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    Real Madrid Sends Chelsea Out of Champions League

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    Real Madrid advanced to the semifinals at the expense of a Chelsea team long on cash and talk but short, it seems, on ideas of how to succeed.LONDON — Todd Boehly was supposed to be the smartest man in the room. That was the pitch, anyway, when he first descended on Chelsea, on the Premier League and on European soccer almost a year ago. He was the guy who spoke to a hushed audience at the Milken Institute Global Conference. He was onstage at the SALT forum. Other people described him as a “thought leader.”His ideas, he knew, might be received by traditionalists as a little provocative. He suggested a Premier League all-star game — and a relegation playoff. He told soccer it could learn something from American sports, a longstanding euphemism for finding new ways to extricate more cash from fans. He evangelized the idea of buying a whole network of teams. It was 2022, so at some point he talked — rather more than hindsight would suggest was wise — about NFTs, or nonfungible tokens.Boehly did not seem to mind the criticism, the resistance. He was likely expecting it, the price to be paid for daring to disrupt an industry as fearful and staid and conservative as, um, English soccer. He had a “modern, data-driven approach.” He sought “structural advantages.” He had worked out that paying players for longer somehow made them cheaper. He was the cutting edge. And it would not be the cutting edge if it was comfortable.A quick status update on where Chelsea stands now, a year into the ownership tenure of Boehly and his less visible colleagues: 11th in the Premier League, having won only two of its last 12 games; employing its third manager of the campaign, and simultaneously searching for his replacement; $600 million poorer after embarking on the largest single-season transfer spending spree in history; and, as of Tuesday night, out of the Champions League, its last, distant shot at glory gone.Todd Boehly and Chelsea may not see the Champions League again for a while.Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThere is, at least, no particular shame in that. In the end, this was as straightforward a quarterfinal as Real Madrid could have hoped for: a 2-0 win at home last week, and another 2-0 victory on Tuesday in London, a low bar confidently cleared. But Frank Lampard, Chelsea’s interim manager, was not clutching at straws when he suggested his team had “caused Real a lot of problems” for the first hour or so at Stamford Bridge on Tuesday.Chelsea had chivied and harried and unnerved Real Madrid, the reigning European champion. In patches, anyway. With better finishing, as Lampard observed, things might have been different. A portion of the credit for that should go to him: It was his deployment of N’Golo Kanté in a more advanced role that caused Real Madrid to “suffer” so much, as Carlo Ancelotti, Real’s coach, admitted. Chelsea went down, as it was always going to, but it did so with pride intact.That has not always been the case in the first year of what is probably best described as the Boehly experience. Chelsea has long nursed something of a soap opera streak, one that has provided a curiously accurate reflection of the shifting nature of the part of London it calls home.In the 1960s, the club was home to the Kings of the King’s Road, chic, hip and cool. In the 1970s, the freewheeling mavericks arrived, the club nursing a sort of alternative, pre-punk energy. By the 1990s, it was home to a set of impossibly stylish European imports. And then, from 2003 onward, Roman Abramovich turned it into a sort of gaudy monument to the power of the vast wells of new money pouring into the capital from across the globe, Russia in particular.Frank Lampard, still winless in his latest stint at Chelsea.Clive Rose/Getty ImagesThere have been various points, in all of those incarnations, when Chelsea has veered perilously close to lapsing into self-parody. Abramovich, in particular, appeared to have absolutely no interest in running a sensible, steady sort of a soccer team. He may or may not have been a Kremlin apparatchik, but he was most certainly thirsty for drama.He fired coaches for not winning titles. He fired coaches for not winning the right titles. He fired coaches when they had won titles. He appointed at least one manager whom the fans hated. He appointed another because he was his friend. There was one season when the players effectively ran the show. There was infighting and politicking and dark talk of plots, and all of that was just a quiet Tuesday for José Mourinho.Chelsea, in other words, has a relatively high tolerance for the unusual and even, at times, the absurd. But even by those standards, Boehly and his consortium have pushed it to the limit.Signing so many players that the locker room at the club’s training facility is not quite big enough to accommodate them all is not indicative of judicious planning. Likewise spending so much money that the club, in the absence of Champions League soccer and the income it brings, will not only have to indulge in a fire sale of players this summer but quite possibly breach the Premier League’s financial rules next season.Abramovich was not averse to dropping in on the players — sometimes literally: His helicopter regularly used to land at the Cobham training ground if the fancy took him — in order to inspire or encourage or perhaps just glare menacingly at them. But there are no known instances of him, as Boehly reportedly did, telling one of his expensively acquired stars that his performances had been “embarrassing.”There is a chance, of course, that all of these are just teething problems, a form of culture shock, the inevitable growing pains that come with some very rich, very clever — though it is worth noting that those two things are not as synonymous as is often assumed — people dipping their toes into an industry to which they are not native.It may well be, as Lampard loyally and hopefully suggested, that Chelsea is “back” sooner rather than later: guided by one of the half-dozen managerial candidates being considered by the four sporting directors, or equivalent, it employs, boasting a trimmed-down squad full of bright young things, the fat excised to make way for the lean.As Boehly himself said last year, the Premier League is designed in such a way as to give the “big brands” — oh, Todd — a number of his beloved structural advantages. One of those is the privilege of having money to solve problems. Another is a limit to how much it is possible to fail.From this vantage point, though, the ultimate vindication of Boehly and his group seems almost impossibly distant. Chelsea is out of the Champions League. It will not be back next season. Still, there is hope. It is up to Boehly to plot its way back, and he is, by all accounts, the smartest man in the room.Rodrygo, right, scored both goals as Real Madrid cruised into the semifinals, where it will face the Manchester City-Bayern Munich winner.Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated Press More

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      Chelsea’s Graham Potter Paid Price for Owners’ Spending Spree

