Say what you like about Todd Boehly, he knows how to get people’s attention.
First he buys Chelsea from Roman Abramovich in football’s biggest-ever takeover deal. Then he appoints himself interim sporting director and presides over Chelsea’s biggest-ever transfer window, spending £278 million on new signings.
Then, after losing three of the first seven matches, he sacks his Champions League-winning coach, Thomas Tuchel, one week after the transfer window has closed.
But nothing he has done as Chelsea’s owner brought him more criticism than his observation that the annual Major League Baseball All Star game generates $200 million, and so maybe the Premier League should look at having an All Star game of its own.
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Boehly was castigated by a series of big football names including Jurgen Klopp (“is he going to bring the Harlem Globetrotters as well?”), Thierry Henry (“this is Europe, it doesn’t work like that”), Jamie Carragher (“I think it’s incredibly arrogant”), and Gary Neville (“US investment into English football is a clear and present danger to the pyramid and fabric of the game”).
Boehly obviously hadn’t helped himself by naming Mo Salah and Kevin de Bruyne as graduates of Chelsea’s academy. In the days after he sacked Tuchel, a story had done the rounds that in one of Tuchel’s meetings with Boehly, the owner had made reference to a “4-4-3″ formation . . . Chelsea insisted that story was untrue, but it sounded truthy enough to enjoy wide circulation.
Boehly knows a bit about truthiness. His claim that baseball’s All Star game makes $200 million has proved difficult to corroborate. Maybe it should be filed alongside his casual assertion in the same interview that every Premier League team makes “north of a few hundred million” in TV revenue – when the actual sums last year ranged from millions to £160 million depending on league placing.
But Boehly’s mistake was not to get a couple of details wrong. It was to suggest English football could take a “lesson” from American sports. This made him guilty of the (serious-in-England) offence of failing to know his place.
It’s not that the Premier League never takes lessons from American sports. The league is essentially a clone of the National Football League, and was largely inspired by the NFL fandom of three English football club directors: Irving Scholar of Tottenham, David Dein of Arsenal and Martin Edwards of Man United.
Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg’s 2018 book, The Club, tells how Dein used to go to Miami Dolphins games, where he saw decent stadium toilets for the first time and realised another world was possible.
Dein, Edwards and Scholar all eventually cash out as the changes they forced through made English clubs attractive to wealthy international investors. Top-level English football is now mostly owned and operated by foreigners, but appearances are everything in what an increasing number of English pundits now call “Our League”.
It’s fine for Americans to own English football, but not for them to talk as if they owned the place.
Boehly’s suggestions were an insult to the order of things, not unlike Phillip Schofield jumping the queue to pay his respects to the Queen. Yes, Schofield’s employers, ITV, have debunked the claim that he jumped the queue – but like 4-4-3, it’s truthy.
Schofield’s alleged behaviour was contrasted with the decency displayed by David Beckham, who famously queued up like everybody else. The other thing Beckham did to make the news recently was sign a £150 million deal to promote Qatar, but 12 hours in the queue restored his man-of-the-people credentials. Beckham has never needed anyone to explain to him the importance of appearances.
Having seen Boehly’s spitballing about All Star games greeted with ridicule, it will be interesting to see the reaction whenever he reveals his real ideas, which will have nothing to do with cheesy exhibition matches and everything to do with multi-year media rights deals.
If Boehly’s career could be boiled down to a formula it would be: bet big on sure things. In 2012, when his consortium bought the LA Dodgers for what was then a world-record $1.575 billion, many thought he had overpaid. In Boehly’s account, these people didn’t realise how undervalued the Dodgers’ TV rights were.
He bought the team just as their old TV rights deals were expiring and they were preparing to negotiate a new one. It had generally been expected the rights would bring in around $3.5 billion – but the eventual deal with Time Warner Cable was for $7 billion – and, from that point on, Boehly and his partners were laughing.
Why did Boehly pay £2.5 billion for Chelsea, plus another £1.75 billion in add-ons? It’s because, like the Dodgers, he believes they are cheap at the price.
What interests him about Chelsea is that big international fanbase of theirs, just waiting to be properly monetised. Like the people who run Manchester United for the Glazers, Boehly often talks about “turning fans into subscribers” and his dream is a worldwide audience of Chelsea fans connected to the club via a mobile app, paying to subscribe to Chelsea as they would subscribe to Netflix.
At the moment a lot of those Chelsea fans are subscribing to TV companies like Sky, BT Sports and so on. These middleman will need to keep ratcheting up their rights offers if owners like Boehly are ever going to get a return on investment. If they don’t, Boehly will not hesitate to seek a solution that works better for Chelsea, even if it doesn’t work for smaller teams. For baseball owners accustomed to negotiating their own media rights auctions, the Premier League’s collective system must feel like tyranny.
But even if none of that works out, Boehly still has one big reason to feel bullish. In the era of quantitative easing – an era which seems to have ended and may be about to go into reverse – investors have got used to the idea that certain kinds of assets can only go up.
Asked on a Sportico podcast in November 2021 what he saw as the biggest threat to the ever-increasing valuations of teams like the Dodgers, he conceded he couldn’t see one.
“[Major sports franchises] are gonna continue to go up in value, as more dollars come into the system, there’s going to be expansion of value,” he said.
“There’s not many of them, they’re not manufacturing more of them – there might be a handful more, but they’re not manufacturing a lot more. And we’re adding more and more liquidity into the system, and that’s going to continue to expand values. All markets are like this [gestures up and down]. But in the end, if the supply of money keeps growing, and the asset itself is finite, it’s hard to see it doing anything other than going up in value.”
These are the money markets in which Todd Boehly made his billions: even when you lose, you win.
