The Clearlake Consolidation: Financial Engineering & Corporate Trap at Chelsea

The Athletic FC Welcome, the Athletic FC podcast with me, Kate Mason. Clear Lake capital have taken full control of Chelsea, purchasing top bullies and minority stakes. So today, we're asking why Bowley's four-year affiliation with the club has come to an end and what it means for the Chelsea project. And it's Thursday on the Athletic FC, so we're joined as ever by the big hitters in studio. I have former England goalkeeper Rob Green. Hello. Hello. And I'll see you in news and investigations report it much later. Hi. How are you? Nice to see you. And on screen as well, we have our Chelsea correspondent Liam to me. Hello Liam. Thanks for having me. Any time. And specifically this time, because we are talking Chelsea, top bullies affiliation with the club comes to an end after four years. His stake has been purchased. He will leave his role as chairman. Clear Lake has also purchased a stake belonging to Mark Walter, who co-owns MLB side Los Angeles Dodgers with Bowley Matt. Do this news come as a surprise to you or from what you've seen, has Clear Lake always indicated their plans to take full control? It's a little bit of both, so no, not, sorry, not a surprise, then I'll get to that a bit. And it's yes to the second half of your question. So, but with the confusion that for a while, there was this dance as the Bowley might buy Clear Lake out. So do you remember they bought this together, Clear Lake about 61% while Walter, top Bowley and Hans Jorgweiss, their sort of Swiss billionaire buddy, they bought the rest as a sort of, like, the three of those guys bought just under 40%, so 60, 40 split. And they pretty soon fell out. And Bowley was the front man, despite only only just under 13% himself, Bowley was very much the front man. It took us a while, I think, to realise that that actually the real money was Clear Lake as in they put the most in. But anyway, so we worked that out over time and they fell out, Bowley and Clear Lake's Vedatic Bowley just, you know, Chelsea's only big enough for the one of them. Only one of them could be supporting director, although of course they then confused it by hiring five sports directors, but anyway, so for a while it was like, well, who's going to buy who out? And there was a little bit of kind of, you know, well, I'm going to buy you out. No, you're not. I'm going to buy you out. And then it was sort of like, okay, well, they was, we're just going to get on, right? Because maybe we just stick to the plan, right? Wait, so is that posturing? Is it? It was a little bit. A little bit. I don't, Liam was sort of in the middle of it, you know, all the Chelsea beat reporters very much in the middle of it for a while. So anyway, so that, so things settled down last year. And we sort of think, well, do you know what, these two probably are going to sort of see this out because, you know, to take one of the other ones, to take the other out, we're costing off a lot of money and clearly they're not going to like play ball, they're going to like, you know, there's, there's, they're just going to have to get on. Anyway, we then get to the first bit of your question. Yeah. So, brief history on model. So I promise you'll be brief. A fellow from Iowa, you know, finance guy, very, very shy, it doesn't sort of say a great deal. In the 80s and 90s, he was one of the first to work out. There was quite a lot of value in insurance companies, which have previously been very unsexy, boring thing to invest in. I'm talking about the, you know, life insurance, college insurance, car insurance, these American state level businesses that would kick out very small profits, so therefore not attracting, you know, the murderers and acquisitions guys, you know, that's boring. That's, these are, these are like mom and pop type companies. He realized, you know what, this is really steady money here, so he starts buying them. Then he realized there's something else, and this, this goes into the North Sea as he was one of the first to realize it, a lot of people realized it, do you know what? These guys are kicking out really steady money, these premiums. I can use that money, I can, I can leverage that, I can borrow against that, all right, because they're good for it. All these Americans are buying insurance policies for whatever it might be. I'm going to do something sexy with it, sport, entertainment, property, so that was his big thing. He made enough of a lot of money on it, and lots of other people copied him, including Todd Bowley, right, Bowley, all to go way back, way back, they are like partners. So there's a problem though, there's just something to sort of think about. Insurance by nature has to be safe, because you and I depend on it, and if something goes wrong, the state often jumps in to sort of save you, all right, so by definition it's highly regulated, and whatever these insurance companies invest in should be safe, and they should diversify risk. So if you own a