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      American owners spent billions to buy the Premier League club and then millions more on players. But as Chelsea sinks in the standings, is the worst still ahead?LONDON — Every week, it seemed, Chelsea officials worked their phones to quiet the whispers that Graham Potter was about to be fired. And every week the news media quickly relayed those reassurances to Chelsea’s fans, even as the defeats mounted, the grumbling grew louder and the team’s plunge down the Premier League table showed little sign of slowing.This Chelsea, its new American owners said in their own private briefings to reporters, was going to be different from the one previously controlled by Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch famous for his habit of churning through managers. Now, fans were told, the changes and the investments were for the long term.That was until Sunday. This time, the whispers were true: Potter was out.His exit, after only six months in charge and after the club spent hundreds of millions of dollars on new players for him to coach, was jarring. But it was also just the latest head-spinning announcement from Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali, the two American financiers who have thrust themselves forward as the frontmen for a soccer project that shows little sign of any overarching plan.And the cost just keeps rising.First, Boehly, Eghbali and their American-led consortium paid a record 2.5 billion pounds (roughly $3.1 billion) to acquire Chelsea, a club that lost about $1 million a week during the nearly two decades it was owned by Abramovich, and committed to spending another $2 billion on the team over the next decade. That shook up the soccer industry overnight, changing the valuations teams set for themselves. Within months, the owners of Manchester United and Liverpool had put their clubs on the market.Then came the new players, first in an initial group of acquisitions last summer and then in another big-ticket wave in January. They arrived in London at a cost of more than 600 million pounds (about $750 million), an extreme outlay that had no previous precedent, and which puzzled — and frustrated — even Chelsea’s most free-spending rivals, since it drove up the asking price for talent around the world and simultaneously made it harder for Premier League clubs to offload players they no longer wanted.But players weren’t the only costs. In between the shopping sprees, and within their first 100 days, the new owners had also dispensed with Thomas Tuchel, the German coach they had inherited, and who brought the club the Champions League title just over a year earlier. To replace him, Chelsea lured not only Potter but also half a dozen members of the coaching staff at his former team Brighton. The cost? About $25 million in buyouts, plus long-term contracts for all involved.Todd Boehly became a fixture at Chelsea as the face of its American-led ownership group.David Cliff/Associated PressIt seemed, in the moment, a shrewd (if pricey) bit of business. At Brighton, Potter, 47, had slowly and deliberately turned a provincial club, a relative newcomer to the Premier League, into a team that now has realistic aspirations to regularly finish in the top half of the table.Yet at Chelsea, the environment has appeared to be anything but deliberate. Now, with Potter gone, no one seems to know the plan for a collection of players — team feels too strong a word — cobbled together with what appears to be little coherence.There’s Marc Cucurella, the wing back brought in from Brighton at great expense but deployed, curiously, as a center back on Saturday; and forward Mykhailo Mudryk, whose experience did not seem to match his nine-figure price; and the 21-year-old Argentine midfielder Enzo Fernández. There are so many new faces at Chelsea, in fact, that at times the strategy has appeared to be nothing more than a simplistic desire to gather as much of the world’s best young talent as possible, whatever the cost, and find places for them to play later.Even as Chelsea was firing Potter, for example, multiple news media outlets reported that Chelsea was working to sign a 15-year-old prospect from Ecuador, reports the club did not deny.Maybe Potter knows what to do with all the disparate parts? That would at least explain the curious line in the statement about his firing that noted he had “agreed to collaborate with the club” on the transition to whatever comes after him.Graham Potter, whose service and staff cost Chelsea a small fortune, didn’t last a full season.Tony Obrien/ReutersBruno Saltor, one of the coaches who arrived with Potter from Brighton, will get the unenviable task of holding things together temporarily, starting with Tuesday’s visit by Liverpool. It is unclear how long his tenure will be, though, with Chelsea now starting a search for its third coach since the American takeover in May.News media reports have already linked the club with high-profile out-of-work coaches like Julian Nagelsmann, recently fired by Bayern Munich, and Mauricio Pochettino, an Argentine who coached both Southampton and Tottenham. That Boehly and Eghbali will make the right decision, though, is questionable.Chelsea, despite its deep pockets, looks to be a monumental repair job. It was beaten at home by Aston Villa on Saturday in Potter’s last game in charge, a performance that highlighted the effects of the curious squad-building undertaken in the last months. While it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring forwards, none of that cash was dispensed on a recognized scorer. Saturday’s 2-0 defeat — a game in which Chelsea took more than 30 shots yet rarely looked like it could recover from its early deficit — was the fifth goal-less performance by the club since the start of February.Chelsea stands 11th in the Premier League table. A date with Real Madrid looms in the quarterfinals of the Champions League next week. Winning the competition is now Chelsea’s its only realistic chance of playing in it again next season, but that remote possibility suddenly seems vital.Chelsea’s finances, already in disarray because of the cost of the takeover, the new coaches and the new players, could soon come under more serious strain. Failure to qualify for next season’s Champions League would mean the loss of tens of millions of dollars of revenue. That could put the club in violation of the Premier League’s cost control rules, raising the possibility of sanctions — or hurried player sales in a market that will know the team needs to sell quickly to balance its books.Sunday was a dark day for Chelsea’s owners. What’s ahead could be much, much worse. More

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      Chelsea’s Spending in Transfer Window Puzzles Its Rivals

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      The Premier League club’s American owners have splashed roughly $750 million on new players since last year. Puzzled rivals can’t see a strategy behind the spending.LONDON — As the last few hours of the January transfer window ticked by, and as a small group of Chelsea executives were painstakingly trying to piece together the $131 million deal that would make Enzo Fernández, the 21-year-old Argentine midfielder, the most expensive player ever signed by an English team, Todd Boehly, the most high-profile of Chelsea’s new owners, was on the phone, trying to sign someone else.Since arriving in the Premier League last May, Boehly has taken an unusually hands-on approach to the transfer market, regularly leading negotiations for prospective signings. In the summer, he appointed himself as Chelsea’s interim sporting director. He has since relinquished the title, but his appetite for involvement is undimmed.So as Behdad Eghbali, the founder of Chelsea’s biggest investor Clearlake Capital now seven months into his tenure as one of Chelsea’s co-owners, was fine-tuning the structure of the Fernández transfer with the Portuguese side Benfica, Boehly decided that he would personally follow up on an email a member of the club’s recruitment staff had sent to the Italian team Fiorentina. In addition to signing Fernández, Boehly told Fiorentina, Chelsea wanted to take Sofyan Amrabat — another midfield player who had starred in the World Cup — on loan.That, he was informed, would not be possible. The Italian club wanted to keep Amrabat, a Moroccan international, and even if it was interested in selling it would not consider letting its star player leave for anything other than a premium, and permanent, fee.Boehly declared Fiorentina’s eight-figure asking price unreasonable. An executive at the Italian team responded by asking how he would feel if some other club turned up on the final day of the transfer window and tried to poach one of Chelsea’s most valuable assets on the cheap. The call, and the negotiation, ended abruptly.Benfica’s Argentine midfielder Enzo Fernández was Chelsea’s prize winter signing.Carlos Costa/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAmrabat