or the 2006-09 period with Rooney, Tevez, Ronaldo. Liverpool's would have probably just been with Klopp. Arsenal I imagine the invincible period with Henry.

I ask because the Mourinho 2004-06ish period is the time I remember them being most dominant, but the CL wins seemed to come randomly much later when Chelsea weren't title challengers.
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Bit harsh to confuse @VP89 with @TheReligion ;)

I don’t know if I can pick out a specific 2-3 year period. Our success have been kind of spread out, with highs and low over 20 years. The absolute highest I have felt as a fan was 2012, then followed by the 2005 title win and then followed by 2021. So it’s a bit difficult to pinpoint the best period. If I was forced to pick a specific 3 year period though, it would probably be 2004-2007.
 
LawCharltonBest said:
Chelsea fans @Mb194dc @duffer @VP89 @WeePat @Orc and whoever else might be reading..

I have a question. Chelsea have been one of the most successful English teams over the last couple of decades. But what would you say has been the best period in your lifetimes?

For example, most United fans might say either the late 90's or the 2006-09 period with Rooney, Tevez, Ronaldo. Liverpool's would have probably just been with Klopp. Arsenal I imagine the invincible period with Henry.

I ask because the Mourinho 2004-06ish period is the time I remember them being most dominant, but the CL wins seemed to come randomly much later when Chelsea weren't title challengers.
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WeePat said:
Bit harsh to confuse @VP89 with @TheReligion ;)

I don’t know if I can pick out a specific 2-3 year period. Our success have been kind of spread out, with highs and low over 20 years. The absolute highest I have felt as a fan was 2012, then followed by the 2005 title win and then followed by 2021. So it’s a bit difficult to pinpoint the best period. If I was forced to pick a specific 3 year period though, it would probably be 2004-2007.
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Get my plastic flag out yeaaah CHEWWSEA!

My favourite moment as a hardcore Chelsea fan was Moscow 08
 
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Chelsea linked to everyone currently.

They have made some deals which can turn out super.

Also these clubs now selling players to each other to get around the financial fairplay restrictions.

Is this sustainable?
 
adkb said:
Chelsea linked to everyone currently.

They have made some deals which can turn out super.

Also these clubs now selling players to each other to get around the financial fairplay restrictions.

Is this sustainable?
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No

If some of these kids don’t become top players very quickly, these owners will make Chelsea suffer. Their plan is pretty risky that a bunch of these kids become worldies and want to stay together.
 
It would be, but risky not having senior leadership to bring along these players.
 
Zaphod2319 said:
No

If some of these kids don’t become top players very quickly, these owners will make Chelsea suffer. Their plan is pretty risky that a bunch of these kids become worldies and want to stay together.
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If anyone knows how to mitigate risk, it's hedge fund / private equity guys. And they've done that (partially) by building the best recruitment setup in Europe. The club will be fine.
 
UsualSuspect said:
If anyone knows how to mitigate risk, it's hedge fund / private equity guys. And they've done that (partially) by building the best recruitment setup in Europe. The club will be fine.
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Chelsea have the best recruitment set up in Europe? I mean signing anything that moves doesn't make them best, it makes them clueless.

Arsenal, Madrid, City have better recruitment set up.
 
UsualSuspect said:
Ah, escapism at its finest.
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Curious, what part of Chelsea's recruitment so far makes them stand out, except:
- reading gossip column and finding out who other clubs are targeting?
- over paying for those players by out biding the original club
- tying them up to an insane length of contract
- filling up the squad with 8 players in each position
- raiding Brighton's backroom staff and then mostly firing them?
- running through 4 managers in 2 years (while continuing to pay some of them?)
- running into FFP problems in the process
- forced to sell top young homegrown players
- doing dubious transactions with other clubs to work around the mess yourselves got yourselves into

All while showing no success on the pitch and not looking better or coherent than your own squad from 2-3 seasons back. They've managed to run down a successful club into what you are today, in 2 years!

Hedge fund/private equity players mitigate/profit from risk that is quantitative and measurable - eg market, interest rate, liquidity, credit. Recruitment is not. I'm assuming you're not a student of finance.
 
bringbackbebe said:
Curious, what part of Chelsea's recruitment so far makes them stand out, except:
- reading gossip column and finding out who other clubs are targeting?
- over paying for those players by out biding the original club
- tying them up to an insane length of contract
- filling up the squad with 8 players in each position
- raiding Brighton's backroom staff and then mostly firing them?
- running through 4 managers in 2 years (while continuing to pay some of them?)
- running into FFP problems in the process
- forced to sell top young homegrown players
- doing dubious transactions with other clubs to work around the mess yourselves got yourselves into

All while showing no success on the pitch and not looking better or coherent than your own squad from 2-3 seasons back. They've managed to run down a successful club into what you are today, in 2 years!

