Chelsea as the "Beachhead" - The long-term vision for Chelsea & BlueCo

The owners plans are bigger than just Chelsea... though Chelsea is at the centre

One of the topics which comes up a lot is “what is the plan?”, and questions about the concept of a multi-club model. So I thought it might be a good idea to unpack the real plans of BlueCo, the ownership consortium which owns both Chelsea, and now Strasbourg. Because those plans, although they have Chelsea as the centrepiece, are way bigger than just Chelsea.

So the majority stakeholders in BlueCo are Clearlake Capital, represented by Behdad Eghbali and Jose Feliciano. They are Private Equity investors. Their goal is to buy assets, and grow their value.

Chelsea is not the only goal for our owners. It’s the club that heads up a network of clubs. It’s the end goal, the major financial asset of a larger network of clubs. All these clubs feed back to Chelsea. And the goal at Chelsea is to have a winning team.

As Behdad Eghbali, co-head of Clearlake Capital, said in late 2022:

“We thought Chelsea was a beach-head. It was a beach-head to do multi-clubs, we wanted to start with the large global asset, which was Chelsea.

We think, frankly, winning, a good product on the pitch, and commercial success, go hand in hand. You have to have a good product to generate the sponsors, and for the content to work. You’ve got to win. Winning on the field, you have to do that to have commercial success.”

No one can be in any doubt, our owners want Chelsea to be winning consistently. 10th place, no Champions League, no trophies, is not going to be good enough for these guys.

Now in terms of Chelsea as a beach-head, well beach-head is a military term for when you capture a piece of land, usually a beach, and take control of it. You then put all your big guns and assets there, establish a strong foundation, and then build out from that.

So for Clearlake, Chelsea is intended to be the focus, the foundation, the centre-piece of a network of clubs, which will fall under the banner of “BlueCo”. The first of these of course, being FC Strasbourg - whose fans are very resistant to the BlueCo ownership.

When you think of BlueCo and their vision, think of the Red Bull group, but with a super-club at it’s centre. Red Bull with a Chelsea, Bayern, or some other major club as its centre-piece. That’s the vision our owners have.

Now you can have your own views on the ethics of the concept of the multi-club in football - and that’s a whole article in itself. I certainly have my concerns about it as a model, whilst seeing some of its benefits. But heading up a multi-club model is going to be Chelsea’s reality going forward.

Chelsea’s success potentially brings the biggest return on their investment, the biggest revenues, the biggest profits. So the goal would be to build a network of profitable clubs which all feed the bigger club and contribute to the value of both Chelsea and BlueCo.

Here’s Behdad again, this time explaining the vision for the multi-club network:

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“You have clubs which can be development pathways for players, where you’re managing your content and your labour costs much more effectively, you’re signing players and keep re-upping them. We think there’s a path to manage labour costs and still produce a winning product, using data, using the multi-club.

We think the multi-club can be a useful tool for playing trading. The ones we’ve looked at who do it successfully, Red Bull who we like and do it well, on £15m, maybe £20-25m, up to £40m payroll for their largest club, generate around £50-100m per year in profit from player trading/sales.

If done right, you can make money on each specific enterprise (club), and its’ the perfect pathway to developing talent. You don’t have to spend crazy money on payroll. If you apply some of “Brighton’s IP” into developing talent but keeping your talent, not subject to free agency, we think that can be a sustainable model”

• Behdad Eghbali, November 2022

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That last paragraph especially is as close as you’re going to get to explaining the vision, and to explaining why Chelsea have tapped up talent from Brighton.

The vision, long term, is that you have a global scouting and recruiting network - likely headed up by potential new appointment Ben Jewell (below). Then someone like Jewell signs up top young talent either for Chelsea, or to be loaned to these clubs to develop, or alternatively signed by BlueCo clubs and developed, then either sold for profit - much like Red Bull do - or to another club within the network.

The incoming loans manager, Josh Marsh, would then potentially create development pathways and manage loans between Chelsea and other BlueCo clubs in particular, and ensure all BlueCo players have appropriate loans for their development

The best players, ultimately, would join Chelsea, probably for lower fees either directly or from a multi-club club, and initially on lower salaries. Meaning in the long term, you build a successful Chelsea team on a lower wage bill, with a consistent flow of young talent from the various multi clubs, as well as the Chelsea academy.

This allows Chelsea to build a strong, young, high energy team with an overall lower wage bill. It also means Chelsea can eventually focus their increasing revenues on signing truly elite footballers where needed, to supplement the talent coming through the academy and multi-club network.

We can joke about how much the owners love Brighton, but all of us can surely admit they are a very well run club with excellent scouting, good structure and a long-term approach, which is helping them overachieve considerably. The idea our owners have is to to this “on steroids”.

So for example, instead of selling Moises Caicedo or Alexis Mac Allister after signing them and developing them in your first team or on loan, you keep them in the first team, and they become long term players for your club. Likely on lower salaries and without the need to spend as big, as often. If you ever choose to sell, you make a profit.

The reason we hired out of Brighton, I believe, was partly to integrate the best elements of their “IP” into Chelsea, but doing it on the scale and with the ambitions of a global super-club.

The concerns many fans have had, with some foundation, is that we’ve imported the lower expectations, lower “standards” and mid-table levels into the club as well as any positive aspects. Their first managerial hire, Graham Potter, was the most visible example of this.

I personally don’t believe that’s true, especially given Behdad’s publicly stated ambitions for Chelsea. He’s not at Chelsea to be a mid-table club, he’s here to win, partly at least because winning brings him the most revenues and profits.

But the vision Clearlake and BlueCo has goes way beyond Chelsea. The project is way bigger than Chelsea, though Chelsea is the centrepiece.

The vision, is to create a massive multi-club network to emulate or even exceed Red Bull, “BlueCo” network of club, all of which feed into the beach-head club, Chelsea. We are destined to be the elite level club at the centre of a huge multi-club network, the club which generates the biggest, most significant profits and has the biggest success.

Of course, one thing we have to accept to, it it’s a long term project. We won’t see the bigger, wider scope of this or see the machine of the BlueCo network fully and smoothly operational for a few years. This is an operation that’s clearly set up for long-term, sustainable success and growth.

The problem with this is, football fans tend to think about what’s happening right now or the next few months, not in 5 or 10 years time - and the fans views matter in any football club.

All this said, I suspect if they have success, they’ll keep some interest in the network. Maybe they’ll sell a controlling stake (as the Glazers have recently, though in NO way are our owners like the Glazers) in 8-10 years time. But I suspect they will remain stakeholders, provided the club and network make the profits they anticipate, so they can still benefit from it financially. They could even keep control for longer than 10 years if it’s being majorly successful. That’s the future I see for Chelsea and BlueCo.

I still believe they, and of course Chelsea, will ultimately be successful. They are new to football and still learning how the football world works, but they’re smart and ambitious enough to eventually get it right. There’ve been some big bumps in the road and might still be more, along the way. Mistakes have been made and these must be acknowledged.

However, overall, despite my (and others) ongoing and valid concerns over the sporting directors and decision making structure at Chelsea, I still think there’s reasons for us to be optimistic about the long-term future of the club.

The ambitions of the owners are big, and right now they’ve only scratched the surface in terms of what they want to do, and to achieve.

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