Stamford Bridge Thread

[Vesper 29,025]

1 hour ago, Fulham Broadway said:

A spokesman for the ECDC said: “There is no plan within our plans for Chelsea FC to relocate to the Earls Court site.

I do not see that changing

[Fulham Broadway 16,923]

45 minutes ago, Vesper said:

I do not see that changing

Smells like a PR distraction , the whole thing. from the Boely/Egbali fall out

[King Kante 1,502]

Earls Court has always been the most sensible option for us. In my opinion, it is absolute madness to stay on the SB site with all the restrictions and compromises. At EC we could build pretty much whatever we want at a lower cost than a compromised stadium at SB. 

On top of that EC would be the best located stadium in Lomdon, which would then make it appealing for gigs, other sports etc. 

[ZAPHOD2319 4,519]

2 hours ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Smells like a PR distraction , the whole thing. from the Boely/Egbali fall out

It is, they are in full PR mode. Today they also went after Boehly for his overpaying for players in the first window that is still cost the club a lot of money. This is going to go on for months.

[UTC_Dil 0]

Anyone selling tickets to Chelsea v Gent after 2 together 

[Fulham Broadway 16,923]

11 hours ago, ZAPHOD2319 said:

It is, they are in full PR mode. Today they also went after Boehly for his overpaying for players in the first window that is still cost the club a lot of money. This is going to go on for months.

We are right...''Chelsea’s prospects of relocating the club to Earl’s Court have been dismissed by the company in charge of the development of the site.''

Reuters

A distraction from their spat

[Fulham Broadway 16,923]

1 hour ago, UTC_Dil said:

Anyone selling tickets to Chelsea v Gent after 2 together 

There is a Tickets section mate Tickets & Travel - Talk Chelsea Forums

[kellzfresh 7,229]

Want to give a special appreciation to the away fans. They have supported the club through thick and thin and they deserve all the best things in life. Caicedo in a previous interview during the summer said he was more comfortable playing away from home and I didn't understand till this season. 
We now have four home games in a row (Barrow, Brighton, Gent and Nottingham Forest). I want to appeal to the home fans to support the team during the match. Please don't boo the players or chant about players that are not playing for Chelsea. 

We all love Chelsea and all we want is anything to keep the club winning. So we need to support in any way we can, no matter how small 

[Vesper 29,025]

Chelsea explore new stadium options with Earl’s Court proposal back in play

https://www.insideworldfootball.com/2024/09/26/Chelsea-explore-new-stadium-options-earls-court-proposal-back-play/

September 26 – Chelsea are reportedly exploring the possibility of moving from Stamford Bridge to a new stadium site at Earl’s Court, as the club seeks to expand its current 40,343-seat capacity and increase match day revenues. 

Increasing the stadium’s size is a priority for Chelsea’s ownership group, but the logistical challenges of redeveloping Stamford Bridge have prompted them to investigate alternative locations in west London.

Under Roman Abramovich’s ownership the club had repeatedly looked at new stadium options and even submitted a plan to the local council but later pulled away from redeveloping the stadium as cost estimates ballooned upwards and beyond the £1 billion mark.

The club has already held discussions with Transport for London and real estate developer Delancey, who manage the Earl’s Court site. However, the Earl’s Court Development Committee (ECDC) currently has no plans for a football stadium in its master plan, which focuses on a mixed-use development.

If the ECDC secures planning permission for their vision, it could pose a significant obstacle to Chelsea’s ambitions.

That said, some experts believe the high costs associated with the ECDC’s current plans may lead to a shift in favour of a football stadium, potentially including affordable housing if Chelsea’s proposal is approved.

The club has reportedly drawn up plans targeting the Lillie Bridge depot as a possible location for their new home, with chief executive Jason Gannon leading productive discussions with TfL and Delancey.

