Todd Boehly Wants Red Bull-Style Network Of Clubs For Chelsea And Suggests Premier League All-Star Game

Chelsea chairman Todd Boehly caused a stir across the world of soccer after speaking at a SALT conference in New York last week.

It is rare to hear an English Premier League owner speak so openly in public about their club and its place in the wider landscape of the sport, but Boehly said the quiet parts loudly last Tuesday.

In this candid conversation, the new Chelsea owner covered topics including the challenges faced by a Premier League club owner, soccer’s global reach, building a network of clubs, signing and developing players, and the differences between owning an American franchise and a global soccer club.

Boehly’s suggestion of an all-star game in the Premier League, in particular, made the headlines.

“Ultimately I hope the Premier League takes a little bit of a lesson from American sports,” he said.

“Why wouldn’t we do a tournament with the bottom four teams, why isn’t there an all-star game?

“People were talking about more money for the pyramid—MLB did their all-star game in LA this year and we made $200 million from a Monday and a Tuesday.

“I think you could do a north versus south all-star game for Premier League and fund whatever the pyramid needed very easily.”

Beneath all that was an insight into what goes through the mind of a Premier League owner, particularly one with new ideas and one who wants to expand the footprint of the club they control.

Boehly is the head of an ownership group that took over at Chelsea following sanctions placed on the previous owner—the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich—by the UK government and his subsequent disqualification by the Premier League.

The new owner arrived with a summer transfer window just around the corner and set about rebuilding the club’s playing squad, and eventually replaced its manager, Thomas Tuchel. There was a large turnover of playing staff with a total spend of $282 million and a new spend of $223 million.

The departure of players such as Antonio Rüdiger, Andreas Christensen, Danny Drinkwater, Timo Werner, Emerson Palmieri, Marcos Alonso, and Michy Batshuayi gave the club plenty of room to manoeuvre in terms of their spending on wages.

“Sourcing and identifying talent is really a global proposition,” Boehly said.

“You have markets in South America, all throughout Europe, all throughout Asia, Australia, and it’s not regulated at all.

“So dealing with the agents in each market, it’s almost like it’s a local business on a global scale.”

Boehly also spoke openly about creating a multi-club network similar to those created by Red Bull GmbH and City Football Group.

Red Bull and City have teams across the world below their two main teams, RB Leipzig of the German Bundesliga and English Premier League team Manchester City respectively.

Several of the teams in both stables, such as Red Bull Salzburg and New York City do well in their own right.

The Chelsea chairman sees this as an ideal way to give first-team experience to Chelsea’s large number of youth players, and prevent players like Mohamed Salah and Kevin De Bruyne from eventually becoming key players at rival clubs (Liverpool and Manchester City respectively, in the case of those players).

“We’ve talked about having a multi-club model,” he said. “I would love to continue to build out the footprint.

“I think that there are different countries where there are advantages to having a club.

“Red Bull does a really good job. They’ve got Leipzig and they’ve got Salzburg, both of which are playing in the Champions League. You have Man City, which has a very big network of clubs.

“I think the challenge Chelsea has right now, or one of them is that when you have 18-, 19-, 20-year-old superstars, you can loan them out to other clubs, but you put their development in someone else’s hands.

“Our goal is to make sure we can show pathways for our young superstars to get onto the Chelsea pitch while getting them real game time.

“To me, the way to do that is through another club somewhere in a really competitive league in Europe.”

This kind of network also provides a way for English clubs to obtain work permits for players.

The requirements around work permits have changed in the English leagues post-Brexit, providing an opportunity for a club to loan players to other leagues in order to get the points required to obtain a Governing Body Endorsement (GBE) to be granted a work permit.

“Because of Brexit, you also have to think about how am I going to get these players into England,” Boehly said.

“We need GBEs, which are basically points that you get for playing in different leagues and the more points you get and the more [international] caps you have, the easier it is to immigrate. So our job is to figure out how to put that platform together.”

Though Boehly looks ready to delegate a lot of these details to experts in each field, his words at this conference, regardless of whether people agreed with his ideas or not, demonstrated an awareness of the workings of the English league and the wider landscape of modern football business.

Few owners speak out about such issues, leaving media duties to head coaches, managers, or communications departments.

But if Boehly continues to talk publicly on these matters, he will provide a good insight into what goes through the mind of a Premier League owner, particularly one not from a traditional English football background.