Multi-club model on the mind
Chelsea’s new ownership group have yet to make any tangible progress in our stated attempts to create a multi-club empire centered around the Blues, but as per recent reports, it’s not for a lack of trying.
RC Strasbourg president Marc Keller confirmed a few weeks ago that he’s been talking with Todd Boehly & Co, and according to The Guardian, those talks “have intensified” since for the French top division club.
Meanwhile, we have apparently made good on our initial interest in Portuguese top flight side Portimonense SC, but according to Record, our takeover bid worth €40m (rising to €50m) for 75 per cent of the club’s shares has been rejected by the shareholders. That bid seems like a tiny amount, but it is in line with the (similarly rejected) takeover bid from Manchester City a couple years ago.
On a sidenote, UEFA still seem happy enough with all this multi-club talk, and in fact recently re-elected (unopposed) president Aleksander Čeferin is hoping to make things easier for us (and others like Manchester United) by massaging the current rules.
“We’ve had five or six owners of clubs who want to buy another club. We have to see what to do. The options are that it stays like that or that we allow them to play in the same competition. I’m not sure yet.
“We have to speak about these regulations and see what to do about it. There is more and more interest in this multi-club ownership. We shouldn’t just say no for the investments for multi-club ownership, but we have to see what kind of rules we set in that case, because the rules have to be strict.
“From one point of view it’s true if you are the owner of two clubs and they play in the same competition you can say to one club to lose because you want the other to win. But for you, as a football player, do you think it’s so easy to do that, to tell a coach, lose the match because the other wants to win?”
-Aleksander Čeferin; source: The Overlap via The Athletic
Thanks, Aleks!
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