While Chelsea has not ruled out staying at Stamford Bridge, no significant progress has been made on redeveloping the site, which is complicated by its proximity to transport lines. A potential rebuild would likely force the team to play temporarily at Wembley. However, another significant hurdle for Chelsea’s expansion plans is internal conflict between co-owners Clearlake Capital and Todd Boehly, with tensions rising over control of the club.

Despite these challenges, Chelsea’s owners remain committed to constructing one of the largest and most modern stadiums in England, with a potential bid for Earl’s Court estimated to be in the region of £500 million. The situation remains fluid, but a move could significantly alter the club’s future landscape.

[Vesper 29,025]

Jason Gannon: One of Chelsea’s most important hires – and a defining figure in Stamford Bridge future

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5795906/2024/09/27/jason-gannon-Chelsea-profile-stamford-bridge/

It was the kind of announcement that football fans rarely take much of an interest in or care about too deeply.

Earlier this month, Chelsea released a statement on their website confirming that Jason Gannon had been promoted from his role as chief operating officer to president & chief operating officer. Now when it comes to communications from a club, supporters tend to focus on things like the arrival of a new signing, the departure of a popular or unpopular head coach and ticket prices. What is going on among the suits in senior management does not usually get the pulse racing too much.

Without making out this latest development is akin to Cole Palmer being given a contract extension, Gannon’s presence and growing influence at Chelsea is significant. He is someone people who follow the club should, and surely will, take an interest in because he is going to play a very major part in what happens to Stamford Bridge.

This is a very sensitive topic, after all. Stamford Bridge has been Chelsea’s home since the club formed in 1905 and to redevelop it is a very complicated and expensive project. Moving to a plot of land nearby at Earl’s Court would allow Chelsea to build a ground to rival the much-revered Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, but going to a different site would upset a lot of people.

Gannon’s experience as managing director behind the development of the much-respected SoFi Stadium, which is home to NFL teams the LA Rams and LA Chargers, is a major reason why he was targeted by the Todd Boehly-Clearlake consortium as a possible hire to head up their stadium plans soon after they bought Chelsea in 2022. The SoFi Stadium, which has a capacity of just over 70,000, opened in 2020. It has already been the venue for one Super Bowl, is going to be the setting for eight matches during the 2026 World Cup and will stage the opening ceremony of the 2028 Olympics. Significantly, it is also able to bring in extra revenue from music concerts. Even WrestleMania 39 was held there last year.

Chelsea had to be patient to prise their man away from Kroenke Sports & Entertainment. Yes, the same organisation that Stan Kroenke, owner of London rivals Arsenal, heads up and includes the LA Rams, the Denver Nuggets and the Colorado Avalanche in its portfolio.

Having over 15 years of knowledge from being employed in various positions for such a sport-centric company, let alone his sizeable contribution to the SoFi Stadium project, appealed to the Chelsea hierarchy. It took over a year for them to get their man and he celebrates his first anniversary of starting work at the club next month.

 

Some reading this may be doing so with a shrug of the shoulders or, perhaps worse, will be treating any positive words about Gannon with suspicion, cynicism or caution. Chelsea’s record regarding senior hires over the years, including the Roman Abramovich era, has been somewhat hit and miss, especially when it comes to establishing a good rapport with the fanbase.

It feels like there have been a lot of comings and goings during the Todd Boehly-Clearlake regime alone. As part of the article detailing Gannon’s promotion three weeks ago, it was confirmed that Chris Jurasek was stepping down from his position as chief executive to go back to being an operating executive with Clearlake Capital.

As far as Chelsea were concerned, Jurasek had very much completed the task he was hired to do. The plan all along was for him to be in situ for one to two years — it ended up being 15 months — to help make strong hires for the management committee the owners wanted. As president, Gannon heads the committee but is not seen as all-powerful. Other key positions that have been filled and will work with him are Casper Stylsvig (chief revenue officer), Adriel Lares (chief financial officer) and James Murray (chief strategy officer and head of business operations). Chelsea have also convinced Todd Kline to resign as Tottenham’s chief commercial officer to join them instead, while Phil Lynch is going to be global head of digital after quitting Manchester United.