Hedge fund/private equity players mitigate/profit from risk that is quantitative and measurable - eg market, interest rate, liquidity, credit. Recruitment is not. I'm assuming you're not a student of finance.
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What is this nonsense
 
UsualSuspect said:
If anyone knows how to mitigate risk, it's hedge fund / private equity guys. And they've done that (partially) by building the best recruitment setup in Europe. The club will be fine.
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Hedge funds all about mitigating risks? You might as well be saying sharks are role models for the Great British Dining Etiquette. Have you ever heard of LTCM, Archegos, Galleon, Tiger Management? Even the more responsible ones will still take huge gambles in some of their investments and mitigate it in other areas. Being owned by a hedgefund is not a comforting bed of roses for Chelsea.
 
jadajos said:
Hedge funds all about mitigating risks? You might as well be saying sharks are role models for the Great British Dining Etiquette. Have you ever heard of LTCM, Archegos, Galleon, Tiger Management? Even the more responsible ones will still take huge gambles in some of their investments and mitigate it in other areas. Being owned by a hedgefund is not a comforting bed of roses for Chelsea.
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Clearlake isn’t a Hedge fund

The ownership group related to Chelsea is a venture capital related primarily to sports and entertainment. Their primary goal is to have strong footholds in those areas 10, 20, 30 years from now.

When people talk about the wealth of owners they often mention meaningless things; like the paper value of the company they own, etc.

What is important is the liquid assets set aside specifically for sporting team development. For Clearlake I believe that number is 33B. Not “their combined net worth is 33B” (some of the individuals involved are worth more than that on paper by themselves), but that they have set aside 33B just to build sports teams.

For “mitigating risk” these people have things like hedge funds, etc. They want to be elite sporting owners. They all have a passionate interest in it.

The thing with the salary structure isn’t primarily about money: it’s a smart long term strategy. They actually understand that telling people you’ve signed up for this program that will get you rewards and improved deal through performance, and then signing up someone who could only go for 16 games last year for 220 a week and ignoring what you told everyone else is a bad idea.

Also? Don’t overspend on a striker, especially at huge salary. Osihmen might be better than Jackson (he wasn’t last season and he’s coming out of Italy so it’s hard to tell), but not for that money. If you get into “prospects” then why outlay big money if you don’t feel your remaining targets are better than Jackson either. Jackson’s performance against his xG was bad for the year, but a closer look reveals it was steadily improving all the way til the end of the year. There is a good player there. So I think Guiu and David are excellent players to push him for minutes, and in the right profile.

People focus on our youth investments, but forget (probably due to injuries) that we have a talented and experienced squad already:
 
bringbackbebe said:
Curious, what part of Chelsea's recruitment so far makes them stand out, except:
- reading gossip column and finding out who other clubs are targeting?
- over paying for those players by out biding the original club
- tying them up to an insane length of contract
- filling up the squad with 8 players in each position
- raiding Brighton's backroom staff and then mostly firing them?
- running through 4 managers in 2 years (while continuing to pay some of them?)
- running into FFP problems in the process
- forced to sell top young homegrown players
- doing dubious transactions with other clubs to work around the mess yourselves got yourselves into

All while showing no success on the pitch and not looking better or coherent than your own squad from 2-3 seasons back. They've managed to run down a successful club into what you are today, in 2 years!

Hedge fund/private equity players mitigate/profit from risk that is quantitative and measurable - eg market, interest rate, liquidity, credit. Recruitment is not. I'm assuming you're not a student of finance.
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Most of this is wrong. We were first in on many of the players we are targeting. For instance Nico Williams, we won’t get him, but of the current teams interested we were the first to officially contact Bilbao nearly two years ago.

We were way ahead of other clubs on players like Olise. We were monitoring Tosin from the same time everyone was. An ex City graduate and you think Joe Shields had to monitor other teams to see him? He was simply waiting for the green light.

The only real hijack was Mudryk … we were supposed to still be pushing for Gordon … so that went well…

Chelsea, if nothing else, have spent big to have an immaculate level of scouting. Clearlake already had MUCH deeper sporting and are t connections in South America than Europeans would realize, and they upgraded that by hiring away some of the most influential names over there. Joe shields and the group he put together might be the best player recruitment team around. On players like Anselmino and others, English teams are reading OUR mail to get clues.

The people hired from Brighton were let go BY the guy we hired from Brighton, and upgraded.

We are not in FFP trouble.