would, in the end, be a rare miss in what has been an eye-watering, gasp-inducing month of spending from Eghbali, Boehly and Chelsea. With only a few minutes to spare before the window closed, Chelsea filed the paperwork for Fernández, their eighth signing of the month, and at $131 million the most expensive. The club had agreed to pay Benfica roughly 10 times what the Portuguese side had paid for him only six months ago.That took Chelsea’s outlay in January alone to more than $370 million, the kind of spending that is criticized when done by oligarchs and nation states. It was the most any club has ever spent in a single window and more than every team in the French, Spanish, German and Italian top flights combined. Since Boehly and Eghbali took charge, Chelsea has now spent somewhere in the region of three quarters of a billion dollars overhauling a squad that won the Champions League less than two years ago.They have done so with a frequency, extravagance and single-mindedness that has, at times, surprised even some of European soccer’s most seasoned operators. Early last month, for example, Sergei Palkin — the president of the exiled Ukrainian club Shakhtar Donetsk — was sitting in the Cullinan Belek hotel in the Turkish resort of Antalya when he received a phone call from Eghbali.Chelsea had asked, several weeks earlier, to be kept appraised of any bids for Shakhtar’s explosive winger Mykhailo Mudryk, but now seemed to be lagging behind Arsenal in the pursuit of the player. Arsenal had been discussing the terms of a deal with Shakhtar for some time, and Mudryk had even seemed to welcome his imminent transfer on Instagram.Then Eghbali called. “He said, ‘I’m here,’” Palkin told The New York Times. “I said, ‘What do you mean “here”?’ He told me he’s in the hotel.” Eghbali had landed by private jet that morning. After swift talks, he boarded his plane again the same day, this time with Mudryk in tow and $108 million on its way to Shakhtar. Chelsea’s offer, Palkin said, had been more “concrete” than Arsenal’s: It had offered to pay the nine-figure fee for Mudryk over two years instead of the four Arsenal had proposed.Palkin left those talks with the distinct impression that Chelsea’s principal owners — while perhaps a little keener on taking their share of the limelight afforded by soccer’s frenzied player trading business than many of their peers — had serious, coherent plans for the club they had bought at auction from Roman Abramovich.Eghbali, he said, had outlined their vision for what Chelsea would become. “They want to invest in players, new infrastructure; they have plans to build a new stadium,” Palkin said. “At a minimum there will be an increase in the income at Chelsea. In three or four years, Chelsea will look very professional.”Ben Stansall/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesJason Cairnduff/Action Images, via ReutersNow vying for playing time at Chelsea: defender Benoit Badiashile ($42 million); David Datro Fofana ($13.1 million); and wing Mykhailo Mudryk ($108 million).Peter Powell/EPA, via ShutterstockThat view, it is fair to say, is not universally held. Under Abramovich, Chelsea had been losing a million dollars a week, losses covered only by regular capital injections from the Russian billionaire’s personal fortune. How Boehly, Eghbali and their group plan to balance the books — given the enormous scale of their investment on players so far — is not clear.Their preferred mechanism, it seems, has been to defer the official cost of the deals. Though clubs pay the vast majority of a transfer fee upfront — or in a handful of installments over a couple of years — the price of the acquisition is often spread out over the duration of the player’s contract, a process known as amortization. Doing so allows a team to spread out of the cost of an expensive purchase — or, in Chelsea’s case, half a dozen or so — over multiple years, and allow it to stay within the cost controls required by the Premier League and UEFA, European soccer’s governing body.In several of their most expensive deals, Chelsea have sought to use that accounting to their advantage. Wesley Fofana, a defender signed from Leicester City last summer, signed a seven-year deal. Mudryk’s runs for eight seasons. Fernández, the costliest of them all, is contracted to Stamford Bridge until 2031.That approach has not gone unnoticed. The issue was raised at a meeting of UEFA’s executive board last month, and several teams have since contacted Andrea Traverso, the organization’s head of licensing, to ask European soccer’s governing body what action it plans to take to close the loophole. (Starting this summer, UEFA will only allow teams to amortize contracts over a maximum of five years when it analyzes whether teams are in compliance of its fiscal rules.)Long contracts, though, are not the only concern. Among Chelsea’s peers and rivals, the reaction to the club’s spending spree on players has been one of puzzlement. In interviews with a dozen executives at teams both in the Premier League and across Europe, all of whom spoke with The New York Times anonymously because they did not wish to be seen commenting on another team’s business strategy, few could immediately discern the logic of Chelsea’s approach.Some suggested the sheer number of players Chelsea has acquired — more than a dozen since the summer — made it hard to discern any clear sporting plan beyond a simplistic desire to stockpile the world’s best young talent, regardless of the cost. Others wondered if it made sense for a team with one of the most prolific academies in Europe to render its work so obviously futile. Chelsea’s owners have done little, publicly, to explain the frenzy of acquisitions or the thinking behind them.In England, most believe the fees Chelsea has paid in the last few months will have an inflationary effect, though nobody was quite sure if that was deliberate or merely an inevitable side effect.In the rest of Europe, the fear is a little more material. Chelsea, one executive at a major continental club said, has “destroyed the market,” a sentiment supported by Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, Spain’s top division. “The British market is doped,” he said. “It is a competition that loses billions of pounds in the last few years, financed with contributions from patrons, in this case American investors who finance at a loss.”While all of the executives immediately understood the purpose of Chelsea’s prolonged contracts, the majority were baffled as to whether the club was bravely exploiting an inefficiency in the market or mortgaging its future. After all, lengthening contracts might reduce the immediate financial impact on Chelsea’s accounts — and therefore help the club meet European soccer’s largely theoretical cost control mechanisms — but it does not represent the team’s actual cash flow.Chelsea still has to pay the transfer fees in the short term. It still has to commit to pay the players several million dollars more than it might have if they were on more standard-length contracts. It still has to rely on each of them fulfilling their undoubted potential. It still faces the risk of being encumbered with expensive, immovable assets in years to come if they do not.Selling players, certainly, has been a little more of a challenge for Chelsea. As Eghbali was negotiating for Fernández and Boehly was making his last-ditch bid for Amrabat, one of Chelsea’s current players, Hakim Ziyech, was sitting in the offices of Paris St.-Germain, waiting for confirmation of his departure.The deal had been in the works for a week or so. At one point, talks had been sufficiently relaxed that Boehly had suggested P.S.G.’s owner — the Qatar Investment Authority — might like to help Chelsea with its stadium project. As the minutes ticked down to the transfer deadline, though, P.S.G. officials became concerned at Chelsea’s lack of communication.Five minutes before the deadline — at 10:55 p.m. local time — Chelsea finally sent over a document. It was the wrong one. When that was pointed out, a second soon followed. It was not signed. By the time the new error was fixed, it was too late. The deadline had passed. P.S.G. could not register the signing.Ziyech, distraught, had to return to west London, where a raft of new teammates await him, including at least two who play his position. Chelsea has little need for him now. It has to pay his salary, though, for another six months. More

