Todd Boehly rode in as Chelsea’s white knight in May 2022 and the poor billionaire’s had a rough time of it since.
We’ve ranked the many mistakes he’s made at Stamford Bridge from minor to major.
18) Premier League All-Stars
Starting a pitch by claiming the Premier League could “learn a lesson from American sports” was never going to go down well, and Boehly’s suggestion of a North versus South All-Star game was predictably met with xenophobically tinged responses from people who Know English Football.
It appeared to be an offhand comment made with the best intentions of giving back to the football pyramid, but the one extra game in the calendar that, let’s face it, loads of people would watch and would provide millions of pounds for smaller clubs was a terrible idea as everyone would definitely get injured during that one specific, half-arsed game.
17) The Mohamed Salah, Kevin De Bruyne academy
At that same New York conference in September Boehly claimed Chelsea have “one of the best academies in the world”, which is arguable, but using Salah and De Bruyne to evidence the worth of that academy rather sullies the argument, and by association any other point about Chelsea or football in general.
Salah broke through at Egyptian side Al Mokawloon before moving to Basel, while De Bruyne made the first team at Genk before a transfer to Chelsea. And namedropping either of those two players to attest to Chelsea’s excellence in developing stars is unwise.
Using Boehly’s earlier All-Star comments against him, Thierry Henry advised the American owner to “learn your own lessons and then come back and teach us something” in reference to his lack of knowledge on the history of his own football club.
16) ‘Disrespecting’ Benfica over Enzo Fernandez
All’s well that ends well, right? Well, Chelsea did get Enzo Fernandez but aren’t now on the best of terms with Benfica, who will no doubt have a player or two they’ll want in the future.
Benfica boss Roger Schmidt wasn’t at all happy with Chelsea’s approach for Fernandez. Referred to as “the club who wants Enzo”, like they’re a footballing Lord Voldermort, Chelsea were accused of making the midfielder “crazy” through suggesting they would meet his £106m release clause, then not doing so, before meeting the Portuguese club’s demands in the end.
15) Not pushing harder for Anthony Gordon
Full disclosure, when we did this ranking back in May 2023 this was still titled ‘Pushing for Anthony Gordon’, but he’s made us all look a bit daft, fully deserved his nomination for the Young Player of the Season and is now being heavily linked with a move to Liverpool for around twice what Chelsea would have paid for him.
14) Dressing room faux pas
Football is arguably too precious about dressing rooms. While American sports allow journalists and fans into their ‘inner sanctums’, footballers and managers appear to want some sort of DBS check for anyone thinking of setting foot in the holiest of all places.
The Chelsea players were ‘taken aback’ when Mykhaylo Mudryk and his entourage were granted entry with Booehly ahead of the Crystal Palace game back in January, but actually it sounds entirely reasonable to introduce a new signing to the players before a game.
However, attempting to bring a group of guests and their children, with no particular affiliation to Chelsea, into the dressing room at half-time in a Premier League game, is a bold move, not least because bringing children into a dressing room with adult men, who could be changing, could be swearing, could be doing anything, feels all wrong.
Thomas Tuchel told Boehly to do one, and was sacked four days later.
13) ‘Embarrassing’ rant
We don’t know everything about what happened, but what we do know is he called the players “embarrassing”, singled a senior player out for criticism leaving them ‘disillusioned’, and at least one onlooker thought it was “weird”. It doesn’t sound great.
Arsene Wenger reckons any new Chelsea manager, and there have been plenty in the last two years, should have an anti-Boehly clause inserted in their contract. It appears that clause is already in place for the sport of football as a whole.
12) Outsourcing medical work
To be fair, dismissed pair Paco Biosca and Thierry Laurent weren’t doing a great job as medical chief and head physio – Chelsea topped the injury count in the Premier League in 2021/22 with 97 according to Howden’s European Football Injury Index. But the injury problems have ramped up significantly since Boehly decided to outsource some of the medical work to a private physiotherapy company.
Denis Zakaria, Reece James, Raheem Sterling, N’Golo Kante, Wesley Fofana, Ben Chilwell, Armando Broja, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Christian Pulisic, Edouard Mendy and Thiago Silva all spent significant time on the sidelines in 2022/23, and we barely saw James, Romeo Lavia or Christopher Nkunku last season, with Marc Cucurella, Ben Chilwell, Carney Chukwuemeka, Trevoh Chalobah and Benoit Badiashile also out for a big chunk of the campaign.
