Roman Abramovich Thread

[Strike 7,217]

 

 

In fact, it is not even certain that SMG has made a bid. Contrary to reports, it had not made one prior to Friday and attempts to find wealthy backers in Saudi were proving difficult - The Athletic

[Blues Forever 1,232]

26 minutes ago, Strike said:

 

 

In fact, it is not even certain that SMG has made a bid. Contrary to reports, it had not made one prior to Friday and attempts to find wealthy backers in Saudi were proving difficult - The Athletic

So far only Ben Jacobs who said SMG submitted the bid early this week.

 

[Strike 7,217]

Nizaar Kinsella is the most improved Chelsea beat reporter over the years

[Vesper 28,772]

Explained: The bids for Chelsea and who to take seriously

https://theathletic.com/3193993/2022/03/19/explained-the-bids-for-Chelsea-and-who-to-take-seriously/

Sport’s dreamers had a lot to remember on Friday. Get their bets in for horse racing’s Cheltenham Gold Cup by 3.30pm, sort out their Fantasy Premier League team by 6.30pm, send their bids for Chelsea by 9pm.

The first and last items on that list have lots in common: big field, lots of hurdles, massive prize. You have got to love the sports calendar — it never lets you down when you need a metaphor.

So who is in the race to replace Roman Abramovich? Who should Chelsea fans be rooting for? Where should casual observers be putting their each/way punts?

These are not easy questions to answer, as this is a contest that seems to have more in common with the gloriously unpredictable race of attrition that is the Grand National — Britain’s other big steeplechase — than the more refined, connoisseur’s affair that is the Gold Cup.

But there is no fun in sitting on the fence — no racing pun intended — so let us crack on with our rundown of the runners and riders in the Trivago (they still sponsor Chelsea, right?) Stamford Bridge Stakes.

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Early fallers and rank outsiders

We will start with names you should ignore or, if you get them in a sweepstake, rip up.

Turkish businessman Muhsin Bayrak was one of the first to link himself with a bid for Chelsea, telling local media “the world believes we have a 90 per cent chance of completing the deal — Abramovich thinks the same”. This led some to wonder if Bayrak was simply going to keep the Premier League club warm for Abramovich while the sanctioned Russian waited for the war in Ukraine to finish and resumption of normal service in Londongrad.

That, however, was pure speculation. Unfortunately, so is Bayrak’s bid. There is simply no way an unknown entity from Istanbul, with investments in crypto, is going to get this done.

Another to avoid is Aethel Partners, who optimistically threw their hat into the ring on Thursday. The London-based investment firm is fronted by Portuguese entrepreneur Ricardo Silva and their main investment appears to be a loss-making iron ore mine in Portugal. In other words, a large hole in the ground — there might be another metaphor in that.

Speaking of holes in the ground, Ghanaian businessman and politician Bernard Antwi Boasiako is another Chelsea suitor whose wealth is built on mining. Boasiako claims to earn $1 million a day from his gold mining company Hansol and he has written to Chelsea to say he is willing to offer $3.1 billion (just under £2.4 billion) for the club.

Boasiako is a well-connected and high-profile figure in Ghana but it’s unlikely here’s even nearly rich enough to buy the European and World champions on his own. Could he front an African-based consortium? Maybe. Would that be good for the Premier League and Chelsea’s huge following in Africa? Yes. Will it happen? No, not Chelsea and certainly not under these circumstances.

This sales process is unlike any other that British football has seen. On the one hand, it is a straightforward auction, run by a merchant bank, on behalf of a wealthy man. Nothing unusual about that. But on the other hand, it is also the forced sale of a frozen asset that must take place by the end of May or Chelsea will start to dramatically lose value and perhaps even go bankrupt.

It is further complicated by the fact Abramovich is sanctioned in Canada, the European Union and the UK, and can therefore receive none of the proceeds from the sale, just in case they end up in Russian president Vladimir Putin’s hands and are used to fund his war against Ukraine. Abramovich denies there is any such link between him and Putin.

