Chelsea learn the hard way that co-owners rarely work in football

The night before Liverpool’s former owners met the media at Anfield for the first time in February 2007, a meeting was held to discuss the proceedings.

George Gillett, a junk bond millionaire, had initially been thrown out of the club for not having enough pockets. To change his options, he enlisted the help of Inner Circle Sports, a New York City investment bank. Eventually, the talks led him to Tom Hicks, someone he had worked with before after they had invested money in a meatpacking company.

Hicks’ interest in Liverpool came relatively late, and as a result – according to a club official who was present at the time but spoke to the club – The Athletics on condition of anonymity to protect their current position — it was suggested that Gillett answer the first questions in the press conference. Hicks would have none of it. “I’ll go first,” he said. And he got his way.

It was an early indication that this marriage was unlikely to last. Within months, the club was unofficially in the grip of a civil war, with the co-owners no longer speaking to each other.

Their reign continued for three gruelling years, until a High Court ruling led to another sale, this time to Fenway Sports Group (FSG). The whole operation only served to underline how difficult it is to make co-ownership work in the exciting world of Premier League football.

George Gillett (left) and Tom Hicks reveal their plans for Liverpool in 2007 (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

All of which brings us to Chelsea and the battle between co-owners Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali of Clearlake Capital.

Fans of the London club may not appreciate the comparison, but if they want to understand how and why things can go wrong so quickly with co-owners, they would do better to look north.

In the role of Gillett you have Boehly. Both are American businessmen with existing sporting interests (Gillett owned the Montreal Canadiens in ice hockey, Boehly is part-owner of the LA Dodgers in baseball) who were wealthy enough to control one of England’s major sporting institutions, but not wealthy enough to do so. And to realize the great ambitions of those clubs.

The parallels don’t end there. Gillett only completed his takeover after other bidders failed. With Liverpool in desperate need of cash to fund a new stadium project, he returned with Hicks.

At Chelsea, Boehly was only able to claim the club as his own thanks to money from Clearlake and Eghbali. And here too, time was of the essence: the British government had set a deadline of May 31, 2022 for the sale of Chelsea, amid ongoing sanctions against the previous owner, Roman Abramovich, a Russian oligarch.

Since the takeover was completed, Boehly has made much of the headlines, but Eghbali has played a major role in many internal processes and decision-making. The same was true at Liverpool, where Hicks – despite being introduced to the club by Gillett – was always the first name to be mentioned when their names were mentioned together.

If anything, Liverpool’s owners fell apart even faster than Chelsea’s. In Brian Reade’s book on the period, An Epic Swindle, he quotes an anonymous senior football executive and a Liverpool fan who met both owners individually.

“They had only been co-owners of the club for two months, but George was talking about his vision versus his partner’s vision. When I later had lunch with Tom and some of his American colleagues, I asked about the dynamics of their relationship. Tom shrugged and said, ‘You’d better ask him,’ pointing to a senior figure at Inner Circle Sports, who had brought the two together for the deal.”

From the outset there was a lack of understanding as to who was really in charge at Liverpool. This was because each partner held an equal shareholding – a difference with Boehly and Clearlake, the latter’s share totalling 61.5 per cent and Boehly’s less than 13 per cent.

By December 2007, as further disagreements emerged over whether Anfield should be revamped or relocated (sound familiar, Chelsea fans?), Gillett had already begun exploring an exit strategy, having realised he had made a monumental mistake with his choice of partner.

The challenges of running a business in the meat industry were not unlike those of a Liverpool-sized football club: a responsibility that provoked emotion, scrutiny and criticism, each factor testing a person’s ego. Those who dealt with Hicks—a brash Texan whose investment company initially made money from radio and soft drinks—suggested that his was as big as Mount Rushmore.

Personality conflicts are often at the root of co-ownership implosions, although the tensions are often as much strategic as personal in nature.

Take Crystal Palace, probably the club whose current ownership problems most closely resemble those of Chelsea in the top division.

In 2010, Palace were brought out of administration by a group of wealthy local supporters led by Steve Parish. After an unexpected promotion to the Premier League in 2013 and a few seasons of struggle, the ownership model changed, with Parish seeking outside investment from America in the form of private equity tycoons Josh Harris and David Blitzer, who bought shares in 2015, and John Textor, who bought around 40 per cent of the club six years later. His stake has since risen to 45 per cent.

John Textor wants full control of a Premier League club (Wagner Meier/Getty Images)

Despite their widely divergent interests, Parish, Textor, Harris and Blitzer all have equal voting power, which is a problem given the strategic differences between them.

Parish, who runs Palace on a day-to-day basis, wants to pursue a sustainable long-term economic model based on infrastructure improvements, while Textor is keen to attack the transfer market and capitalise on other elements of his Eagle Football multi-club model (he also owns Ligue 1 club Olympique Lyon, Brazil’s Botafogo and Belgium’s RWD Molenbeek). Blitzer and Harris appear generally content to maintain the status quo.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Palace are in the grip of a Chelsea-style civil war, but the strategic impasse effectively means that the club is stuck. That is why Textor is now trying to sell his stake in Palace and buy Everton, which Farhad Moshiri has been trying to sell for a few years.

Moshiri has officially been the sole owner of Everton since 2016, when he replaced the late Bill Kenwright, who remained as chairman. Although Kenwright’s power had disappeared, he remained an influential and prominent presence around the club, a point that created its own problems. His views did not always align with Moshiri’s, particularly around decisions such as the sacking of manager Roberto Martinez in 2016 and around a number of transfers, and the result was barely controlled chaos.

Perhaps something similar was at play at Newcastle United and the recent departures of Amanda Staveley and Mehrdad Ghodoussi, the couple who secured the club’s takeover with Saudi Arabia’s backing in 2021.

Amanda Staveley and Mehrdad Ghodoussi watch Newcastle United in August 2023 (Stu Forster/Getty Images)

At the time, there was no sporting director or CEO at the club, so Staveley and Ghodoussi took responsibility for those areas until an executive team was eventually appointed, who became the public faces of the club’s executive team. But their influence was belied by their 10 percent ownership stake.

Ultimately, after the existing vacancies were filled, the feeling arose that there were too many competing voices and that in that scenario there could only ever be one winner.

Will the same happen at Manchester United? INEOS and the Glazer family have never worked together before. Sir Jim Ratcliffe has had a lot of influence at the club since his investment, but it will be interesting to see what pressure he is put under internally if the results on the pitch continue.

Co-ownership structures can be successful, but only – it seems – if the partnerships are not simply thrown together by circumstance. Wrexham duo Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney appear to have found a way to work in harmony, although if their project ever reaches the Premier League, with all the associated scrutiny and financial demands, that partnership may come under renewed scrutiny.

Who knows where Chelsea will be then? Either way, the chances of Boehly and Egbhali still being a duo seem slim.

(Top photos: Getty Images)