bunch of these companies, and you are using their money, using their profits to do riskier stuff, you have to declare that. These affiliated party transactions, or related party transactions, have to be completely open. You have to say, do you know what? I am using insurance company X's money to invest in company over there, why, but everyone has to know about it, it has to be completely declared, and you have to only, it's very some state to state, you can't have too great a percentage of your money in something risky. You know, government bonds, yeah, fine, tracker funds, yeah, find cash, gold, wine, whatever, but spending money on football teams, yeah, not so much of that, please. So anyway, we get to last year, end of last year, couple of big bits of news, we find out that the FBI, Department of Justice, the SEC, that three of the big, you know, regulate tree bodies in the states are all over water companies, because they feel that he might have not declared some of these relationships, how he was, how he was borrowing money against these insurance companies to do the other stuff, the investing in sport, and he was going to have to reclassify these loans, they seized the laptops, they seized phones of him and senior executives, this is still going on, by the way, still going on, it hasn't been charged anything yet, but these investigations are still ongoing and there's sort of developing stories, you know, New York Times has been over this as a ball street journal, washed to post, anything that he's borrowed against an insurance company, he now has to refinance. So if he's borrowed 10 billion from someone, secured on that insurance company, he has to go borrow it from somebody else, yes, to pay that loan back and go borrow it from somewhere else. Now, not many people want that kind of business at the moment because he's under investigation, so he's basically got to find a load of cash, loads and loads of cash. Hence, he sold the LA acres almost overnight, you don't, you only own them for 14 months, and from that moment on, we all knew he was going to have to sell Chelsea. So long answer to your first bit, the minute we knew that he was under investigation, and this was all blowing up from in the States, and he's badly needed to find cash fast, it was inevitable, absolutely inevitable that he was selling Chelsea. Right, okay. So much to take it from that. Thank you, Matt, and I'm also still reeling from the fact that insurance is sexy, this is breaking news, as we have it, has never been sexy. He made it mildly sexy, uh, by using insurance money to buy football teams and baseball teams of basketball teams. Because I think from the sort of layman's perspective, you would imagine that Boley is the guy we would be expecting to be talking about because he's the man who has been the face of this operation, certainly in the press over here, but it sounds as though this is this whole development is a lot more complex than that. And you said that he's been, he himself to Boley has been a backseat passenger at the club put all of that into context for us. If you can, was he ultimately forced out or was it all connected to everything that Matt has just explained to us as well? Well, first of all, I'm very happy that Matt did that explainer. It's never ceases to surprise me, the realms that covering Chelsea takes me into these days. Yeah. So when Chelsea, well, when Bluko were bidding for Chelsea in 2022, this highly abbreviated bid process to buy a club that belonged to a sanctioned individual in Roman Abramovich, these consortiums had to come together very, very quickly. Todd Boley was always going to be a front runner because he'd he'd actually bid for Chelsea in 2019, had an offer turned down by Abramovich. He'd had interest in Tottenham before. And so he was known to the Premier League. He was known to the English gamer, someone who wanted to be at the head of one of these clubs. And he and Walter as Matt explains go back a long way and a natural kind of co-investors, they needed money to help finance the 2.5 billion purchase price of Chelsea. And so Clear Lake came in, took this 61.5% shareholding. But I think it was convenient for everyone in the consortium, for Boley to be the face of it, for all the reasons I've just said, because he had those relationships, because he had that track record of wanting to get involved to the Premier League. And it helped them win that bid process. And it meant that I think he came in with the reasonable expectation that even though he only had a 12.8% shareholding in Chelsea, that he would be the primary decision maker. You know, there was a lot of talk about this joint governance equal control agreement with Clear Lake. But I think Boley had a reasonable expectation that he would be the one kind of leading things. And in that first window, he was very much out there front and center as interim sporting director in a way that I think nobody in football expected him to be judging by what he said later, even he didn't necessarily