This means there are effectively two sellers — the Raine Group, the New York-based bank running the process for Abramovich, and the British government — and both want a combination of price, speed and certainty. No fuss — just cold, hard cash and a track record of competence.

That criteria probably rules out two bids fronted by well-known Chelsea fans, too.

The first of those is the True Blue consortium, which is fronted by John “captain, leader, legend” Terry and is trying to raise £250 million so it can buy a 10 per cent stake in the club. The plan is to do this by getting supporters, players and staff to buy crypto-based fans tokens. This is pretty much the same idea that Terry has been plugging to fund his retirement and it has not gone well.

The second is Nick Candy’s… group? Supergroup? Funding proposal? We are not quite sure. But, to mix our metaphors, the British property developer did manage to find a backer deep in injury time on Friday when he teamed up with South Korea’s Catalina Kim and Hana Financial Group.

The 38-year-old Kim wrote a book last year about her experience as the only Asian woman working as a football agent in Europe and her LinkedIn page suggests it was a hit back home. Buying Chelsea would certainly provide a lot of new material for a second volume.

Kim announced her involvement in a bid just as Rachael Blackmore was becoming the first female jockey to win the Gold Cup. Blackmore, however, has already won loads of other races, including the Grand National, and was sat on the favourite, A Plus Tard.

Candy, Kim and Hana sound like a nice combination, but they look like the longest of shots for this contest.

Value bets

OK, these are the scraps of paper from the sweepstake that you want want to hold onto and we are going to run through them in reverse order of probability, but with the caveats that all these guys have a chance, betting is mugs’ game and what do we know really?

Woody Johnson, the great grandson of the founder of the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical empire, is understood to have been looking for a Premier League club for a while. He bought the NFL’s New York Jets in 2000, paying $635 million for the privilege. That was the third-highest fee ever paid for a sports franchise at the time and equates to about $1 billion (£760 million) today, if we adjust for inflation.

That is not going to be enough to bag Chelsea, though. The amount of interest in this trophy asset is likely to send the price over $3 billion (£2.27 billion), which is a remarkable number for a club that lost more than £145 million last season. In fact, Abramovich has poured more than £1.5 billion of his fortune into Chelsea since 2003 and he says he does not want it back. That will certainly help sell the club, but it does also indicate the level of subsidy Chelsea require if they are going to continue winning trophies.

US business magazine Forbes estimates Johnson’s personal wealth to be £4.5 billion, but he is old money compared to Abramovich, so he is not going to throw it around — and his track record at the Jets suggests this is not a man consumed by a passion for winning. He also turns 75 next month. He is in good shape, but is he young enough to embark on a project that almost certainly involves building a new stadium? He did that for the Jets but it took him 10 years.

Some sources have suggested he has an inside track because of his stint as America’s ambassador to the UK under Donald Trump. Others believe that could be an obstacle.

Oaktree Capital is another stellar name in American business circles that is understood to have kicked Chelsea’s tyres. 

Co-founded by Howard Marks, one of the most respected investors on the planet, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange, Oaktree has a huge amount of money at its disposal and has already dipped its toe into football’s waters by lending Inter Milan cash.

Some (yes, we are citing them again) think Oaktree is exactly the type of bidder Raine and the government are praying for; others see Marks tweet his investment philosophy — “It’s not what you buy, it’s what you pay” — and think there is no way he is going to be dragged into a sealed-bids auction for a loss-making club that needs to build a billion-pound-plus stadium.

Oaktree’s involvement in Serie A is probably a complication too far, as well. Inter fans may want to look away now, but the football finance rumour mill thinks Oaktree could end up owning the Italian champions when the club defaults on its repayments. UEFA does not let two clubs controlled by the same entity play in its competitions.

Other potential Chelsea owners with conflicts of interest issues are David Blitzer and Josh Harris. Sorry, we should probably have warned Crystal Palace fans that was coming, as they have been co-owners at Chelsea’s London rivals since 2015. Buying Chelsea would clearly mean selling their Palace shares, although they have already sold a chunk of them last year, when fellow American John Textor joined the ownership group at Selhurst Park.