We were not a successful club two years ago. The British government imposed never before seen measures against our club that forced us to essentially give away some of our best players and assets. Starting from scratch. We won a CL right before that, but we were NOT doing particularly well aside from that win, especially in the league.

What top homegrown players? Maatsen? He did not want to stay at Chelsea. Mount? Ask United fans how they feel about paying big salary for Mount.You keep the players you believe can meet the standard of your team. Forced is a bad word: we find jobs for players not good enough to stay in our model, for the mutual benefit of both parties.

Clearlake is a venture firm that focuses on long term brand building. Aside from stupid FFP rules they could give feck all about mitigating cost risks. The cost risk of bring a bad team is much higher. The are not a hedge, or mitigating entity. We know this because they are not new to the sorts arena, just European football.

What dubious transactions? As voted by the majority of the league, asset transactions are purely legal. Perhaps if the PL had stuck to the original agreement given to the Raine group about the extent of extra allowances that would be made to Chelsea due to the gross infringement on their business they wouldn’t have triggered those means. Those issues are still in court btw. The league got butt hurt a wealthy group bought Chelsea and started spending money and immediately tried to backtrack on their agreements.

Even with an all time record for injury minutes lost in a season, we still finished top 3 in points from January on.

We will see.
 
I'd love to see the Venn diagram of this new era of Chelsea fans and the posters on r/wallstreetbets
 
Boelhy is going to ruin Chelsea by signing a lot of good footballers for them?
 
Rozay said:
Boelhy is going to ruin Chelsea by signing a lot of good footballers for them?
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Shite ones like Mudryk on mega 8yr contracts. Then there’s sacking top managers like Tuchel who won them the CL and replacing him with guys like Potter! Boehly’s doing great work and long may it continue!
 
Give Chelsea fans their due, they will give their absolute backing to their owners no questions asked. Imagine spending 20 years defending a Russian oligarch and now having to do the same thing to a private equity firm.
 
ShinjiNinja26 said:
Shite ones like Mudryk on mega 8yr contracts. Then there’s sacking top managers like Tuchel who won them the CL and replacing him with guys like Potter! Boehly’s doing great work and long may it continue!
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So signing a player who doesn’t live up to expectations is now ruining a club? They’re all ruined then. Also, it’s clear that the signing of Mudryk hasn’t inhibited their ability to buy other players after, so they are not like us looking at an Antony outlay as to why we can’t buy Neves two years later.

As for the managerial merry go round, that didn’t start at Chelsea with Boelhy, it’s been a feature of the club for 20 years. And they ended the last season trending upwards and got into the Europa League. Not only did they get into the Europa League (like us), but they are not inhibited in addressing the areas they feel will get them to the next step.

I don’t see them being ruined at all. On the contrary, I suspect the strategy of signing top young players in every position will, over time, result in them having a very good football team. Oddly enough.
 
Dan_F said:
Give Chelsea fans their due, they will give their absolute backing to their owners no questions asked. Imagine spending 20 years defending a Russian oligarch and now having to do the same thing to a private equity firm.
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"for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until parted by death."

I agree with all of that apart from the "until parted by death" part. My ghost will be a Chelsea supporter.
 
Rozay said:
So signing a player who doesn’t live up to expectations is now ruining a club? They’re all ruined then. Also, it’s clear that the signing of Mudryk hasn’t inhibited their ability to buy other players after, so they are not like us looking at an Antony outlay as to why we can’t buy Neves two years later.

As for the managerial merry go round, that didn’t start at Chelsea with Boelhy, it’s been a feature of the club for 20 years. And they ended the last season trending upwards and got into the Europa League. Not only did they get into the Europa League (like us), but they are not inhibited in addressing the areas they feel will get them to the next step.

I don’t see them being ruined at all. On the contrary, I suspect the strategy of signing top young players in every position will, over time, result in them having a very good football team. Oddly enough.
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It’s not affecting their ability in the short term but blowing through a billion in the space of 3 windows means they’re now stuck having to sell off academy players constantly every summer just to enable them to spend in the market. Would you like to see us in that situation? Flogging the likes of Mainoo and Garnacho etc. to sign the latest flavour of the month that may or may not work out? I certainly wouldn’t.
 
Rozay said:
So signing a player who doesn’t live up to expectations is now ruining a club? They’re all ruined then. Also, it’s clear that the signing of Mudryk hasn’t inhibited their ability to buy other players after, so they are not like us looking at an Antony outlay as to why we can’t buy Neves two years later.

As for the managerial merry go round, that didn’t start at Chelsea with Boelhy, it’s been a feature of the club for 20 years. And they ended the last season trending upwards and got into the Europa League. Not only did they get into the Europa League (like us), but they are not inhibited in addressing the areas they feel will get them to the next step.

