Chelsea have entered the realm of late-stage American sports capitalism | Leander Schaerlaeckens

Here follows a list of the things accomplished at Chelsea Football Club during a time that historians may choose to grandly term the First Clearlake Era, or perhaps the Boehly Bungle.

Since the May 2022 purchase of the club from the sanctioned Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, when Todd Boehly took over the club’s daily operations, Chelsea – Premier League champions as recently as 2017 and 2015, and Champions League winners in 2021 – have placed 12th, sixth, fourth and 10th in the league.

After the sacking of Thomas Tuchel, the incumbent upon the takeover, five permanent and four interim managers were installed. They employ five sporting directors.

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About $2.37bn (£1.78bn) – with a B! – was spent on 60 new players, per Transfermarkt. The same source values Chelsea’s current first team at just $1.23bn (£920m). And when, to put it in Professional Business Guy speak, your entire trading strategy rests on buying young players you plan to profit from later, it doesn’t seem great when you’ve spent twice as much on your portfolio of assets as it is now worth.

Those signings included at least one of the Premier League’s all-time busts (Mykhailo Mudryk) and one of its worst contracts (Raheem Sterling).

Chelsea set a new Premier League record for the biggest pre-tax loss.

And, infamously, the club sold its women’s team to itself as part of some accounting shenanigans to stay on the right side of financial regulations.

And now let us go through the things that were not achieved:

A credible title challenge.

Qualifying for European competition in two of four seasons, which ought to be the rock-bottom minimum for a club of Chelsea’s means.

Building a new and larger stadium, even though one was mooted.

All the same, Boehly will walk away after four years as chair of Chelsea – although his influence had recently waned – with a profit in his bank account, or wherever it is that money men of his kind stash their cash. So too will his fellow American and minority stakeholder Mark Walter, after both men sold their 12.8% shares to Clearlake Capital last week.

Welcome to the final stage of the American ownership model, which has now enveloped most of the Premier League. At this stage, members of the billionaire class just pass stakes in teams around among themselves, always for at least a bit more than they paid. They are not stewards of their clubs and don’t see themselves as such. They feel no obvious alliance or allegiance to the fans, acting only as the current holders of the paperwork that confers financial control over a valuable asset.

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As part of the Clearlake takeover group, Boehly and Walter each bought their stakes with the club at a $3.3bn (£2.5bn) valuation and have now sold at $6.7bn (£5bn), doubling its supposed value after four chaotic years. The exiting owners made a “modest profit”, per the Financial Times. That would probably be explained by the $2.3bn (£1.75bn) investment that Boehly, Walter and the other new owners committed to when they took over the club.

That they should get to exit with more money than they spent at all is instructive in a way that the exact figures involved here are not.

The dirty little secret of the way American sports functions at the highest levels is that the season-to-season balance sheet is sort of immaterial. So is being competitive (unless you care about fan sentiment). The ownership class makes its money by buying a club and then holding on to it; by possessing a ultra-scarce asset for a spell, until someone else is willing to pay more for it. They may move the furniture around in the name of optimization, but the house largely remains unaltered. If the team makes a bit of money – although nothing like the sort of profit that would justify its valuation – or breaks even, then that’s dandy. If it suffers losses, that’s probably fine, too, as they will be offset, and then some, in profit from the sale.

There is no correlation between price point and how well or poorly these teams have actually been run – all that matters is the premium someone else is willing to pay for an institution that has historically been as safe a bet as any. It is virtually impossible to lose money by parking it in a beloved sports team over the long term. All you have to do is not get relegated (if such a thing is even possible in your league). And so clubs, or chunks of them, are now picked up and dumped as easily as Normals like you and me might grab and ditch a stock in an online brokerage account. And with little more ceremony than an earnest press release.

That’s the game England’s many legacy clubs find themselves in now. The game the Glazer family kicked off when they bought Manchester United mostly with borrowed money in 2005 for $1.47bn (£800m at the time) and then, in 2023, sold Sir Jim Ratcliffe a quarter of the club for about $1.6bn (£1.3bn) in cash and infrastructure investment. Which is to say that the Glazers recouped more or less the entirety of the investment they made with the money of others – even though much of it still sits on the club’s books as debt – and retained three-quarters of one of the planet’s most valuable sporting brands.

This is the game Mark Walter mastered when he bought the Los Angeles Lakers for $10bn and flipped them on for $12.5bn just 14 months later, as he liquidates some of his vast sporting portfolio in the face of a federal investigation into fraud.

This summer, a consortium including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought 30% of Liverpool for $2.2bn (£1.65bn) from Fenway Sports Group, which had acquired the club outright for $464m (then £300m) in 2010. That represents a 1,580% profit , in case you’re keeping score. In that light, Alexander Isak and Bradley Barcola really don’t sound all that expensive.

That’s how things have been done stateside for decades. It is now also how things are done in England. It doesn’t drive sporting excellence or foster deeper connections with the fans that bring the club its value in the first place. The clubs now exist to make rich people richer. There’s little anyone can do about it. It sucks.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is the author of The Long Game: US Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts, which is out now. He teaches at Marist University.