Blitzer and Harris made their fortunes working for huge American private equity firms. Blitzer is still a senior executive with Blackstone Group, while Harris has now left Apollo Asset Management but he was one of its co-founders. The pair first teamed up to buy basketball’s Philadelphia 76ers in 2011, then added ice hockey’s New Jersey Devils in 2013, before repeating the trick at Palace two years later.

At 57, Harris is five years older than Blitzer, and he is probably twice as rich, too, with a personal fortune of more than £5 billion. But Blitzer owns more sports teams, as he now has also stakes in football teams in Germany, Netherlands, Spain and the US. Blitzer believes there is value in football.

Harris, on the other hand, has given the impression he is not so sure about that. In fact, several sources have told The Athletic that if Harris is going to buy another football team, it would be of the American football variety, with the Denver Broncos up for sale at a similar price to Chelsea.

But it seems he has not quite given up on the Premier League just yet, as he and Blitzer have teamed up with Sir Martin Broughton to form an Anglo-American consortium.

Broughton, who also turns 75 next month, is British business aristocracy. A former chairman of British American Tobacco, British Airways and the British Horseracing Board, he has also been the president of the Confederation of British Industry.

A lifelong Chelsea fan, he was actually brought in by Liverpool’s creditors to sell the club in 2010, when the Premier League side was on the verge of bankruptcy. That was at the tail end of the Tom Hicks and George Gillett era at Anfield, a calamitous period in the club’s history, but Broughton helped ease them out and bring Fenway Sports Group (FSG) in.

So Broughton provides contacts, credibility and experience. And if that is not enough, he has teamed up with fellow Chelsea fan and British sporting aristocrat Lord Coe. The two-time Olympic gold medallist was also a Conservative MP, which could be helpful, and also worked closely with Prime Minister Boris Johnson when Johnson was Mayor of London. The former athlete also chaired the organising committee of the London Olympics.

This group definitely has a chance, then, but they might not be able to move as quickly and decisively as others.

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The favourites

That leaves us with two heavily fancied groups who will also have sent Raine Group a bid, proof of funds and a business plan by Friday’s deadline.

In a statement released on Wednesday, the Ricketts family, owners of the Chicago Cubs, confirmed what many agents and bankers had been whispering about for weeks: they want Chelsea.

“As long-time operators of an iconic professional sports team, the Ricketts family and their partners understand the importance of investing for success on the pitch, while respecting the traditions of the club, the fans and the community,” the statement adds.

The family owe their wealth to the brokerage business Joe Ricketts founded in 1971, Ameritrade. It was bought and renamed TD Ameritrade in 2006, and was bought again in 2020 by the Charles Schwab Corporation. It has grown into a substantial business.

Joe Ricketts, now 80, has subsequently invested in bison meat, the film business and, most famously, baseball. Unfortunately, he is probably best known right now for some very unpleasant remarks he made in a series of emails that came to light in 2012.

In those emails, he allegedly referred to Muslims as “his enemy” because of their “deep antagonism and bias against non-Muslims”, described Islam as “a cult and not a religion” and shared offensive conspiracy theories about former US President Barack Obama.

Joe Ricketts and his four children, who own the Cubs via a family trust, have been apologising for those remarks ever since and have worked hard to rebuild links with Chicago’s Muslim community. It would probably be fair to say that the court of public opinion in the US has cleared the children of their father’s sins, with the only debate about their ownership of the Cubs being about whether they invest enough in the team or not.

News of their interest in Chelsea, however, has reignited the controversy surrounding Joe Ricketts’ views, not least because Chelsea have several Muslim players and lots of Muslim fans. Overcoming this might be the biggest challenge Tom Ricketts, the 58-year-old chairman of the Cubs, faces if he is going to finally land a football team.

He has wanted to add one to the family portfolio for years and is known to have looked at Chelsea in the past, as well as AC Milan and Tottenham. The fact the Ricketts have weighed up a move for Chelsea before, and done some due diligence, is an advantage in a process where time is of the essence.

