Todd Boehly has got some front. We should at least give him that. We should at least accept that it takes some nerve for a man who has turned Chelsea’s season into a sorry farrago of bombast, arrogance, stupidity and mediocrity to walk into the home dressing room late on Saturday afternoon after yet another humiliation and tell the players that their form has been an embarrassment.
An embarrassment? If there’s one overarching embarrassment at Chelsea, it’s Chelsea’s co-owner. Most of the players, admittedly, are not far behind him. But he chose them and he paid for them.
And then he dumped them like the contents of a supermarket sweep at the feet of a good manager, Graham Potter, and blamed him because he could not make sense of the mess he had inherited.
And then he chose Frank Lampard – a good manager and a decent man – to bring some sort of order to the chaos, presumably because he thought a Chelsea legend who might just be the club’s greatest ever player could act as a human shield for him and the rest of the board. That worked well.
Boehly was pictured being harangued by fans after the defeat to Brighton & Hove Albion at the weekend. At which point, he marched into the dressing room and gave the players a ‘pep-talk’.
Todd Boehly went into the dressing room after Chelsea were beaten by Brighton on Saturday
Fans were furious with Boehly at the final whistle and he made his way down to the dressing room afterwards
The Chelsea co-owner undermined the limited authority which Frank Lampard has on the team
This is cartoon behaviour. It undermines Lampard, who, as a stop-gap appointment, is fighting to establish authority anyway. And it makes Boehly look like a spoiled, over-entitled, tin-pot dictator of an owner.
What does he know about football that he feels entitled to tell the players how it is? That kind of interference is one of the hallmarks of a dysfunctional club. Under Boehly, there are plenty of others, too.
It is de rigeur to mention the television series Ted Lasso when discussing the American presence in English football. Well, there are some very smart Americans – owners and players – in our game but Boehly is the ugly American who gives Ted Lasso a bad name. In football terms, he’s Dumb and Dumber, all wrapped up in one guy.
He gets a brilliant football manager and ruins him. He spends £600m on largely untested talent, puts those players on exorbitant wages and long contracts and then he ruins them as well. If Chelsea do not put three goals past Madrid on Tuesday night, their season is over in the third week in April. So I’d say ’embarrassment’ barely begins to cover it.
We have had some brash, crass owners in English football over the years but Boehly is only a matter of months into his tenure and he is already giving them a run for their money. He took things to a new level last Wednesday when he told a television crew – before the first leg of the Champions League quarter-final with Real Madrid in Spain – that Chelsea were going to win 3-0.
You will have heard that already, I’m sure, but it bears repeating. He said the team languishing in 11th place in the Premier League, the team that can barely score a goal, the team which he forgot to buy a centre forward for, was going to crush the reigning champions of Europe, the 14-time winners of the competition, by three clear goals, in their own backyard. He said it twice. As if he had really thought about it. Chelsea lost 2-0.
The thought process involved in that is interesting. Why do it? To give the players a confidence boost? Doubtful, because the players probably wouldn’t have been watching. Nor would they have valued his opinion, frankly. So did he actually think Chelsea were going to win, let alone by three clear goals. Because if he did, he must be spectacularly ill-informed.
Not for the first time, he made himself look like a man intent on trumpeting his ignorance. He ought to go and spend more time with his hare-brained All Star Game idea for a friendly between North and South. It might be an abomination but at least it might distract him. It might stop him making even more of a mess of Chelsea.
Chelsea were outplayed as they were beaten 2-1 at home by high-flying Brighton on Saturday
Lampard is yet to win a match since taking charge of the Blues as caretaker manager
Chelsea now have the task of overturning their first-leg deficit against Real Madrid
So on Tuesday night, Lampard will walk into Stamford Bridge as interim manager for the second leg of the tie with Madrid, with a hospital pass from Boehly still glued to his right foot. He has inherited the same disjointed, incoherent, grotesquely bloated squad packed with semi-detached, semi-interested players that was chucked at Potter and, to his credit, he has made little attempt to disguise his dismay at the attitudes he has encountered since his arrival.
The same may well be said for others in the glut of incomings. In a good side with a clever recruitment policy, maybe they might have prospered. But in this mayhem? The odds are stacked against them. It is not their fault. It is the situation they were thrust into. If their attitude is poor, it is because they are being infected by the disorder around them.