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      Welcome to Wrexham: It’s the Future

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      Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds seem sincere about their investment, emotionally and financially, in a Welsh soccer team. But they are not mere observers in its story.The first thing, and likely the most important thing, is that Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney seem to be sincere. It is hard to be absolutely certain, of course: They are both actors, after all, and a 45-minute Zoom meeting is, on balance, probably not the ideal format in which to take the measure of someone’s soul.If their enthusiasm and affection for Wrexham, the down-at-the-heels Welsh soccer team they bought two years ago — and the community that it calls home — is an act, though, then it is a convincing one. McElhenney watches Wrexham’s games these days, while “pacing back and forth, unable to sit still,” he said. “There is nothing quite like the anxiety soccer produces.”If anything, he has got off lightly compared to Reynolds. McElhenney is a lifelong Philadelphia Eagles fan, a blessing and a curse that served to inoculate him — to some extent — against the ravages of fandom even as he fell quickly, “deeply and madly in love” with Wrexham.Reynolds, on the other hand, was pure, unsullied, defenseless. He had nurtured something of a soft spot for the Vancouver Canucks and Whitecaps, his hometown hockey and soccer teams, but admitted he would be stretching it to identify as a fan.At first, he wondered if he was resistant to the sensation. He caught only half of Wrexham’s first few games after his and McElhenney’s takeover was completed in February 2021. He was, by his own admission, “pretty passive.” It did not last. When it hit him, it hit him hard.“It is a horrible, cyclical, prophetic hellscape that never ceases or ebbs,” he said, a sentence that suggests he has come to fully understand the appeal of soccer. “I love every second, but it’s torment in equal measure. Every second is pure agony. It’s a new experience for me. I am in awe of people who have survived in that culture their whole lives.”Wrexham’s battle for promotion was more than a TV story line to its fans.Lewis Storey/Getty ImagesNeither McElhenney nor Reynolds had quite anticipated the extent of the emotional impact when, late in 2020, the former approached the latter with a proposal. McElhenney had spent a considerable portion of lockdown watching sports documentaries: the acclaimed “Sunderland ’Til I Die,” for one, and more significantly an HBO series on Diego Maradona. He decided he wanted to add his own production to the canon, and he wanted Reynolds — an acquaintance, rather than a friend, at that stage — to help bankroll it.The result, “Welcome To Wrexham,” is heartwarming and funny and appealing, but it is also difficult to categorize. At one point, Reynolds describes it — perhaps as a slip of the tongue — as a “reality show,” but that feels reductive. So, too, does the faintly euphemistic term “structured reality,” a genre most recently characterized by Netflix’s glossy “Selling Sunset.”But nor is it, strictly speaking, a documentary, not in the traditional sense, not in the way that “Sunderland ’Til I Die” was a documentary. There is a long-held rule among wildlife photographers and documentarians that they are present to observe, rather than intervene. Even David Attenborough hews to the mantra that “tragedy is part of life.” To prevent it, he said, would be “to distort the truth.”“Welcome To Wrexham,” by contrast, is inherently interventionist. Wrexham had been drifting, hopeless and forlorn, in English soccer’s fifth tier for more than a decade when it was bought, out of the blue, by two Hollywood stars. Reynolds and McElhenney are not simply telling a story. They are shaping it, too.That is exemplified, most clearly, by what appears to be an innocuous jump cut halfway through the show’s second episode. All of a sudden, the viewer is at home with Paul Rutherford, Wrexham’s locally born veteran midfielder. With more than a hint of pride, Rutherford shows off all the work he and his wife, Gemma, have done to their home: They put in the staircase, lowered the ceilings, installed a downstairs bathroom.It turns out the house is about to get a little busier. The couple already have two boys; a third is on the way. Rutherford is currently building the baby’s crib. Later, he is shown playing soccer with his oldest son. He carries him home on his shoulders. It is heartwarming, touching and deeply ominous.Anyone who has seen a nature documentary in which a young giraffe becomes separated from the herd, or a horror movie in which a teenager experiences a power failure, or an installment of “Match of the Day” in which a player is shown picking up an innocuous early yellow card, knows the cue. Something bad is about to happen.The bad, in this case, comes in Wrexham’s last game of the season, a few months after the takeover. The team needs to win to make the playoffs. Rutherford, introduced as a substitute, is sent off for a reckless challenge. He is shown in the changing room, his chest heaving, urging his teammates to win without him. They do not. Wrexham is held to a draw. Its season is over. A caption appears. Rutherford’s contract expired the next day. He was released. He was the giraffe.“I love every second, but it’s torment in equal measure,” Reynolds said of watching Wrexham, and fandom more generally. “Every second is pure agony.”Andrew Boyers/Action Images Via ReutersSuch is the cold reality of soccer, of course, a sport that has no appetite for sentiment and — at the level Wrexham occupies — no money for it, either. Countless players suffer the same fate as Rutherford every season, victims of the game’s unapologetic mercilessness. His story, apart perhaps from the circumstances of his farewell, is not especially remarkable.Reynolds and McElhenney are clear that, while they are ultimately responsible for it, they did not make that call. Personnel decisions are left to those on the ground at Wrexham, those who know the sport far better than they do. Nobody is hired or fired because it makes good drama; their commitment, Reynolds said, is simply to do the best by Wrexham as an entity.Sometimes, sadly, that means individuals have to be cast as collateral. They take no pleasure in that. “It is a terrible feeling,” Reynolds said. “You don’t want to mess with people’s livelihoods. It’s genuinely awful. It feels mercenary, but it’s also part of our responsibility to the club.”It is impossible not to feel, though, that their very presence placed a thumb on the scale. Of course, Rutherford — and the other players who were cut — might have been released by a different ownership group. Reynolds and McElhenney’s vision and ambition, though, made it certain. They are not simply telling the story. They are writing it, too.McElhenney, certainly, is aware of the irony. Sports are compelling, he said, because they are “uncontrived,” authentic. “Any piece of scripted content has been contrived and created and manipulated to make you feel a certain way,” he said. “The masters can do that to great effect; they can make you feel like you’re not being manipulated, but that is the intent. There is no manipulation in sports. What is happening is what is happening.”By documenting that, though, they are necessarily adding a layer of manipulation. Any documentary, McElhenney said, has to take a “point of view,” to tease out a narrative thread from thousands of unhelpfully unstructured and often inchoate real-life moments for viewers to consume.