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[Ponietz]

6. I see you have new Saudi stakeholders

Sorry to say I saw this coming. What a mess. Good luck

To recap the bare facts of the case, because it is all quite dry and convoluted and also requires an inelegant number of the uses of the word “fund”: Clearlake, the private equity firm that owns Chelsea — alongside the transfer market master strategist Todd Boehly — has received some (it’s not clear how much) investment from the Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.

The PIF, as previously discussed in this newsletter, recently took control of four teams in the Saudi Pro League, and has set about hiring a glut of aging, slightly faded stars to populate them. Many of its targets, as it turns out, play for Chelsea: N’Golo Kanté, Hakim Ziyech, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and so on.

As it happens, Chelsea has spent colossal sums on players since Clearlake and Boehly took over last year. It now finds itself desperately trying to pare down its bloated, expensive squad, both for practical reasons — the players do not all fit in one changing room — and more pressing economic ones: Chelsea needs its books to balance a little more by the end of the month so the club doesn’t run afoul of various financial regulations put in place by the Premier League and European soccer.
On the surface, then, it is not hard to understand why people might think this Saudi buying of Chelsea players is all just a little too convenient. Somewhere along the line, the people doing the buying and the people doing the selling have interests that are, let’s say, mutually aligned.

[link:https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/sports/soccer/transfer-window-signings.html]