expect to be in that position of signing players. But he did seem to enjoy it to be fair to him. And then what happened after that window, which did not go well for Chelsea, they signed a lot of players for a lot of money that didn't really work out. Wesley Fafana is the only big signing that is still at the club from that window. Clear Lake started to exert control, more control over strategy at Chelsea. And functionally that meant that Badaday Bali started to exert more day-to-day control over decision-making at Chelsea. And that meant that when Boley stepped down as interim sporting director in January 2023 and stepped back from day-to-day running of the club, I think he was hoping that they'd hired the sporting leadership team. You hire the experts, you let them get on with it. That was the philosophy of the LA Dodgers and some of the other teams that Boley's been involved in. But Egg Bali remained actively involved and there was this cultural clash between the two of them, which we detailed extensively in September 2024 in an athletic long-read when all of these tensions between Boley and Clear Lakes build out publicly. And really what's happened in the two years since is a kind of uneasy, mutual pact of silence. I think both sides realized that it wasn't beneficial to have this noise out there. And I think everyone was waiting to see how the Chelsea investment did on the pitch. And what happened instead was Chelsea take a big step back in the Premier League finished tenth. And while there was no easy mechanism for Boley and Clear Lakes to buy each other out for all their posturing, they couldn't compel each other to sell. They also couldn't sell to anyone outside the consortium without permission of the other party. So they were kind of locked in together. It was obvious it was going to take something bigger, probably bigger than Chelsea, some sort of macro economic development to force some movement here. And that appears to be the pressure that Mark Walter is under in the US. We know as Matt said that Boley and Walter have some similarities in how they made their money. We don't know really that Boley is under the same immediate pressures as Walter. But it does make sense that he would be looking to get out of Chelsea because the investment hasn't really gone to plan. And he didn't have the control that he hoped and expected to have. Matt Liam, I've got a question. Is it a general picture of football clubs like this that from the outside fans will look at it and say wealthy individual is buying out wealthy individual person A to person B. And that's about it. There's not many occasions where that is the case where you have a billionaire or someone who's extremely wealthy goes in and buys, for example, Newcastle. Is it a case that I think the first family, the first case was Manchester United with the Glazer family really wear more and more now or less and less. We've seen people maybe wanting to legitimise themselves from all the money that they've gained, that you're just seeing people who are keen to do it but don't have the money to do it. Yeah, I've got that. I mean, I think with Chelsea, don't forget, it was a really remarkable situation. So you had this very famous sports team that was put on the market with a very clear deadline. This club has to be sold because this guy has to sell it. He sanctioned. And Liam will remember the best of the most. You'd go on, I think. Yes. But the government were kind of running Chelsea. Almost every bill had to be paid. They had to ask government first because doing business with sanctioned companies is incredibly bad news or they could do nothing. They were I spoke to people in the top and they could not they could not pay them. You couldn't like the milkman would not want to have money owed to them. Sorry, my sanctions busting here. Everything had to be kind of like pay me now. Pay me now. I'm not you're not you're not owing me a thing. Mr. sanctioned individual. So this had to happen. And that created an awful lot of buzz. So it's the best advert in the world for a sports team to be sold. Don't forget Chelsea. You know, a brand of it should have taken them from there to there for people who are still doing the old fashioned thing of listening. I'm the other from a team from a team that was sort of struggling to pay the bills under the previous lot. You know, they pumped them full of money and turned them into into winners. Right. God, someone's going to buy this team. So you had a fantastic auction probably the best auction that I can remember since I've been doing sort of football finance. We're a load of these big hitters kind of got together. You know, they formed little groups. You know, should we do it? Can we do it? Can we do it? And these guys did it. All right. And they did it because they are they they really believe in sport. So it wasn't that they they they have got the money. But they are they are sure they're money. Well, it's never their money. There's a thing. This is what other people's