Save Chelsea FC, Save Football, Get BlueCo Out
Save Chelsea FC, Save Football, Get BlueCo Out
The Issue
To The FA, Premier League, UEFA, and the Global Football Community
A prestigious football institution is being stripped of its identity and reduced to a financial vehicle. When the BlueCo consortium took over Chelsea Football Club four years ago in 2022, they promised stability and framed themselves as an upgrade over the so-called "poorly managed" era of Roman Abramovich. While the Abramovich era ended abruptly, its undeniable sporting legacy made Chelsea one of the most successful clubs in world football. Under BlueCo, that legacy is being buried. The club has been turned into a private equity hustle, characterized by reckless cash burn, fan alienation, and cynical financial loopholes.
If football continues in this direction—prioritizing balance-sheet manipulation and profit extraction over the communities that built the sport—every historic club is at risk.
The Parties Involved
We hold the entirety of the BlueCo consortium (operating under the parent company 22 Holdco Limited) accountable for the cultural and financial degradation of Chelsea FC. This includes:
- Clearlake Capital: The majority shareholder (holding roughly 60%), led by co-founders Behdad Eghbali and José E. Feliciano, representing the controlling private equity interest and acting as the primary architects of this chaotic strategy.
- Todd Boehly: Co-owner and Chairman (Eldridge Industries).
- Mark Walter: Co-owner (Guggenheim Partners).
- Hansjörg Wyss: Co-owner (Wyss Foundation).
Our Core Grievances:
1. The Propaganda Machine and Access Journalism
We are calling out the constant stream of propaganda disguised as sports journalism. To mask staggering pre-tax losses, UEFA sanction threats, and chaotic decision-making, the ownership relies on a compliant ecosystem of access journalism to gaslight the fanbase.
Whenever the club faces a self-inflicted crisis, pre-packaged PR briefs are simultaneously fed to prominent, high-profile journalists and broadcasters—such as Matt Law, Fabrizio Romano, David Ornstein, and Kaveh Solhekol (Sky Sports), who regularly regurgitate ownership talking points about "long-term visions," "wage bill reductions," and "master plans." Trading exclusive scoops for favorable spin is not objective journalism; it is a mouthpiece operation. We see right through these false narratives. The reality on the pitch and in the financial accounts exposes this "master plan" as nothing more than a desperate PR shield. Football cannot survive if it is governed by manufactured reality rather than sporting merit.
2. Financial Loopholes as a Strategy
BlueCo has approached football solely through a private equity lens, treating the club as a stripping asset. They rely on egregious related-party transactions—such as selling the club's own hotels to themselves—simply to exploit Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR). These are not the actions of custodians trying to win; these are the actions of hedge fund managers trying to artificially balance a spreadsheet after years of gross incompetence.
3. Nepotism and the Erosion of Elite Standards
Rather than hiring proven, elite winners to build on Chelsea’s historic success, the ownership has systematically pushed out the people who understand the fabric of the club and what it actually takes to win at the highest level. In their place, they have installed a network of external "yes men" based on personal connections rather than merit. The recent scandal surrounding co-director of recruitment Joe Shields and the Kinetic Foundation pipeline is glaring proof of this rot. We are seeing crucial coaching staff roles—including the head coaching position itself, occupied by an individual who doesn't even hold a UEFA Pro License—handed to individuals simply because of their ties to Shields and his network. Chelsea Football Club should be a destination for the world's elite tacticians, not a sandbox for private equity executives to hire their underqualified friends.
4. Exploiting the Fans: The Ticketing Controversies
The lifeblood of any club is its match-going fans. BlueCo's recent updates to the ticketing system, introduced under the guise of stopping "touting," include strict digital ticketing limitations and inflexible transfer rules that punish genuine, long-standing supporters. Furthermore, there is a glaring conflict of interest regarding Todd Boehly's involvement with the ticket resale platform Vivid Seats—where Premier League tickets are sold to foreign tourists at massive markups. Squeezing out local, working-class supporters in favor of high-paying tourists is a warning sign to match-going fans across the entire sport.
5.Dismantling the Best Women's Team in the World
Perhaps the most egregious failure is the ownership's interference in the Chelsea Women's team. For the last half-decade, alongside Lyon and Barcelona, this team has been the standard-bearer for excellence in world football. Yet, under BlueCo:
The women’s team was cynically "sold" to BlueCo’s parent company for approximately £200 million purely as an accounting trick to bypass financial regulations for the men's team.
The ownership forced out crucial operational figures, destabilizing a world-class operation. Men’s sporting directors with no background in women’s football have been allowed to interfere, eroding the elite, self-sustaining culture that was painstakingly built over years.
A Warning to World Football
This is not just a Chelsea problem; it is a football problem. If private equity groups are allowed to buy historic institutions, exploit financial loopholes to balance reckless spending, use journalists as PR shields, squeeze local fans out of stadiums, install unproven friends in elite roles, and dismantle elite women's programs to balance their books, the sport will lose its soul. The gap between the people who made this game and the entities profiting from it is widening to an irreversible degree.
We demand accountability. We demand that football’s governing bodies scrutinize this ownership model and implement strict regulations to protect clubs from being treated as mere holding-company assets.