On their likely approach to running the club, Tom Ricketts is understood to be a fan of what the FSG syndicate has done at the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool: investing in infrastructure to grow revenues, while keeping a lid on spending and using data to make better decisions.

Under their ownership, the Cubs bought swathes of land around the team’s Wrigley Field stadium and turned the area into an entertainment village. Can you see what they have in mind for Fulham Broadway?

Of course that will cost them, but that is where the financial muscle of their associate Ken Griffin comes in. He runs the Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel and it has made him one of America’s richest men, with a fortune of more than £20 billion.

Griffin is a guy who is used to getting what he wants. He owns property all over the world, including a £100-million house near Buckingham Palace, and last year paid nearly £33 million for a copy of the US Constitution, outbidding a group of crypto enthusiasts in an auction at Sotheby’s.

Like Oaktree’s Marks, Griffin has a reputation as a “value investor”, so he is not going to be bullied or cajoled into overpaying for Chelsea, but he is also known to be ambitious, bold and driven. If he thinks there is value in owning the five-time Premier League champions, he is not going to flinch at having to dig a bit deeper.

One US source sees him as the difference-maker.

“With Griffin, the Chicago group have the most liquidity of any buyer… they will be able to go over £3 billion if they need to,” he explains.

One question every Chelsea fan will have for this group, though, is do they want to win? The Ricketts will say yes, of course, and point to the Cubs’ 2016 World Series title and the team’s relatively high payroll.

But 2016 sticks out as there have only been four other trips to the play-offs, which leads us to the last of the known entities: Team Boehly,

Todd Boehly has packed a lot into his 48 years. Having studied finance in the US and UK, he started his investment career at Citibank and Credit Suisse First Boston, before moving to venture capital firm JH Whitney & Co.

From there, he moved to Guggenheim Partners, the firm first set up to invest the Guggenheim mining dynasty’s wealth, where Boehly’s reputation for spotting trends and backing winners grew. He saw that energy giant Enron was about to go bust in 2001 and managed to safely navigate his clients through the financial crash of 2009.

In 2012, he and his boss at Guggenheim, Mark Walter, led a group that bought the Los Angeles Dodgers. At $2.15 billion, it was the biggest cheque anyone had ever written for a sports team and it followed a highly competitive, three-way auction after Major League Baseball had effectively repossessed the team from previous owner Frank McCourt.

The lesson here? Boehly has done this before.

The Guggenheim Baseball Management group included former Los Angeles Lakers great Earvin “Magic” Johnson, tennis legend Billie Jean King and leading names from the worlds of baseball, entertainment and finance. Once in charge, they began developing land around the stadium and improving the ballpark, as well as starting their own regional sports network.

They also started winning. In fact, they won their division every year from 2013 to 2020, won the National League in 2017, 2018 and 2020 and went on to win the World Series in 2020 too. Last season was not quite so successful, but they maintained their streak of reaching the play-offs.

In an interview with Yahoo Finance last year, Boehly said: “We‘ve got a really good group of owners who understood that we have a great market and that this market wants to win.

“And having Earvin Johnson as our partner, he just pounded in on us all along that we have to win. If we’re in LA you have to win, right?”

London is a bit like that, too.

Boehly left Guggenheim in 2015 and set up Eldridge Industries, a private holding company that owns stakes in 80 different businesses, including a London-based real estate company, fantasy sports firm DraftKings and stakes in the Lakers and women’s basketball team the LA Sparks.

Primarily, Boehly sees sports teams as media rights businesses and he thinks it is only a matter of time before big-time professional sport moves to a direct relationship with fans at home, not via a third-party media company. And that relationship will be richer, in every sense.

Speaking to the Capital Allocators podcast in November, Boehly outlined an experience where viewers at home can either “loyalty gamble” on the next piece of action, earning discounts for their next visit to the stadium or online shop, or actually gamble using the latest data to inform those bets. You will not be surprised to learn that among Eldridge’s investments are companies that can do all this pretty much now.

“Last year we made over a billion dollars,” he told the podcast host Ted Seides. “Every year now we’re making so much money that we’ve got to keep reinvesting. We’ve got the ability to pivot into areas where we think there’s more growth.”

