Chelsea rewrote the new owner playbook in 2003. Was Todd Boehly right to follow it?
New owners can spend their fortune without changing their team's fortunes for the better. Momentum matters most for clubs used to winning.
Depending on your perspective, Chelsea’s start to the 2022/23 season either validates or betrays their transfer window spending. While establishing his willingness to spend, Todd Boehly also completed the usual purge of incumbent executives and managers, on both the commercial and sporting sides of the house. But does the “new owner checklist” actually accelerate progress towards trophies and titles, or does the momentum of the club determine that timeline?
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about that ^ paragraph is that I wrote it before Boehly sacked Thomas Tuchel.
Todd Boehly didn’t do much out of the ordinary in his first 99 days as Chelsea owner. He spent over £270 million during his first transfer window, being a bit unusual in how he bought so many young players who are at least several years away from Chelsea’s first team, especially given the evidence of Cobham’s success in Chelsea’s starting XI. But like many new owners, he moved decisively at high cost for some players and continued the Chelsea habit of a deadline day “Him?” transfer, with double Blue points for it being a post-prime No. 9.
Fun fact: Average age of Chelsea transfers before signing Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang on deadline day. 22.5. Average age after: 23.9.
But, again, “Him?” made sense given that “he” was one of “his” guys and was a bit of a gift. Or so such narratives go.
Day 100 is when Boehly stepped outside the norm, sacking Thomas Tuchel, for whom he bought “Him?” and after giving Tuchel a larger role in transfer business than Tuchel wanted. Had Boehly fired Tuchel within his first 75 days or so, before the season opened, it would have been a disappointing but completely anticipated non-event. New owners sack incumbent managers, especially when there’s a summer purge across the organization.
Over the scale of the years that Boehly will own Chelsea, that delta of a few weeks will be a curiosity, if that. Overall, Boehly did all the standard things new owners do. He’s a bit basic, you could say.
Whatever his rationale for being such a Basic Boehly, he’s quite limited in what he can accomplish beyond what his predecessor did. Chelsea obviously can grow and improve, but there’s a lot more space below them than above. And short of a full house cleaning – think of Nottingham Forest’s summer, extended to player and commercial staff – a new owner’s impact through finances and personnel turnover does not typically affect the club’s output over the first few years. At least not at clubs like Chelsea. And not in any positive ways.
The graph below shows the title winning teams from the three competitive “big five” leagues that have changed ownership or controlling executive (to account for the ownership structure at Barcelona and Real Madrid) since Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea in 2003. The data looks back at least 20 years before the sale.
The first thing to notice about the graph is how symmetric most teams’ trophy haul is on either side of a sale – not just in terms of the number of trophies, for those teams where we have enough post-sale years to get a good picture, but also the spacing of trophies. For most of these clubs, if I removed the blue shading, you’d be hard pressed to tell when something significant happened.
The two exceptions are two of the clubs that are blank on the light blue side: Chelsea and Manchester City, whose previous domestic titles came when the First Division still had several decades as the First Division ahead of it. Leicester City also had its zero-to-one season, but took longer than the other two teams in blue and did not progress beyond one title.
The other clubs that show the most pre- / post-sale asymmetry are Valencia, Manchester United and Arsenal. Their changes in ownership signal the beginning of a decline, although Valencia’s 2002-2004 seasons seem to be outliers on any time frame, regardless of ownership turnover.
Attributing United’s or Arsenal’s title asymmetry to ownership is obviously confounded by the managerial issue. Both had extremely long term managers, spanning much of the period covered here and bridging the pre- and post-sale eras. The main difference is that one kept winning over decades, whereas the other had a few great years as part of a commendable decade. Arsenal stopped winning under Arsene Wenger well before Stan Kroenke bought the club, and Manchester United continued winning under Sir Alex Ferguson even after the Glazers took control.
But manager selection is among a team owner’s most important, public and assessable functions. It’s the most direct way – maybe the only direct way - that the owner can influence how the team performs on the field and where they finish on the table. Replacing Sir Alex Ferguson was never going to be easy, but the Glazers have failed spectacularly, repeatedly. None of Arsenal’s managers have come close to replicating Arsene Wenger’s early 2000s success, which has as much to do with Stan Kroenke as it does with whatever is in the water in north London.
New owners can only change the trajectory of a club towards the direction in which there is room to maneuver. When a team is already great or even mid-dynasty, the most any new owner can do is to move them a little further along their all-time, dynastic asymptote.
Todd Boehly adhered to the new owner playbook as closely as Maurizio Sarri did to his dog-eared copy of Una Guida per Principianti al 4-3-3 insieme a Regista. That’s a major risk for a club in Chelsea’s position. Twenty years of winning momentum left them with much more space below them than above. Boehly did not buy a club that needed a dramatic turnaround. He bought a club that needed an owner to replace one who, in many ways, wrote the new owner playbook for global football. If Boehly wants to surpass his predecessor, his priority should be maintaining momentum rather than setting a new direction.
Maintaining momentum does not mean managing decline, especially in sports. Dynastic coaches like Sir Alex Ferguson mastered this. But no one in business wants to follow the unfollowable act. Tim Cook, after all, has one of the least enviable jobs in the world.
Hopefully Chelsea’s new owner will figure out how to work under the asymmetric risk he bought into, pursuing marginal gains in a non-Team Sky kind of way because those are most of the gains left to achieve. If he does, many trophy lifts lay ahead. If not, people will look back at May 2022 and say “Him. Why did it have to be him?”