“There is no manipulation in sports,” McElhenney said. “What is happening is what is happening.”Patrick Mcelhenney/FX, via Associated Press“Sports are kind of meaningless to me unless I know what is at stake for someone,” Reynolds said. “What a player overcame to be there. What a club means to a community. If I think about the movies that made an impression on me, is ‘Field Of Dreams’ a movie about baseball? Not really. It’s a movie about a father and son trying to connect. That context is what pulls you in.”It is a tension that more and more clubs will confront as the lines between sport and story blur ever further. There are ever more documentaries in production — Amazon’s “All Or Nothing” series will follow the German national team at this year’s World Cup — as soccer embraces the same logic as Formula 1 did with “Drive To Survive”: What happens on the field is not the only thing that can be harnessed to drive interest and, as a result, revenue.At heart, of course, what Reynolds and McElhenney have done with Wrexham is an inherently benign form of ownership, certainly by soccer’s standards. They have not saddled the club with debt. They are not using it to try to whitewash the image of a repressive state. They have given a club, and a town, reason to believe, and all for the price of a couple of camera crews.Their ownership does not, they insist, hinge on “Welcome To Wrexham” being a success. They are in it “for the long haul,” Reynolds said, whether the audience is or not. They have, of course, already affected the story of the team, and quite possibly the town. But they are not mere observers. They are in the story, too, and so the team, and the town, have done exactly the same to them.There but for the Grace of ToddPerhaps, Todd Boehly will reflect, a brightly-lit stage at a high-profile business conference is not the place to start spit-balling ideas.That, it seemed fairly clear, is all Boehly, Chelsea’s increasingly fascinating new owner, was doing when he brought up the notion of a Premier League all-star game this week at the SALT Conference in New York.His remark was not, in any reasonable reading, a “proposal.” It was a top-of-the-head sort of a suggestion, a back-of-the-envelope example. There was no PowerPoint presentation. He had not run the numbers. He was not submitting it to a vote. He was simply discussing ways in which English soccer — famously impoverished — might seek to generate yet more precious revenue, and an all-star game was the first thought that came to mind.None of that seemed to dampen the immediate storm of criticism generated by Boehly’s indulgence in some momentary blue-skying. Nobody, at any point, seemed inclined to treat it as nothing more than an idea. And why should they? It was far more fun to take it very seriously indeed.There were, after all, so many reactions available. Some of them were valid, since it is not, deep down, a very good idea. Dressing it up as a way to pump more money into the rest of the soccer pyramid was almost as transparent as it was cynical. As Jürgen Klopp said, there is player welfare to consider. As the Daily Telegraph’s Sam Wallace pointed out, it does not work on a practical level: the desires of the English are not the only factor in determining soccer’s calendar, a sentiment Bayern Munich’s fans clearly share.The most frequent reaction, though, was also the most ferocious. To many, Boehly’s suggestion was nothing less than an outrage, a betrayal of English soccer’s history, a misreading of its nature, an irruption of its purity. To Gary Neville, it was further proof that American investment into the Premier League represents a “clear and present danger” to English soccer.There were many ways to react to this outpouring of scorn, too. You might ask whether Neville was quite so upset by all of the money pouring into the Premier League from American broadcasters, or whether he was so troubled by Boehly’s shock-and-awe spending spree on Chelsea’s squad this summer.Or you might point out that an all-star game is certainly no more of an imposition than the Community Shield, and much less of one than the Premier League Asia Trophy and the Florida Cup. Best of all, you might suggest that Neville should be old enough to remember the various exhibition games between invitational teams in the 1980s. They weren’t called all-star games, of course, but that is precisely what they were. Boehly’s idea is, it turns out, neither American nor new.Mostly, though, it was hard not to notice the many layers of irony present in both the statement and the backlash.It is, certainly, one of the curiosities of soccer’s era of international investment that so many billionaires seem to think the most popular sport in the world, the one they have had to pay a fortune to buy into, just isn’t good enough at making money.It is another that they are so often accused of misunderstanding the sport. Boehly, like everyone else, has been attracted to soccer because it has spent the last three decades in a relentless, fervent and frequently amoral pursuit of profit. His idea might not have been a good one, but it is perfectly in line with the nature of the business he has bought into.CorrespondenceA wonderful way to start the week, thanks to Nona Cleland. “Would you be kind enough to explain the meaning of the corner flag photo?” she asks, in reference to a caption from last week.I would be delighted, Nona: clubs tend to use a stock photo of a limp, mournful corner flag, emblazoned with their crests, when they release a statement imparting bad news, most frequently the firing of a manager. I don’t quite know how it started — though I am, I admit, tempted to find out — but it is now a fairly reliable visual clue that a crisis has reached its inevitable conclusion.Oh no: Who got fired?Neil Hall/EPA, via ShutterstockThere has also been a bit of a backlash to Tom Karsay’s suggestion that fans might object more to big-money acquisitions if they remembered the money funding them came, ultimately, from their own pockets. “Quite the opposite, when the alternative is our money going into the owners’ pockets and staying there,” wrote John Nielsen-Gammon.Brian Marx, meanwhile, pointed out that fans “choose to consume top league club soccer, it is not forced upon us. Also, for the fans of any specific team, the signing of a difference-making player, expensive or otherwise, is always another chance to allow those rays of hope to stream in the window.”And we can finish with a question, one that will make no sense to those of you who skipped last week’s newsletter, from Rich Johnson. “Which Premier League manager do you believe would have the most success at interpretive dance?” he wrote. This would, I think, be an intensely competitive field. Most managers, after all, essentially spend whole games performing elaborate dance routines. Antonio Conte’s body language is powerfully expressive, but it’s hard to see past Pep Guardiola, who often has the air of a man performing a complex choreography. More

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      The Problem With Chelsea (Hint: It May Not Be the Manager)

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      Six days after spending more in a single transfer window than any club in history, Chelsea’s new owners fired the team’s coach, Thomas Tuchel. Now what?The caveat, right from the start, was experience. The consortium, fronted by Todd Boehly and bankrolled by the private equity firm Clearlake, had the money. That much was plain. They had, after all, paid $2.8 billion to buy Chelsea in a frantic, opaque auction, making it the most expensive acquisition in the history of sports.They had expertise in the business, too, or some form of it: Neither Boehly nor Mark Walter, a comparatively late addition to the ownership group, was a sporting neophyte. Both own a slice of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and that investment, in recent years, has proved a relatively adroit one.No, the only thing that could be held against the new owners, the only thing that gave Chelsea’s fans pause for thought as they considered what a post-Roman Abramovich future might bring, was that none of them — Boehly, Clearlake, Walter or Hansjorg Wyss, the octogenarian Swiss billionaire who had brought the group together — knew the first thing about English soccer.Three months in, those doubts have been