Get BlueCo out of football
1
The Issue
To The FA, Premier League, UEFA, and the Global Football Community
A prestigious football institution is being stripped of its identity and reduced to a financial vehicle. When the BlueCo consortium took over Chelsea Football Club four years ago in 2022, they promised stability and framed themselves as an upgrade over the so-called "poorly managed" era of Roman Abramovich. While the Abramovich era ended abruptly, its undeniable sporting legacy made Chelsea one of the most successful clubs in world football. Under BlueCo, that legacy is being buried. The club has been turned into a private equity hustle, characterized by reckless cash burn, fan alienation, and cynical financial loopholes.
If football continues in this direction—prioritizing balance-sheet manipulation and profit extraction over the communities that built the sport—every historic club is at risk.
The Parties Involved
We hold the entirety of the BlueCo consortium (operating under the parent company 22 Holdco Limited) accountable for the cultural and financial degradation of Chelsea FC. This includes:
- Clearlake Capital: The majority shareholder (holding roughly 60%), led by co-founders Behdad Eghbali and José E. Feliciano, representing the controlling private equity interest and acting as the primary architects of this chaotic strategy.
- Todd Boehly: Co-owner and Chairman (Eldridge Industries).
- Mark Walter: Co-owner (Guggenheim Partners).
- Hansjörg Wyss: Co-owner (Wyss Foundation).
Our Core Grievances:
1. The Propaganda Machine and Access Journalism
We are calling out the constant stream of propaganda disguised as sports journalism. To mask staggering pre-tax losses, UEFA sanction threats, and chaotic decision-making, the ownership relies on a compliant ecosystem of access journalism to gaslight the fanbase.
Whenever the club faces a self-inflicted crisis, pre-packaged PR briefs are simultaneously fed to prominent, high-profile journalists and broadcasters—such as Matt Law, Fabrizio Romano, David Ornstein, and Kaveh Solhekol (Sky Sports), who regularly regurgitate ownership talking points about "long-term visions," "wage bill reductions," and "master plans." Trading exclusive scoops for favorable spin is not objective journalism; it is a mouthpiece operation. We see right through these false narratives. The reality on the pitch and in the financial accounts exposes this "master plan" as nothing more than a desperate PR shield. Football cannot survive if it is governed by manufactured reality rather than sporting merit.
2. Financial Loopholes as a Strategy
BlueCo has approached football solely through a private equity lens, treating the club as a stripping asset. They rely on egregious related-party transactions—such as selling the club's own hotels to themselves—simply to exploit Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR). These are not the actions of custodians trying to win; these are the actions of hedge fund managers trying to artificially balance a spreadsheet after years of gross incompetence.
3. Nepotism and the Erosion of Elite Standards
Rather than hiring proven, elite winners to build on Chelsea’s historic success, the ownership has systematically pushed out the people who understand the fabric of the club and what it actually takes to win at the highest level. In their place, they have installed a network of external "yes men" based on personal connections rather than merit. The recent scandal surrounding co-director of recruitment Joe Shields and the Kinetic Foundation pipeline is glaring proof of this rot. We are seeing crucial coaching staff roles—including the head coaching position itself, occupied by an individual who doesn't even hold a UEFA Pro License—handed to individuals simply because of their ties to Shields and his network. Chelsea Football Club should be a destination for the world's elite tacticians, not a sandbox for private equity executives to hire their underqualified friends.
4. Exploiting the Fans: The Ticketing Controversies
The lifeblood of any club is its match-going fans. BlueCo's recent updates to the ticketing system, introduced under the guise of stopping "touting," include strict digital ticketing limitations and inflexible transfer rules that punish genuine, long-standing supporters. Furthermore, there is a glaring conflict of interest regarding Todd Boehly's involvement with the ticket resale platform Vivid Seats—where Premier League tickets are sold to foreign tourists at massive markups. Squeezing out local, working-class supporters in favor of high-paying tourists is a warning sign to match-going fans across the entire sport.
5.Dismantling the Best Women's Team in the World
Perhaps the most egregious failure is the ownership's interference in the Chelsea Women's team. For the last half-decade, alongside Lyon and Barcelona, this team has been the standard-bearer for excellence in world football. Yet, under BlueCo:
The women’s team was cynically "sold" to BlueCo’s parent company for approximately £200 million purely as an accounting trick to bypass financial regulations for the men's team.
The ownership forced out crucial operational figures, destabilizing a world-class operation. Men’s sporting directors with no background in women’s football have been allowed to interfere, eroding the elite, self-sustaining culture that was painstakingly built over years.
A Warning to World Football
This is not just a Chelsea problem; it is a football problem. If private equity groups are allowed to buy historic institutions, exploit financial loopholes to balance reckless spending, use journalists as PR shields, squeeze local fans out of stadiums, install unproven friends in elite roles, and dismantle elite women's programs to balance their books, the sport will lose its soul. The gap between the people who made this game and the entities profiting from it is widening to an irreversible degree.
We demand accountability. We demand that football’s governing bodies scrutinize this ownership model and implement strict regulations to protect clubs from being treated as mere holding-company assets.
Get BlueCo out of football
1
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Petition created on 7 May 2026