money. Yeah. It's a clear lake is a private equity fund, which is sovereign funds, massive pension funds. They are an ultra high net worth people. They are managing billions of people's money to go invest in things. Right. And they'll be it could be in tech. It can be in, you know, anything from Uber to you know, whatever Elon Musk is up to these days to football teams to sports teams. Right. That is their job. And then because they say to you, Mr. Rich person or Mr. Sovereign Well Fund or Mr. You know, you give me your 100 million now. In 10 years time, I'm going to give you 500 million back. Okay. We're going to be we're going to be interested better than living under the bed better than investing it in, you know, in a bank. We're going to actively invest your money. So that's what they're doing. Yes, it's other people's money, but they have it under management. They think it's their money. Let's put it another way. There he goes. Don't match the pocket. Yes. Although these guys are now quite rich themselves. Oh yeah. But are they as rich as they see? No, but, you know, top only is a billionaire. These guys are all billionaires, but you need five. Yeah. That's the thing. That is the thing. And no one puts that much of their wealth in anything these days. You know, normally people put it in their house, right? But these guys don't put, you know, 20, 50% of their wealth in anything. You know, they sprinkle it around. That's the whole point. So, so, you know, you're right. But they weren't trying to sort of rinse their reputation. It wasn't that kind of thing. They were buying Chelsea because they genuinely believed Chelsea was a great investment. And their sort of confidence came from, well, look, we bought the Dodgers when they were a distress asset. The Dodgers were almost bankrupt. And Boley was the front man of that with Walter behind him. It's been an absolute home run pun intended of an investment. And he's done the same at Lakers. He's done the same at the Sparks, which is the women's basketball team. You know, sport has been good to Boley and Walter. That's why they did it. I want to stick with you, Rob, actually, from a player perspective, if that's okay. Because this, all this news started breaking, Chelsea taking apart by Brentford can't happen to anyone. But uncommitting starts of the season continues. How much of an impact to do these kind of boardroom machinations and the funding? Because obviously Chelsea has a club, Chelsea fans, perhaps, is who we should be more concerned about. They've been experiencing this now a few times going back to Roman and Bramovich days. Yeah. None really on the pitch. What it does affect. I think when does, when does a take over, as opposed to person A buying out 12% of someone else, when it does happen and when it did happen at Chelsea, was when they took over, and I've seen it there, or at West Ham, I've seen it, other places, is they come in and just decimate the staff within the club. And that strips away a lot of the heart of the club. And when you're a player, you buy into what you're buying into is, the manager sells you the training ground, the pitch. You come in and meet the staff. And then you see these people leaving meetings and tears that you see them being sacked, you see them being having the livelihoods taken away and having to restart their lives. And you realize, you know, this is just business. For some people, for people who are living abroad, or people who have put the club or whatever it might be, they don't care. They're saying, streamline the club. Let's get in the people we want within the key areas of the club. So that's fine. And possibly, that's why Chelsea have gotten through so many players is that a lot of them have just gone, well, I'd say, well, we're off as well. You look at Enzo Fernandez. Why is he? It's not often you see Chelsea sell to rivals. And you consider that Chelsea may not be on the pitch, you know, in terms of rival in Manchester City this season, but they consider them rivals. And now they're selling to them. That for me was sort of a real red flag in there. A player turns around and goes, I want to go. Right. So you're saying day to day in the immediate picture. People don't particularly notice that they're playing for the club, but it creates a picture. I think there's an initial trauma that you see the change. You see the the unsavory nature of streamlining a club. And you see that. And you see the people that it hurts. And that's what I've seen in the past, which is leads a bit of taste in you know. Let's go back to Boli Liam, who's been the face of this project without him to take the heat. Does this really put the spotlight on clear lake for the first time? Yes. So I think that's what's so interesting about this deal is that it's on one level, absolutely a good thing for clear lake. And maybe a good thing for Chelsea in the sense that you remove that source of tension or unease in the boardroom. And you have not necessarily more clarity of vision, because as we've said, clear