overcome. Scarcely 100 days have elapsed since the group took official control of Chelsea. In that time, it lavished more than $300 million on new signings — more than any club had ever spent in a single transfer window — and then, with the ink still drying on the last couple of contracts, decided to fire its manager only a half-dozen games into the season.If they carry on like this, Chelsea’s new owners will fit into the Premier League’s hyperbolic soap opera just fine.Todd Boehly and his partners have been remaking Chelsea all summer. Change has not been cheap.David Cliff/Associated PressFrom the outside, Chelsea’s decision to part company with Thomas Tuchel in the early hours of Wednesday felt distinctly, comfortingly familiar. The team had lost the previous evening in its opening Champions League engagement against Dinamo Zagreb. That defeat came on the back of a stuttering start to the Premier League campaign that has left Chelsea in sixth, just 5 points behind first-place Arsenal but already smarting from losses to Leeds United and Southampton.This was, then, the new Chelsea behaving precisely as the old Chelsea always had, with a short-termism so ruthless it almost qualified as proud. Spending an unimaginable sum of money to furnish a manager with the team he desired only to dismiss the manager at the first hint of trouble? Roman would be proud.Internally, the picture was a little more nuanced. Tuchel’s brief reign — he was in place for only 19 months — had hit its peak early, in the uncanny valley of lockdown soccer, when he took a team that had been struggling to qualify for the Champions League under his predecessor, Frank Lampard, and turned it into the champion of Europe in four months. Rarely, if ever, has a coach had such an immediate, spectacular effect.The 49-year-old Tuchel, though, failed to build on that starburst. He was presented, a year ago, with the $111 million signing of Romelu Lukaku, theoretically the player who could catapult Chelsea to a first Premier League title since 2017. It did not quite work out like that. Lukaku was allowed to leave the club this summer on loan.Though Tuchel steered the team to two domestic cup finals in his first full campaign — losing both on penalties against Liverpool — and handled with poise and dignity the geopolitical storm that engulfed the club in the wake of the British government’s decision to sanction Abramovich, Chelsea’s season petered out, with the German’s side eventually finishing 19 points behind Manchester City.Tuchel in better days. Last year.Susana Vera/Pool Via ReutersThat malaise had not gone unnoticed by the club’s newly installed hierarchy. Nor had Tuchel’s demeanor over the summer, which grew more detached, more disaffected with every passing week.In July, he bemoaned that his players’ “level of commitment, physically and mentally,” was insufficient. By August, he described them as “not tough enough.” On Tuesday, after losing in Zagreb, that had metastasized into admitting that “everything was missing” from his team’s performance.Those public complaints betrayed a growing unease in private. Tuchel had come to be known at Chelsea as a gregarious, warm, affable sort — at a club with plenty of managers to compare him to, he fared well — but a number of players felt he had become more truculent, more distant in recent months, particularly with those he did not consider his most reliable lieutenants.Boehly and Behdad Eghbali, the co-founder of Clearlake, noticed the same thing. As they attempted to retool the squad this summer, they had sought Tuchel’s counsel frequently, asking the manager — in the absence of a technical director — to direct them to his preferred targets.That was not a role that Tuchel relished particularly; he was far happier to be left alone to coach. As the transfer window gathered pace, Boehly and Eghbali found that Tuchel had a tendency to prove difficult to contact at critical junctures. Whatever relationship they had been able to establish in their few weeks working together began to fracture and fray.Kalidou Koulibaly and the rest of Chelsea’s players, new and old, opened the Champions League with a loss on Tuesday.Antonio Bronic/ReutersAs the relatively curt statement released by the club to announce his departure suggested, Boehly and Eghbali did not feel they had acted rashly. They had, instead, reached the decision to part company with Tuchel even before defeat in Zagreb. The travails of the early part of the season were supporting evidence for their conclusion, rather than the thrust of their case.For all the mitigating circumstances, though — and while the owners have been swift to identify Graham Potter, the intelligent, affable and talented Brighton manager, as Tuchel’s likely replacement — it does feel as if his dismissal fits a pattern.Boehly has taken on the role of interim sporting director with vigor and determination. Those at the club have been stunned by his work ethic, and he has made an effort to establish a rapport with many of the game’s most influential agents, inviting some of them to watch games from his box at the club’s stadium.In some cases, that has borne fruit. Chelsea spent a lot of money this summer, but it spent much of it well. Wesley Fofana may have been expensive, but he is also one of the most promising defenders in world soccer. Raheem Sterling has for years been one of the Premier League’s most devastating attacking players.The deals that did not come off tell a story too, though. There was the offer for Romeo Lavia, a player who had made just a handful of appearances for Southampton since moving from Manchester City in July; Chelsea offered to pay at least double what he had cost in August.Then there was an attempt to sign Edson Álvarez, a Mexican midfielder at the Dutch club Ajax, which bubbled to the surface as the transfer window was closing. The approach came so late, in fact, that Ajax was able to use it as proof that Chelsea was not spending to any plan, but rather for the sake of it — an argument that worked sufficiently well for Álvarez to decide to remain in Amsterdam.As they reached the (entirely artificial) watershed of their 100th day in charge of the club, Boehly and Eghbali reportedly spent considerable time contemplating the sort of culture they wanted to establish at Chelsea.They wanted to shift away from the urgency and the uncertainty of the Abramovich years and build something more sustainable, they decided, and they felt that Tuchel was not the right sort of figure to oversee that change. He was better suited, they determined, to the old ways, when nothing lasted forever, and Chelsea’s manager lived each day as if it could be the last.And yet here we are: Six games into the season, six days after the end of the transfer window, Chelsea has fired its manager on the back of a few poor performances and because of rumblings of discontent among the playing squad. Perhaps this will be the last hurrah of the old Chelsea, the final break with the past. Or perhaps a culture, once embedded, is not an easy thing to change, no matter how much money and ambition you have. More

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      Inside the Chelsea Sale: Deep Pockets, Private Promises and Side Deals