But in the short time that Jurasek was in place he did not exactly endear himself with Chelsea followers. It was during his tenure that a long-running coach subsidy for away fans was removed and there was a first rise in general admission season ticket prices for more than a decade. Following his departure, the Chelsea Supporters’ Trust released a damning appraisal of Jurasek’s ability to engage saying: “The CST first met Mr Jurasek in August 2023 ahead of the League Cup tie vs. AFC Wimbledon. During the feisty meeting, he hoped that the team performed well that night and secured three points… this set the manner for his tone-deaf tenure as CEO in which he made no effort to build a relationship with any supporter group.

“The CST looks forward to working with Jason Gannon as he is promoted to president & chief operating officer. This is a positive change that the club should use to rebuild the trust and confidence of supporters.”

Gannon was involved in the construction of SoFi Stadium (Patrick T. Fallon / AFP)

Sources at the club, who spoke under the condition of anonymity to The Athletic to protect their jobs, say Jurasek was not shy in admitting to those around him that he did not have much interest in football. He did not attend every match and, more tellingly, failed to hold one meeting with Chelsea Pitch Owners, the company that actually owns the freehold of Stamford Bridge stadium and the name Chelsea FC.

On the odd occasion Jurasek did meet with fans, the encounters did not go positively, as the messaging from the CST above indicates. So, in some ways, Gannon had an advantage with supporters from the get-go.

In saying that, Gannon has helped himself by making much more of an effort to engage. He met with CPO within a week of starting work at Chelsea and has spoken with them, as well as CST, on other occasions since. His background in sport comes across in conversations — that he is truly passionate about what he is doing rather than seeing his role as just a job.

While Gannon has made it clear that he is not just going to tell people what they want to hear, he is not going through the motions or just box-ticking by interacting with supporters either. He conveys information that is useful and genuinely listens. He is more of a people person, which has come across in the way potentially divisive subject matter has sometimes been lightened with a bit of humour. Employees at the club have the same positive impression of him and highlight how he is a much more visible presence too.

Despite holding such a senior position, he is regarded as someone without a big ego. He is frank, but does not mind if someone has a different opinion to his and is seen as a dynamic, approachable individual. In a period where co-owners Todd Boehly and Clearlake are not on the best of terms and each is exploring the possibility of buying the other party out, there have been no disagreements when it comes to giving Gannon more responsibility.

Whether Chelsea rebuild Stamford Bridge or go to Earl’s Court, there are a lot of conversations to be had. For example, much was made recently of Gannon meeting with Transport for London. Talk of Chelsea making a final decision is far too premature, but sources — kept anonymous as they did not have permission to speak — stress that the club’s links with all the bodies they need to talk to about the new stadium are much stronger than they have been because of Gannon.

Gannon has not pretended to know it all, but has done his utmost to learn all the intricacies as quickly as possible. Perhaps that is not too surprising given he has a doctorate in law from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

The future of Stamford Bridge is going to be a huge focus, but is not the be-all and end-all. Chairing the management committee means he will help run the business side of club (the sporting side is still headed up by co-sporting directors Paul Winstanley and Laurence Stewart) and has to report to the co-owners regularly. Making improvements to the current stadium as it stands, even what could be considered something as minor as the quality of the Wi-Fi access, is on his agenda. Upgrading the training ground at Cobham, where Chelsea have been based since 2005, is also on Gannon’s to-do list for the next 12 months.

As part of the club’s press release earlier this month, Gannon was quoted saying: “I am honoured to assume this elevated position within a club so rich in history and well-renowned across the globe. I have developed relationships with many supporters over the past year since joining Chelsea, and it is an enormous privilege to be here.”

Rather than just an empty platitude, Chelsea fans might take some comfort that Gannon means what he says.

