TODD BOEHLY: WE spent so long trying to understand you that we didn’t pay enough respect to what you understood.
Boehly’s sheer commitment to bewildering disruption has already made him a bona fide galactico in Europe’s chaotic firmament of football executives, but he has also appreciated and accelerated two modern trends. You may not be surprised to hear that these trends are scratching another bit of lustre from the glory game.
Both of these trends were on show this week.
Let’s start with the news that Chelsea look set to sign Manchester City’s academy prospect Cole Palmer, who scored for them in the Community Shield and Super Cup final this month. The deal is symbolic as it takes Boehly and Clearlake’s spending at Chelsea past the £1 billion mark, but it also speaks to something deeper. Never before has the general public been so aware of players as commodities.
We’ve always known that players are professional seeking the best deal for themselves in a short and precarious career, but this has laid bare the extent to which they have been dehumanised by clubs. Players are seen less as people and more as one more part of a portfolio of assets; they are signed young to limit depreciation in value and maximise the chance of profit when it comes to being flipped on the transfer market.
To that end, we are now over-educated in football’s accounting tricks, and specifically amortisation, which has become Chelsea’s most creative force since Gianfranco Zola.
The club are handing out eight-year deals to their players as to be able to spread out the transfer fee across that time, which helps to meet their Financial Fair Play obligations. And while purchases can be spread out over many years, a sale is recorded in that specific year’s accounts, minus whatever was left on the player’s amortised value.
Clubs need to keep the money coming in to balance the books, and for this Chelsea have turned to their academy. Young players who have come through the age-grades – like Mason Mount, Lewis Hall, and Ruben Loftus-Cheek – weren’t bought for transfer fees, so they can be sold and recorded in the accounts as a sweet hit of ‘pure’ profit.
But consider the prevailing logic. Given Chelsea’s policy is to buy young players – none of their signings this summer have been over 25 – they are now selling the young players they produced for free to buy someone else’s young players at a deferred cost in the bet they’ll make a future profit on them.
This is not to say Chelsea are the only club doing this, as it suits Manchester City to sell Palmer to Chelsea and book his profit to sign Matheus Nunes from Wolves. In this era of enormous wealth, clubs will seek every loophole in the rules they can find, and this incentivises them to sell the players with whom supporters have the strongest sense of identity.
The truly great talents will still be retained – Phil Foden, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Marcus Rashford – but even for talents among the very next tier down, clubs are now better off swapping them for the equivalent talent somewhere else.
This is a profound shift for the young players swimming in academies’ shark-infested waters. For an academy player once upon a time, your club’s ambition was that you would contribute to the first-team. Now their ambition is that you’ll grow up to finance the first-team.
In the interests of honesty and transparency, the word ‘Academy’ over the door should be removed and replaced with ‘Portfolio’.
But Bohely doesn’t just have a portfolio of players, as he is also building a network of clubs. His Clearlake group have bought a majority stake in French club Strasbourg, against which fans have protested. First they flew ‘Boehly not welcome’ banners, and then unfurled a message reading ‘no to the timeshare’ at their most recent home game.
Multi-club ownership is one way of competing in a market inflated by oil-backed clubs, and post-Brexit, gives English clubs a place to park the young EU players they are now longer able to sign. But that doesn’t make it right. The consolidation of clubs under one owner creates major implications for sporting integrity were both to find themselves in the same competition, but beyond that, it corrodes a club’s sense of independence and their basic esteem. To be swallowed up and placed in a rigid hierarchy of sister clubs is antithetical to the values of a sport which has operated according to promotion and relegation for years.
Ten of the 20 clubs in the Premier League this season are part of multi-club models, but there has been little notable protest, aside from Crystal Palace supporters banners against their new owner John Textor, who also owns Lyon and Botafogo in Brazil.
Up to now, given the Premier League’s revenue, English clubs have been at the apex of their respective groups, and so the perversities of the multi-club model have earned little public scrutiny.
But that may be about to change because, for the first time, a Premier League club looks to be the junior partner in a multi-club model. Newcastle United have pursued a careful sort of husbandry in the transfer market since being taken over by PIF, who have more recently taken control of four of the Saudi league’s top clubs and hosed Europe-based players with enormous wealth.
There has hardly been a flight of stars from the Premier League yet – Ruben Neves, Fabinho, Aleksander Mitrovic, Riyad Mahrez, N’Golo Kante and Aymeric Laporte are the most notable – but that wasn’t for the want of trying, as Bernardo Silva and Heung-Min Son reportedly resisted offers. There remains a huge question mark over Mohamed Salah, whom Liverpool insist will stay, but may be about to be presented with a financial offer beyond everyone’s comprehension.
Of course, this is less a problem for Newcastle than it is for the Premier League itself. Newcastle have sold Allan Saint-Maximin to Al Ahli, but certainly won’t weep to see some of their domestic rivals weakened. But the moment the stars decide they no longer need to strut their stuff in England is the moment the Premier League’s status will be greatly diminished.
But perhaps it is already too late for the Premier League to stem this steady, sapping tide; maybe its primacy will vanish gradually and then suddenly. At which point the custodians of English football may look around and wonder why they didn’t give better scrutiny to the clinical acts of men like Todd Boehly.