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      Britain’s government has cleared the sale of the Premier League soccer team. But to win approval, the new owners had to agree to a set of unusual conditions.LONDON — The British government on Wednesday gave its blessing to the purchase of Chelsea F.C., one of European soccer’s blue-ribbon teams, by an American-led investment group after deciding it had sufficient assurances that none of the proceeds from the record sale price — $3.1 billion — would flow to the club’s Russian owner.The government’s approval signaled the end of not only the most expensive deal in sports history but possibly the most fraught, cryptic and political, too.In the three months since the Russian oligarch who owns Chelsea, Roman Abramovich, hurriedly put his team on the market, the club’s fate has played out not only on the fields of some of world soccer’s richest competitions but in the corridors of power at Westminster and the soaring towers of Wall Street. And all of it is against the backdrop of crippling financial sanctions imposed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.“We are now satisfied that the full proceeds of the sale will not benefit Roman Abramovich or any other sanctioned individual,” the government said in a statement. The path to a deal has entangled a scarcely probable cast of characters — private equity funds and anonymous offshore trusts; lawmakers in Britain and Portugal; an octogenarian Swiss billionaire and the American tennis star Serena Williams; an enigmatic Russian oligarch and a little known Portuguese rabbi — and featured a contested passport, wartime peace talks and even reports of an attempted poisoning.Its end leaves as many questions as answers. All that can be said for certain is that a group led by the Los Angeles Dodgers co-owner Todd Boehly and largely financed by the private equity firm Clearlake will now control Chelsea, a six-time English and two-time European champion, and Abramovich will not.The American investor Todd Boehly leads a group that is now set to complete its purchase of Chelsea.Adrian Dennis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAbramovich first indicated his intention to sell Chelsea — the most high-profile of his assets by some distance — almost as soon as the Russian army crossed into Ukraine in late February, and only a week before Britain and the European Union identified him as a key ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and froze his assets.Completing a deal, though, has proved fiendishly convoluted. The final obstacle to a sale was resolved only this week, when lawmakers in Britain were sufficiently satisfied that a $2 billion loan owed to an offshore trust, believed to be controlled by Abramovich, had been cleared. British government officials then tried to reassure their counterparts in Portugal, which had controversially granted Abramovich a Portuguese passport with a rabbi’s help in 2018, and the European Union, which had imposed its own sanctions on Abramovich in March. Both must also approve the sale because of his Portuguese citizenship.But the loan was not the only complication faced by Raine, the New York-based investment bank recruited by Abramovich to handle the sale. The agreement with Boehly’s group came with a web of conditions, some set by the British government, some by Raine and some by Abramovich himself, all of them striking in the context of the sale of a sports team.Better Understand the Russia-Ukraine WarHistory and Background: Here’s what to know about Russia and Ukraine’s relationship and the causes of the conflict.How the Battle Is Unfolding: Russian and Ukrainian forces are using a bevy of weapons as a deadly war of attrition grinds on in eastern Ukraine.Outside Pressures: Governments, sports organizations and businesses are taking steps to punish Russia. Here are some of the sanctions adopted so far and a list of companies that have pulled out of the country.Stay Updated: To receive the latest updates on the war in your inbox, sign up here. The Times has also launched a Telegram channel to make its journalism more accessible around the world.All four prospective suitors identified by Raine as serious contenders — Boehly’s group; one headed by the British businessman Martin Broughton that included Williams and the Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton among its partners; another financed by Steve Pagliuca, the owner of the N.B.A.’s Boston Celtics; and one from the Ricketts family, who control baseball’s Chicago Cubs — were asked not only to pay a jaw-dropping price for the team but also to commit to a number of pledges, including as much as $2 billion more in investments in Chelsea.The club’s suitors were told, for instance, that they cannot sell their stake within the first decade of ownership and that they must earmark $125 million for the club’s women’s team; invest millions more in the club’s academy and training facilities; and commit to rebuilding Stamford Bridge, Chelsea’s aging West London stadium.Chelsea’s new owners agreed to several conditions, including sizable investments in the club’s decorated women’s team.Michael Regan/Getty ImagesAt the same time, Abramovich insisted that all the proceeds from the sale would go toward a new charity to benefit the victims of the war in Ukraine. To ensure he does not gain control of that money, the British government will require it first be placed in a frozen bank account that it controls. Only then will it vet all the plans for the fund being drawn up by Mike Penrose, a former head of a branch of the United Nations children’s charity UNICEF, and issue a special license that will allow the charity to take control of the funds.“We will now begin the process of ensuring the proceeds of the sale are used for humanitarian causes in Ukraine, supporting victims of the war,” the government said in its statement.The charity was just one of the peculiarities of the deal arranged by Joe Ravitch, the Raine co-founder who directed the sale.The new owners also will not be permitted to take dividends or management fees or load the team with debt — terms that bankers related to the sale have described as “anti-Glazer clauses,” a reference to the unpopular owners of Manchester United who took control of the club in a leveraged buyout in 2005.Several people close to the process said Boehly’s bid was eventually selected from the group of wealthy suitors because of its willingness to abide by the clauses. (At least one of those people, who worked on the bid backed by Pagliuca, said their group withdrew from the running because of the nature of the conditions.)The Premier League has already signed off on the Chelsea sale, announcing Tuesday that it had vetted and approved the new owners “subject to the government issuing the required sale license and the satisfactory completion of final stages of the transaction.”It is not clear, though, quite what will happen if Boehly and his partners choose to renege on any of the conditions once they have control of the club. Any oversight role will fall on the charity, the only outside entity still inextricably linked to both Chelsea and Abramovich, or the continued influence of two key Abramovich lieutenants who hope to remain in their posts under the new owners.Both of those executives — the club chairman Bruce Buck and Marina Granovskaia, a Russian-born businesswoman who rose from being Abramovich’s personal assistant to the most senior official response for soccer trades at Chelsea — will earn at least $12.5 million for their work on the sale. The commissions to management, totaling as much as $50 million, and the fee to Ravitch, believed to be between 0.5 and 1 percent of the deal’s value, will be paid from the club’s balance sheet and not from the sale funds, according to a person familiar with the structure of the deal.Abramovich on a banner at Stamford Bridge. Beloved by fans for his spending on the team, he is barred from receiving any money from its sale. Clive Rose/Getty ImagesBritish government officials had clashed with Chelsea executives and financiers about creating a legally binding resolution to prevent Abramovich from getting access to the money he so publicly said he was willing to waive.At issue was a company called Camberley International Investments, run by a Cypriot trustee on behalf of what British officials believe was Abramovich and his children. Camberley lent $2 billion to Fordstam, the company through which Abramovich controlled Chelsea, to finance its spending and operations. Camberley’s claim against Fordstam has now been resolved, and its trustee has recently resigned.It was only at that point, with a May 31 deadline for the completion of the sale looming, that Britain’s government moved to approve the deal.For Chelsea’s fans, the sale draws an end to a season that at times blurred into absurdity. The sanctions imposed on Abramovich — and by extension Chelsea — affected everything from the team’s travel to the printing and sale of game programs. Thousands of empty seats dotted Stamford Bridge during games over