Edited September 28 by Vesper

[mkh 298]

Chelsea will remain at Stamford Bridge and expand the stadium capacity to 55,000 if Eghbali wins the boardroom battle with Boehly.

Eghbali favours a £1.5billion renovation to stay at the Bridge, while Boehly wants a new 60,000 ground in nearby Earl’s Court.

🤔

[Vesper 29,025]

28 minutes ago, mkh said:

Chelsea will remain at Stamford Bridge and expand the stadium capacity to 55,000 if Eghbali wins the boardroom battle with Boehly.

Eghbali favours a £1.5billion renovation to stay at the Bridge, while Boehly wants a new 60,000 ground in nearby Earl’s Court.

🤔

Just decide and do it, ffs!

Insanity we are still in pure planning stages 21 years after Roman bought us.

WTF

[nyikolajevics 2,596]

58 minutes ago, mkh said:

Chelsea will remain at Stamford Bridge and expand the stadium capacity to 55,000 if Eghbali wins the boardroom battle with Boehly.

Eghbali favours a £1.5billion renovation to stay at the Bridge, while Boehly wants a new 60,000 ground in nearby Earl’s Court.

🤔

This comment is literally 80% the same as the first post of this thread from 2011..

[Vesper 29,025]

Chelsea Pitch Owners: The unique organisation with the power to block Stamford Bridge move

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5839724/2024/10/14/Chelsea-pitch-owners-power-stamford-bridge-move/

Chelsea are unlikely to be the first club who spring to mind when scouring English football for examples of fan power.

At ownership level, they have helped the Premier League trend in the opposite direction, from Roman Abramovich’s takeover in 2003 heralding the arrival of true billionaire wealth, to the £2.5billion ($3.3bn at the current exchange rate) paid by the current owners to take over in 2022, the latest and loudest example of the growing influence of big American finance on the top division of English football.

But both regimes have been forced to reckon with an arrangement unique in the sport: Chelsea Pitch Owners (CPO), a supporters’ group which holds the freehold to the land on which Stamford Bridge, the club’s home stadium since they were founded in 1905, sits.

The creation of CPO is part of the bigger story of how Chelsea almost lost their ground, as detailed by The Athletic in 2020. For the uninitiated, here’s a brief summary: in 1992, at the end of a long, attritional battle with property developers who wanted to evict the club from a hugely valuable plot of land in south-west London, Chelsea’s chairman at the time, Ken Bates, and his lawyer Mark Taylor set out to devise a novel plan to ensure it could never happen again.

Bates’ initial idea was to divide up the freehold for the pitch into 70,000 squares and sell them to supporters for £100 each, but that ran into problems with VAT (a tax on nearly all goods bought and sold within the European Union), land registry and corporation tax.

Bates and Taylor realised the same result could be achieved by establishing CPO as a company that owned the pitch and offering fans the chance to buy a share for £100; if they sold all the shares, it would finance the activation of a £5million buy option the club had negotiated to purchase the stadium freehold from West Register (Properties) Ltd, a subsidiary of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), as part of a 20-year lease of the ground agreed in December 1992.

The problem was that very few Chelsea supporters actually bought CPO shares. By 1997 — a quarter of the way into the 20-year lease agreement — only around 7,580 had been sold, leaving the company a long way short of the original freehold valuation of £5million. That freehold valuation had also more than doubled to £10.2m, owing to significant expansion to the footprint of Stamford Bridge in light of stadium changes made under Bates in the mid-1990s.

“It was actually a total failure,” Taylor tells The Athletic. “If it weren’t for the fact that Chelsea did a Eurobond issue in 1997 (raising £75million, then loaning CPO the funds to purchase the freehold on soft terms), CPO would have been wound up and the money distributed back to its shareholders in 2012 (when the original 20-year lease agreement expired).”