lake have been controlling the strategy of Chelsea for several years already. But you just remove a potential distraction, which could help with something like the stadium project, which really has not moved in the last four years at Chelsea and is really the biggest thing confronting this ownership now. But it's also a potential bad thing because just as during the bid process, it was very convenient for everyone else in that consortium to have Todd Boli front and center. It was also very convenient for clear lake in that first year when the kind of scenes that Rob described there were happening at Chelsea across every department when the squad was being completely overhauled and the club was falling to 12th in the Premier League as it turned out. It was quite convenient for clear lake to have Todd Boli be the face of everything to be the one who was taking all the ridicule, all the heat. And of course he helped fan the flames of that by some of the things that he would come out and say from time to time at business conferences or when you get approached by Sky Sports on the streets in Madrid or something. But that's gone now. And you know, it had already been going away because Boli had been receding as a presence at Chelsea. He'd still go to games, he'd be in his box and he'd still turn up at a business conference from time to time and answer some vague big picture questions about Chelsea. But he wasn't that same level of consistent all encompassing presence and there was greater awareness I think from fans and the broader football public that clear lake were in control. But now that he's completely out and clear lake have full control. If Chelsea don't get onto the trajectory that this ownership and this ownership won and the fans expect, then there will only be one place to direct the anger and the blame. And we've seen protests from fans in the last couple of years that have increasingly referenced clear lake, increasingly referenced take Boli. And that will now ramp up if Chelsea's results on the pitch continue to be less than everyone hopes and expects. Liam, does Bidad take Boli care about the pressure? Well, I think when you're talking about these American private equity billionaires, typically they're very confident in their own judgment. They've excelled in their own industries and I think there's a level of confidence that they bring to everything that they do. Now, we have seen a change of strategy in the last few months with the appointment of Chabby Alonzo with the signing of some more experienced players with ownership saying after they'd attacked the in-resignal that there would be this process of self-reflection. But I think that came more from the undeniable reality of Chelsea's results, which the Premier League has a good way of telling you when things aren't going to plan. And I think that is what they react to far more than supporter noise or unrest. That's a really interesting point, Liam. And of course, you're right. It's a great leveler, isn't it, composition? That's why we're all fascinated by it. But if you look at the numbers from this, we've discussed a lot about this, and these guys are investors and they're trying to prove that they know what a good investment is and the market investment, as I understand it, is it goes up? That's good. Yeah. So the blue. You're right so far. I was actually thinking of a new job, guys. The blue co-consorting bought the club from a sanctioned Roman and Brahmavic for 2.3 billion in 2022, a box. Can I like now values the club at 5 billion pounds? So that's, again, stick with me for these numbers. That's double. That's slightly more than double. What they think it was worth in 2022, man. I value this cup at 5 billion pounds. How much was it four years ago? That's the case. It was only eight pence. You're right. Quid's in. Yeah, I can help here, I think. So like the key thing to sort of, I think it was a bit more than they pay. So two and a half, there were thereabouts, with a commitment to spend 1.75 billion over a 10-year period of which most people assumed at the time, and we certainly weren't dissuaded from our assumption that that was around the stadium, which is, I believe, the kind of elephant in the room, right? Come on, guys. How's that project going along? So just remember that. Well, we'll call it 2.5 because it's easy to remember. Now, the 5 billion number that has been reported, I think, is greatly misunderstood. Okay. Great misunderstood. So this is the concept of end-surprise value. End-surprise value, it's really simple. Honestly, your face is at the where we going with this and that. Come on, giving me the wind up, is the equity, the price of something, plus whatever that thing's debt is. You just add the two together. The debt is minus. Yeah, the debt. Well, it should be a minus. But this is where they slightly, whoa, twisted my melons, add the debt, right? Because that's the size of the thing you're buying. I'm buying company over there that costs 100 pounds, but it owes 200 