Chelsea’s power struggle: Can Todd Bohely afford to buy out Clearlake? | ESPN FC

I'm gab he's juules gray skies over West London gray skies as we were brainstorming for the show as well jwes because I'm going to do Italy France as our main segment you're like oh no that's too painful no just kidding no right Le we will deal with that in quick hits later on but that was all the way back on Friday so I something a little bit different driven by the news of the the Bloomberg story uh it's about Chelsea and it's about the tension between two of the lead ERS bad Bali and and TOD boy um now but I want to Brad this out because boring Chelsea and we know like you know it's a freak Show whatever so we'll mention that but also I want to ask a question of how do we want our clubs run because I think football has changed I it does my head in every time some Muppet pops up and says oh look oh we have a rich owner and like how rich is he do we have M like no this is not how football works anymore and hasn't worked this way uh in a long long time okay so the story on Friday is basically for those who don't know there's a company called Clear Lake which two of its principles are Jose filano and B dibali they have 61.5% of Chelsea yeah they're an investment fan that they are yeah they're an investment F I don't know exactly how they Define themselves but that's as good term as any uh the rest the other Chelsea shares Todd Bley has 133% of them uh and the rest are split between a guy named hanor Viss who is like a million years old I seriously he's like 89 or something uh and this other guy named something Walter who I don't know much about um so until now Bly or until last year let's say B's B been in the face of Chelsea and as you know he was the deao sporting director in the first summer and that's when everybody made fun of him and the way he looks and he looks like a Collegiate wrestler which he was enough well there's a shock right Captain Mead um since then he and imbali have reportedly they don't seei they report falling out they deny they still have a professional relationship I'm like of course you have to say that you have to have a professional relationship you're not morons right you're working together and the idea is that Bly uh is that now Clear Lake so iali and Feliciano's group they want to buy Bly share that's what Bloomberg reported uh and then counter reports bll come forward says no well what if I raise x billion what if I buy out Clear Lake so there's obviously going to be this question I don't think Todd Bley can come up with two billion to buy out or however much it would take to buy out Clear Lake yeah um just because it's not that easy to raise money and to buy them out they need to agree to sell right you can't just put on like a they need to agree to sell here's the difference and this is another part which people often forget right and this isn't just Chelsea this I'm broadening it out now right so if I'm the Glazer family I have a bunch of siblings in a room yeah we have to agree but you know ultimately it's all on the family Clear Lake raises money from investors from from Pension funds to uh private Equity to hedge funds and so on they're not raising money generally some of it is but they're not generally raising money from Individual investors they're raising they're they're raising money from people who have a responsibility to the guys who have given them money so they have to kind of show a profit they have to show a business plan and so on So in theory if B says here's five billion or an enormous amount of money Clear Lake are going to be under pressure to say yes because if people invested with Clear Lake say look I don't give a crap about Chelsea I gave you money because you said we're going to turn this into a business here's somebody who can give us a big return now pull the trigger and go away right Bully's issue and it's not 100% clear where that 133% of Chelsea that he owns is actually all his money or whether he's borrowed money as well because this is the other thing um I people don't seem to understand this but all these rich people like Jules when you go and you buy a new refrigerator yeah you probably go and you buy the refrigerator and pay with your own money right um most of these people when they invest they say look I have 10 billion in assets somewhere it's not like they sell their assets to to go and buy say buy their chunk of Chelsea no they borrow money against those assets that they have in in many Cas in most cases yeah um they buy Bor a low interest rate whatever and then they acquire Chelsea with that money and it's secured against the other assets that they have so they're not super liquid yeah so the reason I'm bringing all this up and why I we're going to broaden this out on the gabin Jes podcast is does this make for stable ownership and what are the alternative models whether it's the membership model like we have at Bayern or Real Madrid whether we have the super wealthy deao State ownership uh Manchester City Paris sgain and there are also some rich the the family office like uh like practically Arsenal is or Manchester United so there's different models and we'll bore you with that for a little bit and then we'll get on the quick hits [Music]