64 Wednesday May 25 2022 | the times
Sport
Roman Abramovich’s arrival at Chelsea
in 2003 was sudden and unexpected. As
the football world focused on David
Beckham’s transfer to Real Madrid,
the Russian oligarch’s £140 million
takeover, at the time a record for British
football, caught almost everyone by
surprise.
Nineteen years later, however,
Abramovich’s departure from Stamford
Bridge has been rather more public and
protracted, if no less dramatic. It has
been a remarkable story: the sale of a
west London football club sparked by a
military invasion in eastern Europe
that developed into a battle between
billionaires with egos as big as their
bank balances. They were backed by
small armies of investors, lawyers, spin
doctors and advisers, with a sprinkling
of sporting stardust, too.
The group led by Sir Martin Brought-
on wheeled out Lewis Hamilton and
Serena Williams, adding to the heavy-
weight presence of Lord Coe. The
consortium fronted by Stephen Pagli-
uca, the Boston Celtics co-owner,
tried to secure fan approval by team-
ing up with John Terry. Nice try, but
something of a miscalculation. Sir Jim
Ratcliffe, himself almost a sporting
celebrity after his investment in
cycling, sailing, Formula One and foot-
ball, stunned the sellers by offering
£4.25 billion in a text message.
Until the war began, insiders said
Abramovich did not believe that
Vladimir Putin would actually invade
Ukraine. It is claimed he was insisting
as much only a day before the first
Russian troops crossed the border on
February 24.
Within a day, however, Abramovich
was among those named in parliament
as Boris Johnson announced sanctions
against Russian individuals with assets
in the UK. For Abramovich, the situa-
tion was suddenly akin to the wonder-
ful scene in the 1980s film Trading
Places, when Randolph and Mortimer
Duke order a hyperventilating Wilson
to “sell, sell, sell!”
The instructions were delivered by
Abramovich to Joe Ravitch, a straight-
talking New York banker armed with a
law degree from Yale, fluent Russian
and the ability to create an auction that
has secured the highest price in history
for a sporting franchise.
It was from Ravitch’s Park Avenue of-
fices, home to The Raine Group, which
he co-founded, that the search for a
new owner began. Assisted by Colin
Neville, another senior figure at Raine,
they went into overdrive. On March 2,
Abramovich made public his plan to
sell and donate proceeds to the victims
of the war, but major players were
already getting themselves organised.
The Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss
was first to declare a public interest. It
soon emerged he had the support of
Todd Boehly, the co-owner of the Los
Angeles Dodgers baseball team, and
Jonathan Goldstein, a London-based
property investor, Tottenham Hotspur
fan and a long-time friend and business
partner of Boehly’s. Only later would it
transpire that a large part of their fund-
ing was from Clearlake Capital, a Cali-
fornia-based investment firm. Boehly
had explored the possibility of buying
Chelsea in the past, so entered the con-
test with the advantage of having
already completed due diligence and
looking forward to planting his coun-
try’s flag on the Stamford Bridge turf but
was not heard from again.By March 25, Raine — under the gui-
dance of Buck and the Chelsea director,
Marina Granovskaia — had a shortlist
of four bidders: the Boehly group; the
consortium led by the Ricketts family,
the Chicago Cubs owners; the group
fronted by Broughton and funded by
the Crystal Palace shareholders Josh
Harris and David Blitzer; and the
Pagliuca group.
So began the second stage of the
process. The bidders visited Stamford
Bridge, interviewed key members of
staff and examined company accounts.
Curiously, they were able to quiz Buck
and Granovskaia, when the same two
people — loyal, long-serving Abram-
ovich lieutenants — would have a
significant say in which group was
presented to the government for
approval. It sparked some concern
about a potential conflict of interest.
Via a Chelsea spokesman, Buck and
Granovskaia have denied communicat-
ing to the rival groups a desire to remain
under the new owners in roles that com-
mand annual salaries of between
£2 million and £3 million. They also dis-
miss any suggestion that they gave even
the slightest impression the successful
bidder would need to include them in
their plans. They denied asking the
potential owners if they could see a role
for them in the new Chelsea.If anyone knows what Thomas Tuchel
and Chelsea should expect over the
coming days, weeks, months and years
it is Ned Colletti. He was in the same
position as Tuchel ten years ago as the
manager of a sports team that had been
bought for an unprecedented price by a
consortium led by Todd Boehly.
Colletti was the general manager of
the LA Dodgers when Boehly’s
Guggenheim group bought them for
$2 billion (about £1.6 billion) — more
than double the record paid for a base-
ball team at the time. It was only the
start of the spending. Over the past
decade Boehly’s group has renovated
Dodger Stadium and the Dodgers won
the World Series in 2020 after being
revived as one of the sport’s dominant
teams.