Instead, the position of CPO as a gatekeeper of Stamford Bridge’s future was secured. It acquired the freehold with the aid of a loan from Chelsea that can run for 199 years, and in return granted the club a 199-year lease to use the site at a peppercorn rent.

 

Ken Bates in 2003 (Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images)

CPO is duty-bound to repay the loan, and 85 per cent of the nominal value of each new share sold is designated for this purpose. In the accounts filed with Companies House for the year ending July 31, 2023, CPO declared that it had repaid £149,069, leaving an outstanding balance of £8,066,862.

Almost 27,000 shares have been issued to around 15,000 unique shareholders. The list of those who have invested their own money includes former Chelsea players and managers such as John Terry, who is also CPO president, Frank Lampard, Dennis Wise, Jose Mourinho, Antonio Conte and Thomas Tuchel.

Yet regardless of who bought in and how many shares they purchased, Taylor wrote a key safeguard into CPO’s articles of association that ensured power over the fate of Stamford Bridge could not be co-opted by a small number of wealthy individuals: each share was worth one vote, but nobody could have more than 100 votes regardless of how many shares they bought.

He also included an even bigger sting in the tail to deter any future Chelsea owner possibly minded to move the club away from Stamford Bridge against the will of CPO. “They have a right to cancel the lease if the club stop playing there, and to demand the assignment of the name ‘Chelsea Football Club Limited’ to CPO,” he says.

Chelsea cannot call themselves Chelsea if based anywhere other than Stamford Bridge unless CPO shareholders give the green light — a remarkable veto power for any supporter group.

GO DEEPER

Gannon is one of Chelsea's most important hires - and defining figure in Bridge future

---

In 2011, when Abramovich tried to buy back the Stamford Bridge freehold from CPO to facilitate a move to a new stadium, Taylor was on the other side of the fence, advising the club on how best to deal with the organisation he had helped to create. “Right at the start, I said to (chairman) Bruce Buck, ‘You’ll never get people (onside) unless they know what’s going to happen’,” he recalls.

Abramovich’s proposal included no guarantees that he would limit his search to alternative stadium sites near Stamford Bridge. He also gave CPO members just 24 days from Chelsea’s formal announcement of their desire to buy back the freehold to the formal vote held on the issue at an emergency general meeting. Those 24 days were marred by the sudden sale of £200,000 worth of shares to 20 individuals, widely interpreted as an attempt to tilt the vote in the club’s favour.

Opposition mobilised under the slogan “Say No CPO”. Abramovich needed more than 75 per cent of votes cast in order to secure the freehold — a formidably high bar that Chelsea’s current ownership will also one day need to clear to ratify their chosen stadium plan. In the event, just 300 votes controlled by shareholders at the meeting were required in the ‘no’ column to ensure he fell short. The Russian billionaire ended up with only 61.6 per cent on his side.

GO DEEPER

How a view loved by Henry VIII could thwart new Chelsea owners' plans to redevelop Stamford Bridge

This rare defeat forced Abramovich to reassess his options, eventually alighting on the grand “cathedral of football” redevelopment of the ground that he paused indefinitely in 2018. It also soured relations between Chelsea and CPO for several years, and fermented the view in the eyes of some that a relatively small number of supporters had blocked the club’s best route to a shiny new stadium.

A lot has changed since then — not least CPO itself, which now has shareholders in more than 80 countries, including Kazakhstan, Guatemala, South Korea and Venezuela. Shares can be purchased through Chelsea’s official website.

In 2018, new ‘B’ shares were issued at the cheaper price of £25 in an attempt to attract a younger demographic, but were withdrawn in 2021 after failing to spark an uptick in sales. Those shares afford one vote, while the traditional ‘A’ shares are now worth four votes each, and the limit of votes any single shareholder can amass has been raised from 100 to 400 accordingly.

Wounds from the acrimonious 2011 vote healed considerably in the final years of the Abramovich era and, acting on behalf of new owners Clearlake Capital and Todd Boehly, club president and chief operating officer Jason Gannon has made an early effort to build closer ties with CPO.