pounds. So the commitment I'm making, I'm taking on the company plus its debt, is 300 million. I'm saying that that thing is worth 300 million because it has 200 million of debt. So what you could be saying is it was 2.3 billion. They've racked up 2.7 billion pounds with a debt. Therefore, the price is 5 billion. I'm going to give you an A for effort. And sort of taking me very literally, it's even more complicated than that. So let's just go back. So yeah, in theory, you're absolutely right. You've got enterprise value. So this number of five, what they're really saying is we bought in it two and a half. We've added about 1.4 billion of debt. Okay, 1.4 billion of debt. We borrowed a load of money, including very high interest loans that are going to be paid back at some time. Subsequent to buying in 2022, they, the group, all of them, beddad and tired and all that. Loads in 400 million of equity. So you go from 2.5 to 2.9 of money they've invested. They put that money, they put it, that's real money. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, add the debt. They bought Shrazburg and they've bought hotels and car parks and all this other stuff they've done just to sort of make the books balance. The extra bit is what they're saying is the growth of the equity. So take off the debt, take off the extra bit of equity. We are extrapolating a little bit because they're not revealing everything. But I think what they're saying is our investment, the thing that we've bought went from about 2.5 to 3.5, 3.6, 3.7. So there's their growth. A bear in mind that they had 25% of the company if you add Bolly and Walter together, but they're bits together. So of that growth, they only get a quarter. They're basically walking away with £475 million each. Okay, it was 900. The only thing that they revealed was that they didn't even reveal it. The Ft to be fair, winkled it out of them and they haven't an idea is that the cash consideration, what, what clear lake have given Walter and Bolly to go away is 950 million quid. So just divide that by 2 because it was so 475 each. Now it's okay, you're sort of thinking, that's not bad. Do you know what? It's not that great. If you once you strip everything out, the money they put in, it's actually kind of a nominal profit and the language is really important. Walter in his statement said, I've sold it a premium. I have made a profit. He's made a marginal profit four years. He might have was what I've left it in the bank, frankly, for these rich guys. They expect double digit returns. His return is actually about 67%, which is actually a bad investment in his world. Yeah, I get you. But he had to say, I've made a profit because he had to, for pride, but also for the regulatory pressure to find cash, to sort out my insurance debt issues. I've sold the lakers at a profit. I sold the, I sold Chelsea at a profit, a marginal, small profit. So the language is important. What does this really mean, though, for clear lake? Clear lake are in. They are all in and they've doubled down just now. Here's the really weird thing. Bear in mind, as Liam explained, they were the only possible buyer of Bolio, Walter. What would you normally do, right? If you knew someone was in trouble and had to sell you something, you'd absolutely, well, we're all getting through business. Yeah, I genuinely feel like you sat here. We've made such strides. We have really, we've really liked made strides today. But what they couldn't do that, why couldn't they do that? Because what would it look like to their investors? They've got to sell all the guys that invest in clear lake. This Chelsea thing is amazing. They overpaid. They have overpaid to give Walter and Bolie a small marginal profit. So how's the Chelsea investment going? Brilliant. The thing I think most Chelsea fans would be interested in, this is obviously all pretty important. Actually, no, we're delving into it. You said earlier, Robo, maybe it doesn't matter to the players on the pitch, particularly in perhaps it won't have an impact, but then now we dig into it. You can see why it might and the longer term future, you're talking about high interest loans. That sounds worrying to me. But the thing I think that most fans, Liam, are interested in is what is going on with the stadium? The stadium build project has been being discussed. I don't know since I can remember it really. And it's been over four years since as Matt points out, Blueco turned up. They said they were going to redevelop or move away from Stanford Bridge. We know these things are key in modern football, having a stadium that you can use to compete. What's the latest on that? Well, not much. That's the thing. I mean, when Blueco came in and bought Chelsea, among the many and a bold pronouncements they made was that the stadium would move quickly, that they would have a plan to share. I think it was initially by the end of 2023, then it was push back to some point in 2024, then 2025. We're almost at the end of 2026 now and there's still