the final months of the season after a ban on new ticket sales, and roster turmoil loomed because of a moratorium on the signing and sale of players.That will now be lifted, with Chelsea’s players and Manager Thomas Tuchel said to be urgently seeking clarity from Boehly and his group on their plans. At least two key defenders are slated to leave Chelsea this summer, and at least two more players — including the club captain, Cesar Azpilicueta — are expected to follow.Defender Antonio Rüdiger, unable to negotiate a new contract, announced he would leave Chelsea for Real Madrid. Other key players may depart this summer, too.Alastair Grant/Associated PressBoehly, a regular presence at Chelsea games since his takeover was announced on May 6, has broadly said he would like to maintain Chelsea as a major force in soccer. It is unlikely, though, that a group largely backed by a private equity firm will prove quite so indulgent as Abramovich was as an owner.In almost two decades at Chelsea, Abramovich was a familiar but all but silent presence at Stamford Bridge, happy to let his money do the talking. Under his leadership, Chelsea was transformed into a true European superpower, winning five Premier League titles and two Champions League crowns by employing a succession of A-list managers and investing billions of dollars in players.His largess changed Chelsea but also soccer as a whole, ushering in an era of unfettered spending that saw transfer fees and player salaries rise to levels unthinkable only a few years earlier. It also came at a price that Chelsea’s income, no matter how much it grew in those years of plenty, could not match. Throughout his tenure, Abramovich used his vast personal fortune to subsidize losses that ran as high as $1 million a week.Yet just as Abramovich’s arrival in 2003 opened the door to a new era for English soccer, his departure serves as a bookmark, too.While scarcity may explain part of the rush to pay a premium for Chelsea — soccer’s biggest teams are rarely up for sale, after all — it is not clear when, or how, a group of private equity investors who navigated such treacherous, confounding waters to get control of the club can start to realize a return on their investment. More

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      Chelsea F.C. Says It Will Sell to Boehly’s U.S.-Led Group

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      Chelsea, the Premier League soccer team whose sale was forced after the Russian oligarch who bankrolled its success was placed under crippling sanctions, will be bought by a consortium led by Todd Boehly, an American billionaire who is a part-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, the club said on Saturday.The price of 2.5 billion pounds, or $3.1 billion, would be the most ever paid for a team in any sport. The sale, one of the more unusual in modern sports history, still requires the approval of the British government, which imposed the sanctions on the club’s owner, Roman Abramovich, and froze his assets, including Chelsea, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.In a statement posted on its website early Saturday, Chelsea said the proceeds from the sale would be placed into a frozen British bank account, with the intention that all of the funds will eventually go to charitable causes, as Abramovich has promised.In addition to the sale price, Chelsea said, Boehly’s group had pledged to invest 1.75 billion pounds in the club, some of it for much-needed stadium renovations.Boehly’s group is being backed by the American investment firm Clearlake and also includes Hansjorg Wyss, a Swiss businessman, and Mark Walter, an American financier who serves as a co-owner and the chairman of the Dodgers.The decision capped two tumultuous months for Chelsea, its fans and Abramovich, who said on March 2 that he had reluctantly agreed to part with the team, just as Britain’s government was moving to impose restrictions on his fortune and his businesses.The sale process was accelerated once the government formally froze Abramovich’s assets, part of a wider set of sanctions imposed on a group of wealthy Russians with ties to Moscow after the war in Ukraine began. The government has called Abramovich a close ally of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin.Roman Abramovich has owned Chelsea since 2003.John Sibley/ReutersChelsea has been in a kind of limbo ever since, operating under a special license issued by the government, which comes with strict conditions that have severely affected its business. The team is currently unable to buy or sell players in the summer transfer market, nor can it sell tickets or merchandise to its supporters. Its spending has been severely restricted, affecting everything from the team’s travel to the printing and sale of programs.The restrictions, meant to ensure that no money flows to Abramovich, will only be lifted once the sale is completed.Chelsea, led by Thomas Tuchel, the German coach who secured the Champions League title within months of taking over at Stamford Bridge last year, has endured on-field difficulties as it tries to navigate its new reality. The results have been mixed: While Tuchel’s team currently is in third place in the Premier League, it was eliminated from the lucrative Champions League last month. Several players with expiring contracts have announced that they will leave at the end of the season, and until the sale is completed, Tuchel and the club have no way to replace them.Boehly’s group was given a week to close the deal after being chosen last week as the preferred bidder by the New York-based advisory firm Raine Group and Chelsea’s board members.The sale was nearing a conclusion last week when it seemed to be upended, after one of Britain’s richest men, Jim Ratcliffe, announced a bid that mirrored the offer from Boehly’s consortium, after the deadline had passed. On Wednesday, Ratcliffe, who had emphasized his British credentials when making his offer, said Raine had dismissed his bid but vowed to keep fighting to secure the team.Chelsea’s price tag compares with the £1.8 billion valuation ($2.3 billion) for its London rival Arsenal, in 2018, after its American benefactor, the businessman Stan Kroenke, became the sole owner of the club by buying out the 30 percent stake of another now-sanctioned Russian oligarch, Alisher Usmanov, for more than $700 million. Unlike Chelsea, Arsenal has a modern stadium and its finances have been stable.Britain’s Treasury will have to issue a separate license for the sale to go through, with specific clauses that include a requirement that none of the sale proceeds go to Abramovich.The buyers and Raine have discussed the possibility of the proceeds going to victims of the war in Ukraine, an idea that Abramovich raised when he said he would waive an enormous debt owed to him by the club. But it is unclear how such a transfer would work.Todd Boehly, the American who leads the group that has reached an agreement to buy Chelsea, was at the club’s match against Wolves on Saturday.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAbramovich invested nearly $2 billion of his personal funds during his 19-year tenure as owner, during which he covered losses of about $1 million a week as he recruited some of the best players in the world. The strategy was expensive but successful: Chelsea enjoyed the most successful period in its history, becoming a serial contender for domestic and international honors and winning five Premier League and two European Cups.If Boehly’s deal to buy the team goes through with the required approvals from the government and the Premier League, which also has to give its blessing to the sale, his group will have to figure out a way to maintain that successes while paring losses associated with the on-field success and also committing hundreds of millions of dollars to renovating Chelsea’s aging Stamford Bridge stadium, which with a capacity of just over 40,000 is far smaller than the arenas that play host to the Premier League’s biggest teams.Russia-Ukraine War: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 4Russia’s punishment of Finland. More