Roman Holiday: Imagining Chelsea today without Todd Boehly
Imagine if, last May, someone other than Todd Boehly was willing to buy the dumpster fire-in-waiting known as Chelsea Football Club.
Last year at this time, Todd Boehly was Chelsea’s owner-in-waiting, much like how the people of Ukraine are currently in-waiting for the proceeds of the money Todd Boehly paid for the club and that are still sitting in the Fordstam account because, hey, who cares other than me and that guy at The Times, I mean, oligarchs, amirite, we showed them. Sorry, I just lost the plot as severely as Paul Merson watching Paul Pogba on TikTok. Pogba, wow, whatever happened to that guy… I’m doing it again.
Imagine if, last May, someone other than Todd Boehly was willing to buy the dumpster fire-in-waiting known as Chelsea Football Club. The Blues could currently be undergoing their second quasi-nationalisation in two years…...
Chelsea live the dangers of compulsive gambling
Allegations have surfaced that Mattress Mack, the American gambling personality (and occasional businessman), has given into his crippling addiction and put Chelsea FC in mortal danger of going out of business.
Having acquired the imploding club from Roman Abramovich in the sort of confused, vainglorious, political backscratch that defines “Texas white trash wealth,” Mack has done little to improve the condition of the club. If anything, his ownership has accelerated the club’s decline into irrelevancy and, now, insolvency.
Leaked documents from an FA investigation show that, in a Pete Rose-esque bout of impulsiveness, Mack placed a substantial wager on the performance of his own club, currently languishing as an also-ran in League One, following two unprecedented mid-season point deductions and relegations.
Betting slips indicate Mack put $3 million on Chelsea to finish in the top six, a number that dwarfs his club’s current operating income.
While sports betting is widely advertised across English football, those who have a direct hand in the game are understandably restricted from taking part. Mattress Mack appears to have been painfully unaware of this. He was also painfully unaware of the fact that “League One,” despite its seeming primacy, is not the top league in England, so he bet on Chelsea finishing top six in a league that they weren’t in. No one tell him about Serie A.
Sources within the FA and the club itself feel an ouster of the Texan is inevitable, with the club likely going into administration. And that’s to say nothing of the more standard, impending off-season points deduction, which will place the club squarely between such fellow celebrity vanity projects as Wrexham AFC and Real Bedford.
With a tempestuous and entitled fanbase already shifting their allegiances elsewhere, the idea of the club being saved by local investment is almost farcical. This is, for all intents and purposes, a death knell for the club.
As it turns out, trusting a gambling addict to responsibly steward a flailing multibillion dollar sports operation in a nation that actively promotes sports betting is a losing bet, so to speak. Who would've guessed? - Nate Hofmann
$CHELS gets rekt
Federal court filings earlier this week suggest Sam Bankman-Fried is willing to continue owning Chelsea Football Club and serve house arrest within the Stamford Bridge hotel and residence complex, with his lawyers arguing that “being affiliated with this club and its fans is sufficient punishment” for the various fraud charges Bankman-Fried faces related to crypto-Ponzis FTX and Alameda Research.
If federal prosecutors and SBF strike a plea deal along these terms, it will represent a poetic inversion of how SBF came to own the club last May.
Bankman-Fried financed the purchase of Chelsea FC by leveraging his OneCoin (of Bulgarian cryptoqueen fame) holdings to “mint” a record amount of his in-house shitcoin, $FTT. American and British regulators then allowed him to convert said shitcoins to cash through a deal with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, under the terms of which Bankman-Fried would install Altman’s WorldCoin eyeball readers at all entrances to all Football League, non-league and Sunday league stadiums (and hospitals and churches), a move that generated far less fan backlash than Ted Lasso CGI-ing a character’s name over that of Chelsea legend Ray Wilkins on a banner that hangs at Stamford Bridge.
The UK government signed off on a such a deal because they thought it was the most punitive thing they could do to Roman Abramovich without having to go through legal and judicial due process, while also upgrading the government’s biometric surveillance data capabilities from “NHS” to “NSA.” Now, with the real international criminal exposed as an ill-mannered, unkempt, orgy-indulging nepo baby, the tables are turned. Whereas Abramovich was punished by having Chelsea taken from him, Bankman-Fried is consenting to the punishment of retaining the very same club.
Speaking on a Twitter Spaces against the advice of counsel and the meth addict sitting next to him on Market Street in San Francisco, Bankman-Fried said, “If I go to an American prison, I’ll be Epstein-ed within a week. I’ll be safer on the streets of London. International government assassins never strike there.”
Note: Sam Altman’s WorldCoin eyeball readers are a thing. So is OneCoin. Check out the links for some really interesting and seriously f’d up background on them.
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