nothing. When they first came in, it was Jonathan Goldstein and Janet Marie Smith, very much Bowley people who were front and center of the stadium project. Janet Marie Smith had helped on Dodger Stadium and Jonathan Goldstein has great knowledge of the London property market. He helped do the deal for the Stoll Estates, which are adjacent to Stanford Bridge, which increased the footprint of that site. But there was nothing meaningfully beyond that and then when Chelsea brought in Jason Gannon to be their chief operating officer, he effectively became head of the stadium project. He previously managed so far stadium in the US. He's regarded as having a good good track record on this. Our understanding is that he's been having conversations with all the relevant stakeholders and exploring various plans. Last year, the athletic reported in a piece that the one avenue that Chelsea had closed off was a stand-by-stand revamp of Stanford Bridge, that that has been written off as not feasible in terms of time, in terms of construction, in terms of cost. That leaves two options. You knock down Stanford Bridge and do a complete rebuild and play somewhere else while that's happening. The current estimates are that could be as long as seven or eight years somewhere else, most likely at Wembley, or you find an alternative site. The most logical site would be the other end of Brompton Cemetery, the Ells Court site, which used to house the Ells Court Exhibition Centre. That is a lot bigger than the Stanford Bridge site. It would have the potential to allow Bluecoats and not just build a stadium, but to have all of these modern US arena mod cons, you could build a whole complex around it. The idea of having fans spend hours, I mean, the idea of whether European fans will go for that is a completely separate discussion, but that is the idea that I think a lot of these American businessmen have when they're talking about stadium projects, but there is nothing necessarily advanced with all this. I think there's been some noise in recent days online that Chelsea Pitch owners, the fan group that owned the freehold to Stanford Bridge, are potentially blocking progress on anything. That is not the case. Basically, they would have to any stadium proposal, but no proposal had been brought to them. I think the hope is that now that Clear Lake have got this done, that maybe infrastructure will become a bigger priority for them in the next year or two. There's already talk of a Cobham refresh as well, and that the stadium will rise up the urgency list, because Chelsea are now trying to make do with the 10th largest stadium in the Premier League by capacity, and it is a massive problem for them revenue-wise, just in terms of competing on a financial level with the clubs they're trying to compete with. It reminds me very much of when I was at QBR, on a smaller scale, that you look at someone coming in by in a club and say, we will move, and the casing point was, we filled half of Wembley for a playoff final. We can do this. We can get 45,000. Who knew that in West London, it's really hard to acquire land or rebuild a stadium. Just like how long would you give them before they lose interest? Because that's what happened at QPR, it's only kind of like in the end just when I forget it. That's your as well. Yeah, and it's just how long do you give them before they go this? I think it's a really good parallel. Of all the things that these guys have done, or not done, not making any progress at all on the stadium is the biggest shock. I'll let other people make comments around their transfers and who they've hired and fired and all that. These are sort of football things that people get wrong. I'm really surprised that that Bowley Walter, given what they did at Dodgers, the Dodgers, which is a massive success story, and given the financial firepower of Clear Lake and some of their backers to make no progress at all, is always struck me as really odd. The briefing when they bought was West London, this is Chelsea, great brand name, the fashion were part of town, stadium districts, as Liam was saying. This is so much of like the sport investment talk in the States is around stadium, hotel, comfort site, some housing, great restaurants. You think about like the really valuable sports franchises in the States, Dallas Cowboys, Boston Red Sox, they're all doing this stuff, Chicago Cubs, it's not just stadium anymore, literally it's the district, they almost own the entire footprint and they own all the answer to the business. I went to the so fine, this incredible result. It's vast, it's bonkers. If we were doing this four years ago, I would have been sort of saying I think that's the direction of travel and I'm really surprised they've messed about with this else court situation. Look, so many people, I mean I remember dropped amazing plans of Stanford Bridge and they'd fall into all sorts of issues, train line, cemetery, people's rights are light, the famous story about the view, the unimpeded view from