What beggars belief is how a man as successful and able as Boehly can have turned his stewardship of Chelsea into such an unmitigated disaster. The lack of foresight, the lack of planning, is breathtaking. There are suggestions that Chelsea are now speaking to former Bayern Munich boss Julian Nagelsmann but why did they not have someone ready to appoint when Potter was sacked?
The same applies to Daniel Levy at Spurs and the spectacularly inept handling of the aftermath of Antonio Conte’s departure. These are decisions that could cost both London clubs tens of millions of pounds.
Contrast that with what happened at Brighton when Chelsea poached Potter. Brighton appointed Roberto de Zerbi a little over a week after Potter’s departure. De Zerbi was so well regarded within the game that when Brighton announced his capture, the news drew admiring nods. ‘Brighton; bastards,’ Craig Bellamy, the Burnley assistant boss, said when he heard.
There is no hint of that kind of foresight from Boehly. He sups from a cocktail of arrogance and ignorance and its effect is the chaos that is now engulfing him.
Boehly has shown no preparation in the wake of sacking head coach Graham Potter
Sport has done all it can to keep everyone safe… but there will always be some risk
The morning after Ayrton Senna was killed at Imola on the first day of May, 1994, I woke up in my room above a pizzeria in the Via Graziadei to the sound of my mobile phone ringing. I was a motor racing correspondent at another paper at the time and the phone call was from a radio station back in England. They wanted to talk about the events of a tragic weekend at the San Marino Grand Prix.
Roland Ratzenberger, the Simtek driver, had died in an accident the day before Senna’s fatal crash at Tamburello. The day before that, Rubens Barrichello had been lucky to escape with his life after his car flew through the air into barriers during the Friday qualifying session. The presenter at the other end of the phone line asked me what possible justification there could be for the continuance of Formula One in any civilised society.
After a weekend like that and at a moment like that, when one of the world’s most famous sportsmen had died, when sport was in shock, Brazil was in mourning, families were grieving, politicians were looking for quick answers and grand prix racing was being portrayed as a blood sport that sent young men out on to racetracks in motorised coffins, it was hard to come up with an answer that did not sound glib or fatuous or both.
When sport is invaded by death, the natural reaction is to say that sport is not worth it. It happened again at the weekend. Sport’s place in our society was thrown into sharper focus when protests by Animal Rising activists disrupted the build-up to the Grand National at Aintree and a horse, Hill Sixteen, was killed when it fell at the first fence. It was the third horse to be killed at this year’s meeting.
Brazilian driver Ayrton Senna passed away during the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix
The halo, a device in the cockpit to protect the driver’s head, was introduced to all F1 cars from 2018
But sometimes, out of tragedies in sport, vast improvements are made. Knowledge is power and knowledge is safety. F1 reacted to the deaths of Senna and Ratzenberger by redesigning circuits to make them safer.
The halo device now fitted to grand prix car cockpits has saved countless lives. Myriad improvements have already been made to fences in National Hunt racing and on the Grand National course, in particular. The events of the past few days show more changes are needed.
There is a difference, of course, in risks that we impose on animals and risks we willingly assume ourselves. But there will always be dangers in sport. It is about making the risk acceptable.
The power of sport, for so many of us, lies in freedom and release. It makes us feel more alive than the security of inactivity ever could.
Tennis ends boycott to put money first
There was something particularly dispiriting about the Women’s Tennis Association’s announcement that it would start staging tournaments again in China from September even though it has failed to force an investigation into the regime’s treatment of former world doubles number one, Peng Shuai.
Peng disappeared in November 2021 after alleging she had been forced into a sexual relationship with Zhang Gaoli, the country’s former vice-premier and, initially, the WTA took a principled stance, insisting tournaments would not take place there again until they had spoken to Peng independently.
China has refused to accede to the WTA’s demands and the WTA has decided that when you set Peng against profit, profit wins. ‘We have concluded we will never fully secure those goals,’ a WTA statement said, ‘and it will be our players and tournaments who ultimately will be paying an extraordinary price for their sacrifices.’ And so the WTA measures its sacrifice in dollars and leaves Peng to measure hers in the terror of forced isolation.
Still, as long as the prize fund measures up at the WTA Finals in Shenzhen in November, women’s tennis will monetise its conscience and look the other way.
The WTA have announced tennis will return to China after ending their boycott over concerns about the safety of Peng Shuai
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