Clearlake Capital, majority shareholders of Chelsea Football Club, are among soccer’s most controversial owners.
The private equity firm bought into the Premier League side in May 2022, alongside LA Lakers and LA Dodgers shareholder Todd Boehly and a phalanx of other investors.
Since then, they have completely subverted the norms of soccer investment, applying a private equity-inspired approach to running Chelsea. The results, even in the most charitable reading, have been poor.
Yes, Chelsea won the Club World Cup last summer and the Europa Conference League a few months earlier, but that is a meagre return on £1.3bn investment in the transfer market and the further £1bn they have spent on player wages.
What’s more, their methods have bordered on psychedelic. Seven, eight and nine-year contracts – which were virtually unheard of in soccer finance – have become the norm; they have sold property assets and the women’s team to themselves to short-circuit the Premier League’s spending rules; and they have applied a highly unconventional sporting structure, with a high turnover in head coaches.
In 2025-26, they failed to qualify for the lucrative Champions League. In fact, they failed to qualify for any of the three European competitions. And given that they are under a settlement agreement with UEFA, the governing body of the sport in Europe, which means they could be banned the next time they qualify if they exceed financial targets, that’s bad news.
All in all, BlueCo – the consortium which Clearlake and their co-investors used to take over Chelsea – are somewhere in the region of £5bn deep into the project.
Given that Chelsea lose hundreds of millions of pounds per season and need to build a new stadium, that figure will only trend in one direction. So, how do Clearlake, a private equity firm with obligations to its impatient cohort of limited partners, plan to make any money from this investment?
The answer, on face value at least, is pretty simple: they intend to flip the club for far more than the £5bn they have spent so far. How they get to that point is decidedly less simple.
Looking elsewhere in Clearlake’s patchwork of business investments, they have been enormously successful, however.
In a recent press release, the firm revealed that it has made ‘approximately $22 billion of realizations’ in the last five years. That’s the sale of its portfolio companies, to me or you.
One day, they will hope that selling Chelsea will super-size those returns.
It has been a remarkably busy June for the business.
They spent about $1bn to acquire Pathway Capital management and added assets worth $185bn to their portfolio, nearly doubling the size of the company in one swoop.
They also added $5bn in assets via a purchase of loans from LCM Asset Management, plus spending another undisclosed sum to acquire Quest Anetac, a cybersecurity company.
And finally, they completed their eighth fundraising, raising $14.8bn for new investments in the process.
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