Colletti remembers their first meet-
ing. “Think big,” he was told. “I wantHow Boehly triumphed in
had a dialogue with Raine. By mid-
March, they were the clear favourites,
strengthened by the addition of two
high-profile Chelsea season-tickets
holders, the Tory peer and Times colum-
nist Daniel Finkelstein and the PR guru
Barbara Charone, who would become
non-executive directors.The sanctions issued to Abramovich on
March 10 that essentially placed Chel-
sea under temporary government con-
trol sparked a degree of panic. Chelsea’s
teams were told they could continue in
competitions but as a business they
were heavily restricted, unable to rene-
gotiate player contracts or, briefly, use
the company credit cards that had been
temporarily frozen by a jittery bank.
When the government told Chelsea
they had been limited to a budget of
£20,000 per match for away travel, the
club’s chairman, Bruce Buck, had to ex-
plain to some young, slightly naive civil
servants that they would struggle to get
their staff and players much further than
Gatwick airport. The bar was raised.
Some self-declared bidders made more
noise than others. Nick Candy, another
London property developer, never ap-
peared to have the wealth or backing. A
Turkish business tycoon said he wasSources from the rival bidding groups
nevertheless felt it was essential to in-
volve Buck and Granovskaia, despite
the fact the Broughton group intended
to make him club chairman. Broughton
had previously occupied the role at Liv-
erpool and there was some concern
about the judgment of Buck, 76, espe-
cially since he had been a central figure
in the European Super League debacle.
Once the Boehly group was chosen it
became clear that Buck and Granov-
skaia would likely be sticking around.
For five weeks’ work Granovskaia will
receive £20 million, with Buck and
selected others splitting £30 million. It
remains to be seen exactly how long
Buck and Granovskaia do remain.By the time they had been named on
the shortlist of four at the end of April,
the rival groups had been asked to
increase their offers by £500 million,
commit a total of £1.75 billion to the
stadium redevelopment and an invest-
ment in playing staff, and sign an agree-
ment preventing them from selling a
majority stake for at least ten years.
There were clauses to limit the amount
of debt the club can be saddled with.
A day before the Boehly group was
granted preferred bidder status came
perhaps the most startling develop-
ment: Ratcliffe’s intervention. He had
flirted with the idea of buying Chelsea
before, so Raine spoke to the Monaco-
based Briton when Abramovich decid-
ed to sell, only to be told he was not
interested. On April 28, Ratcliffe
changed his mind, striding into Buck’s
office. Buck told him he was too late,
but a conversation between Ratcliffe
and Ravitch took place. The 69-year-
old made a bid, with insiders claiming
it arrived initially in a three-line mes-
sage tapped out on his phone. “The ri-
val groups had spent millions on their
proposals,” said one source. “And yet
Jim thought he could beat them all
with an offer in a text.” If Ratcliffe
thought being a purely British bid
made him more attractive, he was
mistaken. To a Russian oligarch, a
Russian director, an American law-
yer and a New York merchant bank, it
meant very little.On April 29, the Boehly consortium
was chosen. It was after that, Chelsea
insist, that Boehly discussed the bonus-
es for Buck and Granovskaia. Behdad
Eghbali, the Clearlake co-founder, and
Boehly booked suites at one of
London’s finest hotels but were locked
in meetings at Stamford Bridge. By May
6, a purchase agreement had been
signed and Boehly was spotted with
George Osborne, the former chancel-
lor now working for the boutique in-
vestment bank Robey Warshaw.
There were some major obstacles to
overcome before securing government
approval, not least the £1.6 billion loan
owed by Chelsea’s parent company to a
trust in Jersey. In the end Chelsea’s
lawyers and Raine came up with a legal
framework that guaranteed the money
would not end up with Abramovich or
his beneficiaries, but Osborne and Sir
Simon Robey also played a vital role in
helping to structure the deal to the
satisfaction of the Treasury. Boehly’s
confidence in the outcome was clear
from the meetings he held with
Thomas Tuchel, the men’s head coach,
and Emma Hayes, the women’s manag-
er, at Chelsea’s training ground.
The approach on Sunday evening,
after the 2-1 home win over Watford,
was just as relaxed. A casually dressed
Boehly greeted the players as they
came off the pitch before joining them
in the dressing room for photographs
— it was the end of the season but the
dawn of a new era at Stamford Bridge.University fostered love of
you to think of players that you’ve
always wanted to get but could never
afford to get. We don’t have to worry
about the money now, we’ve got to
worry about getting the team as good as
it can get.”
There was action behind those
words. Within eight months, the new
owners had invested close to £800 mil-
lion across the Dodgers, from stadium
redevelopment to player contracts.
They became the biggest spenders in
baseball history in terms of payroll
in the space of a year, and yet still cut
the price of stadium parking from $15
to $10.
“They are all about winning and
spending what it takes to do what they
think is right,” Colletti told The Times.
Boehly was very much involved in
the Dodgers’ success and yet, unlike the
purchase of Chelsea for £4.25 billion,
where he has been the face of the con-
sortium, at the Dodgers his involve-
ment is less known. An article in the Losp
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s v p J w t m m RyerMatt Lawton
Chief Sports
CorrespondentThe front man
by Tom RoddyGranovskaia, the Chelsea director, will
get a £20m bonus from the takeoverSport Chelsea takeover