A British-funded bid driven by Chelsea season-ticket holders revealed on Sunday that it has made an offer to buy the club. The London-based asset management firm, Centricus, has teamed up with hedge fund manager Jonathan Lourie of Cheyne Capital, and Talis Capital’s Bob Finch, formerly majority shareholder of FC Nordsjaelland in Denmark, to submit a bid.
Lourie, Finch and Centricus’ co-founder Nizar Al-Bassam and CEO Garth Ritchie are all long-standing season-ticket holders at Stamford Bridge and made their proposal on Friday to Raine Group, who are organising the sale of Chelsea following the UK government’s sanctioning of club owner Roman Abramovich over his links with Vladimir Putin.
In speaking publicly for the first time about their ambitions for Chelsea, the British-funded bidders emphasised that they would want to use Chelsea as a parent club to other clubs in the world and would keep Marina Granovskaia, the highly regarded club director, unless the government felt it inappropriate given her association with Abramovich.
The group, which is one of six significant bidders for the club, including the favourites led by US businessman Todd Boehly, hopes for a swift resolution to the situation which has caused such uncertainty at the club. “There’s a clock ticking because the club is bleeding money at a faster rate than it should be while there’s uncertainty there,” Al-Bassam said via Zoom on Sunday afternoon.
“I’ve had the same seats in the Tambling suite and the same seats in the West Stand for ten years. I’m worried for the staff there when I see this turmoil. We see the same people hosting us when we walk in. They’re amazing to us. We see the same people in the stands looking after us and I’m feeling for them.”
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Lourie sits in the family stand with his four young children while Finch attended the 1970 FA Cup final against Leeds United, is a member of the Chelsea Pitch Owners with his three sons and has been a season-ticket holder for more than 25 years. Finch owns Raynes Park Vale FC.
“We’ve tried to focus on a proposal which align the ownership of the club with long-term investors with a deep history with the club,” Al-Bassam added. “If you look at the proposal we put forward, keeping it an entirely British finance proposal is core to that.
“There are plenty of very successful clubs financed by international investors but in this case after two decades of exceptional success by the club (under Abramovich’s investment), the club has the fanbase with the resources (like Lourie and Finch) to support the club to maintain that success. That’s what’s very unique about this proposal.”
Centricus, which has invested in technology companies, financial services and leisure companies, has advised Fifa and Uefa over funding in the past, and has access to significant funds.
“We oversee £40 billion assets,” Al-Bassam added. “We’ve been focused on content for a number of years, the Fifa work, the Uefa work, is all built around our view that content is a very, very dominant aspect of technology going forward and sports is a very core, key aspect of content.”
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Chelsea have become available after the UK government linked Abramovich with Putin and the Russian president’s invasion of Ukraine. “We can’t forget of course the bigger picture, the sad picture,” Al-Bassam emphasised.
“We’ve looked at the club in the past. There have been occasions where there were rumours of the club being available but ultimately all those projects were shelved.
“Our bid is all domestic, we don’t have any foreign investors so we’re using domestic capital which I think is quite noteworthy. We all attend the matches with our kids.”
But it is a pure business venture. “I don’t think any of us are coming purely because we’re fans or purely because we love football,” Al-Bassam added. “It’s really driven by the commercial opportunities. But it is a long-term investment. For us, you simply can’t buy a club and expect to sell it in five or ten years. The expectations from the fans, the regulators, be it the FA or Premier League or from the Government, would be not to have a sale of this club in the next five or ten years.
“So this would have to be a very, very long-term commitment. The commitment just around either a stadium expansion or a new stadium is a half-decade commitment and that needs to be done in consultation with the community, the council and with fans.”
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Ritchie, who was also on the Zoom call, said, “Chelsea are one of the very few unique iconic global brands that has come about by unfortunate circumstances, and that’s not lost on us, but the commercial opportunity around an iconic global name in a sport that is continuing to grow means there has to be commercial viability here.
“We have experience of managing big and complex organisations. We are regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Not only do you have the FA making sure you don’t do anything wrong, you also have the FCA making sure you stay in your swim lane.
“We would definitely want to invest in the company, the players and surroundings. It’s why we keep talking about having ‘patient’ capital. The people supporting us have deep pockets of capital. Us being fans, we want to win and we need to invest and if we win the brand continues to grow back.”
The British group believe it can generate more commercial revenues from match-day, media and sponsorship and from owning other clubs, including development of talent. “It involves investing in in clubs on a global basis in order to have the facilities to be able to manage talent,” Al-Bassam said. “The advantage of being able to invest in an MLS club, a Portuguese division two club, a club in Australia or Asia opens your horizons to being able to manage youth development.
“Chelsea has one of the largest loan books out there, they have a huge amount of talent, they recruit a lot of youth, they have a very big network clearly that can be leveraged.
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“The price of what Chelsea will be acquired for at the peak today versus some of the cost of those other clubs to join the network could be quite attractive.
“So there is a business angle to this but the most important thing to remember is Chelsea’s not broken today. We think Chelsea’s well-managed fundamentally under sporting and business side.”
Al-Bassam, who emphasised his group was “not supporters of the European Super League”, acknowledged that the Raine Group had a “challenging” task in selecting even the shortlist.
���They are running an incredibly complex process,” Ritchie added. “It’s not simply the winner is the best price. The SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission in the US) will look at how it is run, as will the FCA and HM government.
“We’ve certainly passed the fit and proper person’s test for the FCA. We wouldn’t be bidding if we thought we weren’t competent in being great custodians for this great football club.”