In a leaked private message in which he explained why his client and his teammates were struggling due to a ‘lack of pilates and terrain work’, Chalobah’s personal trainer said it best: ‘It’s an absolute mess at the moment, bro.’
11) Signing Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang
Given we were told by Boehly that the club’s decision to sack Tuchel was made over a stretch of time and not as a result of the defeat to Dinamo Zagreb, how the hell can he explain the signing of Aubameyang? He was a 33-year-old striker, who was infamously kicked out of Arsenal for being a bad influence in the dressing room, signed purely because he scored a load of goals under Tuchel eight years ago.
With his transfer fee and annual salary taken into account, Aubameyang cost Chelsea roughly £20k per minute played. He then went on to score and assist a bucketload for Marseille, because of course he did.
10) Failed hijacks
When this list was first published in January 2023 this section was also titled ‘failed hijacks’ as we questioned why the result of cherry-picking people that we assumed were among the best in the business from Brighton, RB Leipzig and elsewhere to oversee all things transfers, those individuals appeared to be engaging with the market in the same way anyone with an interest in football with access to the interweb might – gossip columns.
And although we very quickly had egg thrown in our face as Mykhaylo Mudryk did in fact end up hog-tied and brought to Chelsea over Arsenal, it remains a ‘failed hijack’ by virtue of the impact of said individual. Arsenal got Leandro Trossard, who’s been brilliant, while Mudryk has – save for brief snippets of Shakhtar-like quality – resembled a lost puppy and shoots as though his right foot is made of sweaty salami.
Good thing Boehly’s tied him down for eight years, and then added took up the option of a further year in the midst of his terribleness.
9) Not buying a proven striker
We love Nicolas Jackson, and at £32m he’s been a decent signing, but to spend just six per cent of £1bn on strikers makes no sense at a club that’s been in dire need of a goalscorer since Diego Costa left over six years ago.
8) Performance-related contracts
It’s one of those things that sounds far better than it actually is. It seems reasonable to pay players in a team according to how well that team has done. A big problem is that some players are negatively affected by the team’s poor performance and others – those with their wages assured – are not. It caused significant issues in the dressing room last season and how is Cole Palmer going to feel right now as the Premier League’s Young Player of the Year who’s not earned a bonus because his teammates have been vastly inferior?
And although this new system hasn’t seemingly been an issue so far in the transfer market, given Chelsea aren’t in the Champions League next season, a similarly big club with a secured pay packet will surely hold the advantage this summer and for as many transfer windows as it takes for the ‘project’ to be realised.
7) Re-apppointing Frank Lampard
It didn’t really matter, but let’s be clear, re-hiring Lampard was completely f***ing mental. To think all that group of players needed was a pep-talk from a club legend perfectly illustrates how deluded Boehly is. 11 games, one win, eight defeats.
6) Selling Conor Gallagher
Can anyone think of another example of a top football club forcing their de facto captain into a transfer? Possibly if that player’s been a bit of tit or they’re passed their best, but other than that we doubt it, because it’s ridiculous.
Add to that the fact that he was Chelsea’s best player other than Cole Palmer last season, has been at the club since he was a wee boy and is being sold for £20m below market value and it’s one of the most ridiculous decisions in football.
The two-year contract they offered – presumably just do they could say they tried – is insulting and we’re glad Gallagher told them where to go. Who would want to play for a football club like that anyway? Fingers crossed he tears it up at Atletico Madrid and shoves it in their faces.
5) Hiring Graham Potter
Let’s not claim now that is wasn’t an exciting appointment. Potter could have been the man to usher in a new dawn at Chelsea. And yet, in his bid to be nothing like Roman Abramovich, Todd Boehly has been more Roman Abramovich than the Russian oligarch himself, sacking managers with greater regularity than the man whose absolute favourite thing was to swing the axe.
Boehly was said to be surprised by the strength of the fans’ anger at Chelsea’s performances under Potter, and realised that he had no choice but to show him the door with his own relationship with the fanbase at risk. He has of course f***ed that relationship up now anyway.