where is it Richmond Park? It is Richmond Park, yeah. King James Mountain. Yeah, you got to be able to see St. Paul's. You did need to be able to see it. So these wonderfully British London antiquated reasons not to do something. I just saw these Americans, I thought they'd love that, wasn't they? It's a nice story. Guys, it's important. You know, I've just done it and it shows your massively held back. Think about their big six peers, way smaller, way smaller. You know, I just really surprised here we are four years, nearly five years and everything I'm hearing is what they're going to do, they're going to dig down. I think they have to dig down at so far, wasn't it? That was an issue to do with the fly path. That's really expensive, really expensive. I don't know what they're going to do. Liam, I'm seriously, what if you had to, you know, just have a guess, we're not going to hold you to it. Well, I think, I think Abramovich's plan for his cathedral of football plan that was subsequently shelved did involve digging down, but the problem was there's only a certain amount you can dig down before you get to the minimum pitch width. So there are limitations on how far down you can go and limitations on how far up you can go because of this listed view. I've said for a couple of years now that this I think is the most complicated stadium situation in football for all the reasons why redeveloping Stanford Bridge is so hard, but also because the L's court scenario is one that they don't control. The L's court development company, which is backed by Delancy, a property developer, have a master plan of their own. This massive, sprawling, mixed-use development at a time when the UK government has set a national target for housing. It would be, I think, quite difficult, quite tricky. There would be lots of things to navigate. The social housing on that site as well for Chelsea to potentially acquire it. Now, I don't think that that doors necessarily closed. And I do think all things being equal, this is just my opinion. I think that's probably the option that would make most sense to this ownership because you could stay at Stanford Bridge, do the kind of hybrid goodbye that Arsenal did before going to Ashburton Grove, and then move into a purpose built modern super stadium with all the mod cons around it. You could redevelop Stanford Bridge in a way that Arsenal did with hybrid into some kind of development that references its history, but makes you money. So I would imagine that that would be the most appealing scenario, but there is no scenario that is not incredibly difficult. And whatever they do, this is not the same as saying CPO will block anything, but they have to make sure that CPO is on the side because it is 76% of CPO voting shareholders would have to vote for whatever the plan is. So I think the club are keenly aware that they have to bring people with them. And that's not necessarily something that this ownership has been brilliant at so far in other areas. Final question then, Liam, before we wrap, from all of the conversation we've had today, it sounds as though Chelsea might feel a bit stuck at this point. Does it feel as though clearly took all this into account when they were taking over the club? And do you see a route through this in the near term? Well, I think the learning curve has been steep. There's no getting around that. Clear Lake had no track record of owning any sports teams before this. And they've made a lot of mistakes. I think I'm sure they did admit to that over the last four years. They've also learned a lot. They are now in a situation, I think, where you look at the way Chelsea operate because of those revenue deficits that we talked about with the stadium with Chelsea's commercial performance, which still isn't great, front of shirt, all that stuff, where they're essentially trying to play a trade their way into a top team. And that's quite tricky to do at scale. And I think you've seen, again, last summer, they've made some good signings. It still looks like they've got some pretty big holes in their squad when you're talking about even sure-fire Champions League qualification, never mind getting back to the level that fans want them to get back to, which is competing for Premier Leagues and Champions Leagues. So it's a long road, and the Premier League, I think, is less forgiving than ever, because the teams outside those traditional big six, you see Brighton, you see Brentford, these teams are smarter. They've got more money than ever. The level of advantage that your spending can get you, I think, is less than it was maybe in the past. So they have to get a lot of a lot right. And I think there's an awful lot riding on the Chabby Alonzo era, being a success after the previous missteps. Thank you, Gents. Great to see you all, Matt. I'll be back next week alongside Alan Crafton. Robin, I will be with you tomorrow with our Premier League review of the opening five games of the season. We'll catch you then. Till then, take care.