Explained: Ratcliffe and Boyle and a dramatic development in the race to buy Chelsea

A consortium led by Todd Boehle, co-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, was chosen yesterday to be the best bidder for ChelseaHowever the most important development in the pursuit of Premier League The club came from a dramatic late bid from British billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe.

the athlete He understands that the Boehly Group, which includes fellow Dodgers co-owner Mark Walters and Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss, has not yet entered into an exclusive agreement, and while theoretically they have a week to complete the deal, the process has taken on an entirely new look.

The Boyle consortium was in competition with two other groups to buy Chelsea from Roman Abramovich, who put it up for sale shortly before he was sanctioned for his alleged links to Russian President Vladimir Putin in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine. It is understood that the total bid of the Boehly consortium has exceeded 4 billion pounds. That includes a pledge to spend £1.5 billion developing the club and Stamford Bridge, as well as meeting Rennes’ valuation of around £2.5 billion.

But now another credible attempt appeared, which did not follow the lengthy process.

Ratcliffe, owner of petrochemical giant Ineos, held discussions with Chelsea chairman Bruce Buck on Thursday before making his bid.

We did a show on (Friday),” Ratcliffe told The Times. We are the only British offer. Our motives are simply to try to create a high-profile club in London. We are not motivated to profit because we make our money in other ways.”

Here we explain what happened on another extraordinary day for Chelsea and what it means for the club’s future ownership.

Ratcliffe’s bid for Chelsea delayed, but is it too late?

Put it this way, if you verbally agreed to sell your home to someone who called your real estate agent, looked around a few times and made the asking price, would you ignore someone knocking on your door and saying “I’ll pay more and I can do that tomorrow”?

Good for you if you are old enough to honor this initial agreement but not many of them do. Gazing is annoying when it happens to you but it’s not illegal.

The sale of Chelsea was managed by the American group Raine Group. Operating under unprecedented conditions, it has successfully marketed the club, eliminating the waste of time, and has set up a three-horse race between unions made up of wealthy investors, most of whom have extensive experience managing sports teams. With the fire sale still going on, the situation was calm and measured.

In fact, Ren clearly felt she had done her part by Friday when she contacted the unsuccessful bidders – the group backed by Crystal Palace David Pletzer and Josh Harris, co-owners, and the other led by Steve Pagliuca, co-owner of the Boston Celtics – and told them he was going with the gang led by Boyle.

We suppose the conversation went down to something like ‘Well done, chaps, but we go with the guy who’s been trying to buy Chelsea for years and didn’t blink this week when we asked you all to guarantee another £500m for Romain’s charity fund’.

But while America was waking up, Ratcliffe told The Times he was willing to put £2.5 billion into the Abramovich charity and commit £1.75 billion to rebuild the stadium and support the club over the next 10 years. As stated in the following press release: “This is a British bid for a British club.”

the athlete He understands that this offer went directly to Chelsea, and not to Wren. It appears the bank is unaware of the details of Ratcliffe’s bid hours after the US working papers were crowned Bohley as champion. To be fair, there aren’t many details in Ratcliffe’s statement – it’s more of a mission statement than a fully funded show – but there’s no doubt they didn’t expect it.

We understand that Ratcliffe only decided to get into the fray this week but he moved quickly to position himself to deliver what he believes is the most compelling show. For example, talk to the British government, which has a veto on this sale.

It is understood that he was in London this week, presumably speaking to his banker. However, he did not find time to speak to any fan group.

“Ratcliffe can win if he really wants to because he will be backed by Ineos and he can only increase the company’s lines of credit to fund this purchase,” says one source who has dealt with the British businessman before. “Buhli and the others should deal with their guild members.”

Ineos made a profit after tax of £1.7 billion last year. There is no doubt that Ratcliffe can afford Chelsea and believes he is confident he can close this deal within days. Time is short after all. Chelsea are only doing their fixtures because they have a special license to operate. Expires at the end of May.

So, he has time but only if Ryan is willing to tell Boyle, Blitzer, Harris, Pagliuca and all the other billionaires who have followed his schedule, that he is not a personal, but £4.25 billion one of Britain’s richest sports fan – who also happens to be a supportive patriot for Brexit, waving the flag, albeit one home in Monaco – topping £4 billion from a group of US businessmen and private equity funds.

