@Bluelion7 I wrote up some of my issues with Clearlake/Boehly and would love to hear your comments.
- The multi-club ownership. Said this a couple years ago and stand by it but I think any owner who dabbles in multi-club ownership is a cancer to the beautiful game. And I say this despite supporting a club that stands to benefit from the same owners also controlling Strasbourg but I just think it’s an utterly indefensible way of doing things. Ask any European fan what they think about multi-club models and 90% of us think it should be weeded out and killed with fire before the cancer spreads any further. I’m sure you think it’s a great new innovation to the sport, right?
- The handling of academy grown players. These owners have no idea what it means to be Chelsea. They could give less ducks about whether a player has grown up supporting the club and been raised by the club’s own academy. These private equity leeches will always prefer a foreign talent over a homegrown local boy of the same player quality if it means they can streamline the business and save even a tiny bit in wages, or if they think they can clock some delicious pure profit by selling off the homegrown player and replacing him with an imported one. It’s all just a business with zero room for emotion anywhere. I don’t know about you but football without emotion just seems boring as shit.
- The handling of the foreign youth policy. The youth hoarding has gotten to ridiculous proportions with hundreds of millions spent on an armada of young players with the intention of just farming them out on loan for other clubs to develop and then reaping the rewards ourselves. And I'm not talking about all the young players they've signed because there are those anyone with a set of eyes rates highly (ie. Estevao, Paez) and who will most likely be immediate first teamers upon arriving. I'm talking about the ones who just get bought because the scouts saw some potential in them but no thought goes into whether there's a pathway for each player or not. A few promising youngsters is okay but deary me they've really overdone it. Even though I can easily see scenario where this kind of strategy could lead to the club getting a few first teamers for a well below market value price I can’t help but think at the same time quite a few young players’ careers will get derailed along the way and I can’t say I’m a fan of this kind of scattergun youth strategy. I reckon very few of the numerous teenagers signed will even get a chance in the first team and eventually not everyone will even be afforded the best loan places for their development, thanks to the FIFA loan limits. I can guarantee to you with a 100% certainty within a few years we’re looking at a minimum few young players who haven’t developed quite as to expectations but who the club also can’t afford to sell at a big one-off on the books loss due to the financial regulations. At that point the club will use the loan spots for players with higher potential so those inbetweeners will just get kind of stuck and have their careers more or less ruined in the process. But hey what’s a few lives ruined if at least the business is booming, right? Isn’t that the American dream?
- The sponsorship fiasco(s). These arrogant wet wipes came in and exclaimed very publicly that they thought the previous regime didn’t do a very good job in increasing the club’s commercial incomes. Even if that may have been true, at the very least the club always had a shirt sponsor before each season started until these guys came marching in and started doing things their way. Now we’re going into a new season two years running without a main sponsor in place. Maybe inside your mind you can somehow spin this failure into something positive but to me this just screams amateur hour at the director level. Aside from pure incompetency what could possibly be the excuse for failing to secure a shirt sponsor when these clowns had all of last season to do that? Doesn't exactly fill one with confidence about these people knowing how to run a football club.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think everything the owners/directors have done is bad. In fact I think they’ve done quite a bit of good as well. The incentive-based salary structure has put the club in a much better position to being financially sustainable in the long run and despite some obvious mistakes in the transfer market they’ve also signed some really exciting and very talented players to the squad.
That I don’t agree with their methods and think they’re utterly soulless people doesn’t take away from the fact I rate the current squad quite highly and am feeling more optimistic about our chances than I did this time last year. I will continue to praise the good decisions but also call out the bad when I see things that don’t sit well with me, of which there is plenty.