Just as he did with the Dodgers, Boehly is not bidding for Chelsea on his own. Swiss-born, California-based billionaire Hansjorg Wyss is providing some of the money, and it was the 86-year-old who first revealed Team Boehly’s interest in an interview with Swiss paper Blick more than two weeks ago.

British lawyer Jonathan Goldstein, a long-time business partner of Boehly’s, is also on board, as is American investment firm Clearlake.

And like Harris and Blitzer, Boehly has started to build a fan- and government-friendly board, with Times columnist and Conservative peer Danny Finkelstein and music industry veteran Barbara Charone lined up to be non-executive directors.  They are both authentic fans and savvy conduits to people new owners of Chelsea might need to know.

Like Ricketts, a redeveloped stadium is at the centre of their plan. And again, Boehly and co have an advantage as they also tried to buy Chelsea before and did extensive research on the options at Stamford Bridge.

It is understood they favour a slightly cheaper solution than Abramovich’s grand plan, which involved digging down into the site to create more room. The problem with that is once you start digging in London you never know what you are going to find: Roman temples, plague pits, London Underground lines.  The Abramovich vision would probably cost close to £2 billion now, whereas a more modest upgrade could be done for £1 billion.

Apart from that, it is standard American fare: data, sensible investment, a desire to win but not to blow the budget.

There has been some comment about the fact that Goldstein is a Spurs fan — in fact, Goldstein has tried to get Tottenham’s owners into serious talks with Boehly for years — but as Finkelstein wrote on Thursday: “At Chelsea, we sing songs for talented people who see the light and come to the Bridge.”

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Are we missing anyone? 

Well, you do not need to spend long on social media to see who most Chelsea fans — the ones on Twitter, anyway — are cheering for: the Saudi Arabia flags in their profiles rather gives it away.

If this was a vote rather than an expedited auction with added government scrutiny, the Saudi Media Group (SMG) would have won this last week, when the first reports of a £2.7 billion bid emerged. The rationale, apparently, is that Saudi owners do not care about returns on investment — they just want to sign Kylian Mbappe and Erling Haaland.

According to reports, the bid will be led by SMG’s chief executive Mohamed Alkhereiji, who studied in London and then spent three years working in the capital with Deutsche Bank. But his media business has an annual turnover of about £770 million, which is not that much bigger than Chelsea’s, so he could not be acting alone.

It has been suggested to The Athletic that the Saudi government has encouraged SMG to bid because it would help demonstrate that there are plenty of wealthy Saudis in the kingdom who are not linked to the state, which is what they have been trying to tell us about the sovereign wealth fund’s investment in Newcastle United.

There is a problem with that idea, though. It took the Saudis a year to prove to the Premier League that Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman would not be picking the team at St James’ Park. Chelsea have a couple of months, at best, to get this done and dusted. And if SMG really was being nudged into doing this, well, that is only going to make separation even harder to prove this time.

In fact, it is not even certain that SMG has made a bid. Contrary to reports, it had not made one prior to Friday and attempts to find wealthy backers in Saudi were proving difficult.

Are there other mega-bids out there? Sure, former Chelsea player Tal Ben Haim is reported to have found a Gulf-based billionaire willing to put up £2 billion for a shot at the prize.

And The Athletic has heard a rumour about a potential bid from a man with access to one of the greatest personal fortunes on the planet — and no, we are not talking about Vladimir Putin.

But perhaps we should. Because while this piece has tried not to be overly serious, this is a serious process caused by a horrendous event in Ukraine.

The next week is going to feel a bit like transfer deadline day at times as Raine tries to pick a winner that best meets the criteria of this most unusual auction. The dozen or so bids made on Friday will soon be whittled down to three or four. Big promises will be bandied about, but Chelsea fans will most likely have to get their heads around the fact that their club is going to be run in a very different way to the last 19 years.

That does not mean you will never win a trophy again, but even if it did it is not as bad as an invasion. And if all goes to plan, your club can carry on, almost as before, under new, ambitious and rich owners who urgently want to build you a new stadium.