I don’t see them being ruined at all. On the contrary, I suspect the strategy of signing top young players in every position will, over time, result in them having a very good football team. Oddly enough.
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False, they are in the Europa conference league.

Secondly, you cant just go and buy 20 youngsters and think you will have a very good football team because as much as Boehly doesn't understand, football is 11 players at once.

So there will be an issue of development as the players will not be getting game time.
 
ShinjiNinja26 said:
It’s not affecting their ability in the short term but blowing through a billion in the space of 3 windows means they’re now stuck having to sell off academy players constantly every summer just to enable them to spend in the market. Would you like to see us in that situation? Flogging the likes of Mainoo and Garnacho etc. to sign the latest flavour of the month that may or may not work out? I certainly wouldn’t.
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I don’t think Chelsea plan to sell the likes of Mainoo and Garnacho. They are planning to sell the likes of Gallagher and Broja - who will not get them to the level required. They are refusing to sell Colwill.
 
romufc said:
False, they are in the Europa conference league.

Secondly, you cant just go and buy 20 youngsters and think you will have a very good football team because as much as Boehly doesn't understand, football is 11 players at once.

So there will be an issue of development as the players will not be getting game time.
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They are developing at clubs all over the globe to be fair, they are not all at Chelsea. Players like Kendry Paez and Estevão are still with their clubs, but have enormous potential.
 
Rozay said:
They are developing at clubs all over the globe to be fair, they are not all at Chelsea. Players like Kendry Paez and Estevão are still with their clubs, but have enormous potential.
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This is all hopeful and Chelsea don't have a great history of developing young players.
 
ShinjiNinja26 said:
It’s not affecting their ability in the short term but blowing through a billion in the space of 3 windows means they’re now stuck having to sell off academy players constantly every summer just to enable them to spend in the market. Would you like to see us in that situation? Flogging the likes of Mainoo and Garnacho etc. to sign the latest flavour of the month that may or may not work out? I certainly wouldn’t.
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I mean we're not selling the ones at that level of potential, or the ones considered to be at that level.

James got a new deal immediately, they've had a strict not for sale stance on Colwill since the get go and our next big prospect in line Tyrick George got a new deal.
 
horsechoker said:
This is all hopeful and Chelsea don't have a great history of developing young players.
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The old loan army was about making profitable loans. This loan situation now is about player development. The two are not really comparable. It is true that under Roman’s ownership, player development was not a goal with loans for the most part, he went out and bought prime talent.

This new ownership is trying to replicate the success they had with buying up the best young baseball talent, developing them, selling some for huge profit and keeping the best. Will be interesting to see if it works in club football.
 
Dan_F said:
Give Chelsea fans their due, they will give their absolute backing to their owners no questions asked. Imagine spending 20 years defending a Russian oligarch and now having to do the same thing to a private equity firm.
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Have you met any Chelsea fans outside of BlueLion? Most Chelsea fans I know online or in real life have been scathing in their criticism of this ownership.
 
Zaphod2319 said:
The old loan army was about making profitable loans. This loan situation now is about player development. The two are not really comparable. It is true that under Roman’s ownership, player development was not a goal with loans for the most part, he went out and bought prime talent.

This new ownership is trying to replicate the success they had with buying up the best young baseball talent, developing them, selling some for huge profit and keeping the best. Will be interesting to see if it works in club football.
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That just sounds like Chelsea are becoming Dortmund. That's fine if that's what they want but it's not a model that will lead to national or continental success on a regular basis.
 
horsechoker said:
This is all hopeful and Chelsea don't have a great history of developing young players.
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That’s literally untrue firstly, and in any case, they are not the ones developing them - their existing clubs are. Also, it’s no more ‘hopeful’ than any club, anywhere signing a footballer. At least the logic behind their hope is to sign the ones who look to have the most talent.
 
Dancfc said:
I mean we're not selling the ones at that level of potential, or the ones considered to be at that level.

James got a new deal immediately, they've had a strict not for sale stance on Colwill since the get go and our next big prospect in line Tyrick George got a new deal.
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I somewhat agree with you, but I also think it's kind of stupid to sell academy players when we're replacing them with similar level talent or worse. There's no chance, for example, that Badiashile or Disasi are better than Guehi or Tomori.

If we ended up with a Bastoni or Saliba level of CB, then you could argue fair enough, but the academy players we sold are no worse than the players we replaced them with and that is what is frustrating. Fofana is the big question mark here. If he can stay fit and then turns into the world class CB we think he can be, then you can say okay fair enough, but after two significant injuries in two years, how realistic is that really?
 
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