Hired after pre-season, Potter was handed a poorly balanced and bulging squad featuring a combination of very young players and those that were entirely disillusioned with the club. It was never going to work.
Things didn’t go according to plan for Graham Potter at Chelsea.
4) £1bn on what?
They ended up doubling their initial offer for Wesley Fofana, eventually landing him for £75m, shelled out £9m for six months of Joao Felix, plus his hefty weekly wages, £88m on Mudryk, £106m on Fernandez, £115m on Caicedo and over £1bn in total on players, very few of whom have so far proved to be worth anywhere near their various, generally exorbitant, transfer fees.
3) Sacking Thomas Tuchel
“It wasn’t a decision that was made about a single win or loss, it was made about what we thought was the right vision for the club.” It’s a shame Boehly’s vision couldn’t include the manager who had won the Champions League a year previously and had taken Chelsea to six finals. It’s also a shame Boehly’s vision wasn’t apparent before he spent £270m on players for the manager he would then sack five days after the summer transfer window closed.
Simon Jordan reckons the secret reasons behind Tuchel’s Chelsea sacking would “make people’s eyes water” but on the face of it – even given his struggles at Bayern – the decision looked incredibly rash, and the timing downright ridiculous.
2) The FFP mess
Nothing sums up Todd Boehly’s time at Chelsea quite like them not being able to afford to play in the Europa Conference League.
Firstly, the Europa Conference League? Jesus. When he took over they were the reigning Champions League winners. Now they’ve got to hope Manchester City beat Manchester United to ensure they play in Europe’s second tier rather than the third.
It remains to be seen whether they would want to play in the Europa League, but reports earlier this year suggested they would rather be banned than play in the ECL, because they’ve spent so much money that they couldn’t afford the financial hit of playing under UEFA’s stricter financial rules.
The one way in which they may manage to stay within the European rules would be through selling all those delicious ‘pure profit’ players, otherwise known as the academy graduates, who grew up in and love the football club, but have big fat Euro symbols floating over their heads.
Boehly’s already got rid of Mason Mount, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Ethan Ampadu, Callum Hudson-Odoi, Lewis Hall, Billy Gilmour, Ian Maatsen and Conor Gallagher, and they’re desperate to be rid of Trevoh Chalobah and Armando Broja. So much for soul and identity.
1) Sacking Mauricio Pochettino
Reports suggest Todd Boehly was actually happy to keep Pochettino and it was co-owner Behdad Eghbali who was ‘lukewarm’ and pushed for his exit, so this is more a Clearlake mistake than one that rests on Boehly, who stuck his head above the parapet early in the American reign and so gets the majority of the rotten tomatoes launched in his direction.
Anyway, onto the ludicrous reasons for his departure. Apparently they were ‘concerned by Pochettino’s tactics’ and his ‘antiquated’ training methods, which given as of two years ago these owners had next to no knowledge of football whatsoever they must have swatted up impressively in the meantime.
Perhaps they didn’t see the relationship Pochettino has built with the players, his work on the training pitch and in one-on-one chats coming to fruition. Literally everyone else did. There won’t have been a single rival fan, who will have had growing concerns that the Chelsea sh*tstorm might be about to abate to make way for a sensible and dangerous football team, that didn’t punch the air with glee at the club heading right back to square one under a manager that the majority of the players clearly don’t want because they want the man that’s just been shown the door.
The owners also ‘expected quicker progress given the significant investment on players’, which is unreasonable as they bought children even before you pair that grievance with another reason for Pochettino leaving being because the owners denied his request to be more involved in signing players. Essentially they spent loads of money on players Pochettino didn’t want, and that’s his fault.
What they want is a yes man, and no half-decent coach is going to be that at Chelsea because they can’t trust the people above them to make the right decisions. They had an experienced coach in Tuchel, who pushed back and got sacked, hired a young gun in Graham Potter, who couldn’t hack it and got sacked, hired an experienced coach in Pochettino, who pushed back and got sacked, and now they’ve got another up-and-comer like Potter, who will presumably be on this list as a terrible appointee within six months.
After Enzo Maresca it will be Diego Simeone, and so on and so on until they run the club into the ground.