So Ratcliffe is serious then?

Can you build a global petrochemical giant, amass a fortune of over £12 billion and vacation in the Arctic and Antarctic without being serious?

Yes, we think it’s safe to say that a man who started his life in a council house in Oldham but now spends his time between Monaco and the posh homes on the Hampshire coast and the shores of Lake Geneva, is serious about buying businesses. He built Ineos, the world’s fourth largest producer of chemicals, by purchasing more than 20 companies, plants, and refineries within a decade. The 69-year-old Briton is good at this.

For most of his career, Ratcliffe has kept a low profile. But the often controversial nature of his work, his disputes with trade unions and governments, and, it must be said, his phenomenal success attracted more and more attention. He has started spending his money on projects that require scrutiny, namely sports.

He bought FC Lausanne-Sport in 2017, shortly after local authorities committed to building a new stadium, and then partnered with Olympic sailing champion Sir Ben Ainsley to compete for the America’s Cup, a national gamble that has cost him more than £100. Million.

In 2019, he bought the world’s most successful cycling team, Team Sky, and renamed it Team Ineos. The name change doesn’t seem to slow the British-based team, they won the Tour de France this summer, and took home another French award later that year when they bought Ligue 1 Nice.

Ratcliffe’s financial support helped Egan Bernal win the Tour de France for Team Ineos in 2019 (Photo by Mustafa Yalcin/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Since then, he has funded Eliud Kipchoge’s successful attempt to run a marathon in under two hours, became the lead partner of the Mercedes F1 team and began sponsoring the All Blacks rugby union.

And now, back to Chelsea. Because shortly before Ratcliffe opted for Nice’s cheaper option – more suited to his official tax base as well – he made a polite inquiry about Chelsea’s availability.

a Manchester United The businessman was a cheerleader as a boy, and was a season ticket holder at Stamford Bridge as an adult. But he and Abramovich, another person who made his fortune from fossils, could not agree on a price in 2019. The Russian wanted £2.5 billion, but that was before anyone talked about charities, frozen assets or 10-year infrastructure commitments. . Ratcliffe told him that was too much and he spent £80m on Nice, instead.

Three years later, with Abramovich’s time in London on the clock, Ratcliffe appears to believe that £2.5 billion up front is a good fit for the world and European champions. Timing is everything.

Does this mean we should expect more last-minute shows?

Well, we weren’t expecting this, so it would be silly to say the other is impossible. But it is hard to know where they will come from.

Operation Raine appears to have rocked all the US-based sports entrepreneurs who want to add a Premier League team to their portfolios for now, and bids from Africa, Asia and the Middle East have failed to outpace Twitter.

It is possible, we suppose, that we now have to process time and everyone is talking about a figure in the region of £2.5 billion for the club/charity plus £1.5 billion or so to keep Chelsea the way they have we used to, there are all the ingredients that we have to have. Anyone pounce on them and be witty. Someone like Elon Musk, for example, but seems to be stuck on Twitter.

Perhaps the bidding groups that have adapted to participate in the RAIN process can reorganize themselves. After all, they are all guilds of like-minded individuals, some of whom have worked together before.

But how much drama does a club’s takeover saga require? There’s more than enough here for the fly-on-the-wall documentary.

What does this mean for Ratcliffe’s stake in Nice?

Ah, finally, it’s easy.

At present, nothing. That means as much as Harris and Blitzer’s stake in Crystal Palace or Pagliuca’s stake in Italy’s Atalanta – a bridge we may need to cross but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

But for the sake of this exercise, if Ratcliffe bought Chelsea, he would not be able to keep the Nice team. Not unless he wants to turn one or the other into a farm team without his aspirations to compete in European club competition. Nice, for what it deserves, are fifth in Ligue 1 and play Nantes in the French Cup final next month. They are having a good season.

On the other hand, Lausanne-Sport suffers from an unpleasant smell. They will surely be relegated to the second division in Switzerland. He can keep it.

(top image: Getty Images)