 

Roman Abramovich in 2011, the year he took on CPO and lost (Ian Kington/AFP/Getty Images)

“We feel we’re in a good place with the senior management team, we feel they are being positive and it’s a good relationship,” CPO chair Chris Isitt tells The Athletic.

CPO’s focus now is on building its profile online, raising awareness among Chelsea’s global fanbase that they can have a direct say on what happens to Stamford Bridge. Two new directors with knowledge of social media and digital marketing were added to the board in March this year.

It helps their cause when Chelsea supporters at large feel uncertain about the club’s direction. “When the club was up for sale, we sold the equivalent of five years’ worth of shares in six months,” Isitt says.

There is also the knowledge that whoever emerges from Chelsea’s ownership power struggle will soon be looking to push on with their own stadium project. Any plan that involves the team moving, temporarily or permanently, from Stamford Bridge will require CPO approval — a reality that concerns some supporters who fear the club being left behind by their domestic and European rivals if such a proposal is blocked.

Nobody in Chelsea’s current ownership group enjoys anything like the goodwill Abramovich was afforded by fans in 2011, so how can they hope to succeed with CPO where he failed? Presenting a clear, specific plan and communicating it in a manner that does not come across as dismissive or adversarial would be a positive start.

Beyond that, expecting more than 75 per cent of CPO shareholders to effectively vote their organisation out of existence seems fanciful; to even stand a chance of passing, any proposal would likely need to include the transferral of the CPO arrangement to the new stadium, whether it be a revamped or rebuilt Stamford Bridge or a new stadium on the former Earls Court Exhibition Centre site less than a mile away.

This would allow CPO to continue to safeguard Chelsea’s home against non-football interests well into the future. It was also another condition Abramovich was unwilling to countenance 13 years ago. “The whole point of him doing what he was doing was control, and if he’d agreed to that, he would just be transferring one restriction for another,” Taylor says. “He wasn’t prepared to concede on that at all.”

More than two years after Abramovich was compelled to sell Chelsea following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, supporters are still waiting for Clearlake or Boehly to communicate a stadium plan.

When they finally do, the unique presence and nature of CPO means some of those supporters will have a significant say in whether that proposal ever comes to pass.

GO DEEPER

Chelsea and Stamford Bridge: Should Boehly-Clearlake stick or twist?

[Fulham Broadway 16,923]

£2 billion from the club sale has been sat in a bank account for two years.

Supposed to go to aid to Ukraine, but people still arguing how it should be spent...

Should be divvied up to the fans who had to put up with shit performances....

[bluesman2610 1,347]

38 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

£2 billion from the club sale has been sat in a bank account for two years.

Supposed to go to aid to Ukraine, but people still arguing how it should be spent...

Should be divvied up to the fans who had to put up with shit performances....

Isn’t that because Roman won’t authorize the funds?

[Fulham Broadway 16,923]

8 minutes ago, bluesman2610 said:

Isn’t that because Roman won’t authorize the funds?

Its cash sat in a British bank account from the sale, Abramovich has no jurisdiction over it now.

Labour peer Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale  stressed: “It is now over two years, nearly two and a half, since Chelsea Football Club was sold.

“Over £2 billion is sitting in an account here in London, waiting to be spent on the reconstruction and humanitarian effort not just in Ukraine but in those countries elsewhere in the world that have been affected by the situation in Ukraine, particularly in relation to food security, for example. What are we doing?”

'kin useless

Also, say its getting 5% interest, minimum - that's another £200 000 -250 000

[DH1988 1,310]

Unbelievable that it's even thought of to go to Ukraine, not that I do not care for the people of Ukraine, I do not have an ounce of sympathy for the war or anything economic associated.

The same attitude as the people asking for charity money on the street, does my £20 end up at the source of the need? Does it F.

An absolute farce they were able to force us into a sale in the first place.