[Blues Forever 1,232]

 

Edited March 19, 2022 by Blues Forever

[Vesper 28,772]

25 minutes ago, Vesper said:

It is understood they favour a slightly cheaper solution than Abramovich’s grand plan, which involved digging down into the site to create more room. The problem with that is once you start digging in London you never know what you are going to find: Roman temples, plague pits, London Underground lines.  The Abramovich vision would probably cost close to £2 billion now, whereas a more modest upgrade could be done for £1 billion.

I do NOT like this

I do not want a fucking cookie cutter discount stadium (as the reason any option is so expensive is that it is London, and not just any London, West London, and its expensive as fuck to do any work, so a billion quid LONDON stadium versus a 2 billion quid London stadium is going to be massive)

that Abramovich plan is still, even 4 years on, the best (well maybe the 2 giant stadiums in Madrid (Real) and Barca, post renovation, may technically be more impressive as they are damn near 100,000 cap, but we do not need 100K cap, we would never (or almost ever) sell it out, 60-65K is plenty), and most unique plan I have seen

it was damn near perfect for us and for London, as it was a stone temple to football, and very uniquely English old Perpendicular Gothic inspired

[Blues Forever 1,232]

Just now, Hermione said:

 

Probably either billionaires like Musk and Bezos or Kuwait royal family.

[Vesper 28,772]

11 minutes ago, Hermione said:

 

one of the big 4 hopefully

plus these (skipped Warren Buffet, that old fuck is a cheapskate, he is a pure value investor and spends little on flash (he still lives in the damn house he was in during the 1960's ffs, lol)

Ellison would be awesome, he LOVES to do things to the absolute best levels, and is 77yo, so not like he is going to wait 10 years to rebuild

 

Edited March 19, 2022 by Vesper

[Vesper 28,772]

5 minutes ago, Blues Forever said:

Probably either billionaires like Musk and Bezos or Kuwait royal family.

2nd richest after the Saudis

half a trillion or so (I think the 360 billion usd is on the light side)

(the Saudis are worth WAY more (in toto) than the 1.4 trillion usd figure I see tossed about, but it is so split up)

[Blues Forever 1,232]

3 minutes ago, Vesper said:

2nd richest after the Saudis

half a trillion or so (I think the 360 billion usd is on the light side)

(the Saudis are worth WAY more (in toto) than the 1.4 trillion usd figure I see tossed about, but it is so split up)

Can only think about Kuwait since the other Arabs royal families like Saudi, UAE, and Qatar already owned Newcastle, City, and PSG.

[Vesper 28,772]

1 minute ago, Hermione said:

Isn't Larry Ellison the owner of IW Masters that's being played this week or am I mistaking him?

yes

he is the Oracle founder

pure genius

he is too conservative for my taste politically, but nothing like the Ricketts fam

wish he was 10 years younger, but being 77 adds urgency

[Vesper 28,772]

Just now, Blues Forever said:

Can only think about Kuwait since the other Arabs royal families like Saudi, UAE, and Qatar already owned Newcastle, City, and PSG.

yes

Bahrain and Oman royals are not rich enough

 

[Vesper 28,772]

I was really hoping  a 40yo Swiss, Guillaume Pousaz, would bid

fintech

he has shot up from £8 billion to almost £20 billion in the past year or so

Checkout.com Founder Guillaume Pousaz Now Europe’s Richest Tech Billionaire After New Fundraising

 

Edited March 19, 2022 by Vesper

[Blues Forever 1,232]

 

[chelsea_4_eva 1,157]

HABIBIIII!

[Blues Forever 1,232]

 

[Pizy 18,368]

Boehly’s group seems to have by far the most comprehensive package from those we know publicly. They seem to be coverage every base.

I’d be genuinely shocked if it isn’t them at this point.

[Vesper 28,772]

17 minutes ago, Blues Forever said:

 

omg

FUCK Goldman Sachs

close to the biggest financial criminals on the planet

along with Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase

arffffffffffffffff

I am sure our Greek fans (amongst many others) just love hearing this