Clearlake co-owner Jose Feliciano says that Chelsea’s business model is “sustainable” despite UEFA’s recent revelation that the club lost a British-record £355m last season.
Feliciano is co-founder and managing partner of Clearlake Capital, the firm also headed up by Behdad Eghbali that bought just over 60 per cent of Chelsea in 2022, with a second group of investors led by Todd Boehly acquiring the remaining equity in a £2.5bn deal.
Since the takeover, BlueCo – the consortium’s umbrella company, which also owns Chelsea’s sister club Strasbourg – has committed around £5.15bn in capital to the project.
So far, that investment has yielded the Europa Conference League and Club World Cup, as well as a return to the Champions League this season, where Liam Rosenior’s side face reigning champions Paris Saint-Germain in the round-of-16 first leg on Wednesday.
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A sufficient return? We’ll leave it to Chelsea fans to decide.
One thing is certain, however. BlueCo’s private equity-inspired approach to running a Premier League heavyweight has been straight from the Mark Zuckerberg playbook: move fast, break things.
They have taken the multi-club player trading system pioneered by the Red Bull network and Manchester City’s City Football Group to new extremes; the Stamford Bridge vs Earl’s Court debate has caused ruptures in the boardroom; and Chelsea’s bombastic recruitment and retention model has landed them with a UEFA-imposed financial plan, with significant limits on net spending until at least 2028-29.
Boehly and Eghbali have been the public faces of the BlueCo regime over the last three-and-a-half years, but the ownership encompasses dozens – if not hundreds – of other investors.
Feliciano is among a cohort of billionaires who have a more modest public profile. His name delivers fewer Chelsea-related Google hits and column inches, but he is every bit as powerful in SW6 as Boehly or Eghbali.
And after UEFA’s European Club Finance and Investment Landscape report revealed Chelsea’s £355m loss in 2024-25, he has become the first major shareholder to comment.
Speaking at the Bloomberg Invest 2026 conference when asked about the deficit, which Chelsea have since briefed is partly explained by non-cash accountancy quirks such as player value write-offs, Feliciano said: “The reality is that we have put in place a much more sustainable system in terms of players and development which is, I think, yielding results right now.”
As well as emphasising BlueCo’s role as stewards of a community asset, Feliciano said: “We intend to win the Premier League some day soon.”
But how sustainable is a business that loses £200m-plus at the operating level every season?
There’s no doubt that BlueCo can afford to continue underwriting the losses. The combined net worth of the shareholders we actually know about is greater than the most expensive thing ever built, the International Space Station. But as a private equity firm, Clearlake’s primary duty is to their limited partners, who will one day demand a return on their investment.
Broadly speaking, there are two ways to get there. They can either A) make the club so profitable that the shareholders can take regular, chunky dividends or B) sell Chelsea for more than the £5.15bn they have invested so far. In private equity, the latter model – which is known as ‘capital appreciation’, in the biz – is far more likely. And private equity demands huge returns which outpace public markets, not a break-even or a few measly million.
A fair chunk of that £5.15bn is debt, which means the owners have some room for manoeuvre with what they can frame to their backers as ‘profit’. But either way, as long as the club continues to lose £200m-plus year in, year out, the timeline for a positive return for BlueCo will continue to stretch.
“Setting Chelsea’s creative accounting to one side, there has been a significant contribution from the owners,” says University of Liverpool football finance lecturer Kieran Maguire, speaking exclusively to The Chelsea Chronicle about Feliciano’s ‘sustainable’ claim.
“The club, however, will see this as an investment. It’s cash out, inventory in. They are investing in inventory, i.e., players, which can appreciate in value if they do their calculations correctly.
Interior view of Chelsea's Stamford Bridge dressing room with player shirts visible
Photo by Darren Walsh/Chelsea FC via Getty Images
“They are buying young players on long contracts and have gone down this interesting, hedge fund-style route of acquiring undervalued assets, nurturing them and trading them for a profit.
“This is a necessity at Chelsea because they are operating in a smaller stadium and therefore have a significant disadvantage in terms of matchday income.
“They have addressed that very successfully. They are ahead of their peer group by about £300m when it comes to player trading in recent seasons.
“The Chelsea brand enhances player value. If you look at their accounting policies, they value the squad as a whole with the exception of those for whom they are actively seeking a sale, which speaks to the fact that they see player trading as a whole new revenue stream.”
Because of the UEFA settlement, Chelsea are obliged to pare back their net spending in the transfer and wage markets over the next few seasons.
The logic from BlueCo appears to be that after building a large base of young players with appreciable value on long-term, heavily incentivised contracts that protect the club if they fall out of the Champions League, they can now afford to move to a more self-sufficient model.
It’s a high-tariff play, however, and one which many experts canvassed by The Chelsea Chronicle argue is at odds with football’s culture. Century-old traditions don’t disappear overnight. It will require a discipline with squad rotation in order to maintain player value, for example, which Enzo Maresca wasn’t able to stomach.
Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali Co-Owners of Chelsea, applaud
Photo by Mike Hewitt/Getty Images
There are umpteen examples of private equity and football being oil and water in this way. Players are humans, and will agents continue to advise them to move to Chelsea if it means they are seen primarily as commodities whose careers and chance of glory on the pitch can be sacrificed on the altar of profit at a moment’s notice?
Raheem Sterling and other ‘bomb squad’ inductees’ testimony could be damning here, while fans faced with booming ticket prices might also feel alienated by relentless player churn, especially when academy talent is the first to be put up for sale. That’s before we get to the European Court of Justice’s landmark ruling in the case of former Blue Lassana Diarra that has forced FIFA to change several key components of its transfer rules. Legal experts say the revisions could make it much easier for players to break their contracts without crippling financial penalties.
Commercially, meanwhile, the prolonged absence of a long-term front-of-shirt sponsor can be read as either BlueCo having the patience to wait for the right deal or naivety about the value of the inventory they are selling. The near-universal consensus among experts is that it is the latter.
A new stadium could deliver nine figures of extra revenue annually too, yes, but it will come with a debt burden at a time when stubbornly high interest rates mean a return on investment takes longer to realise. And we’re potentially years away from the owners coalescing on a plan for Stamford Bridge’s future anyway.
An aerial view of Chelsea's Stamford Bridge
Photo by Ryan Pierse/Getty Images
There is then the wider problem of competition. Football is addicted to external investment in order to compete on the pitch in a market where sovereign wealth, dream-chasing billionaires and the insatiable demands of supporters have inflated the transfer and wage markets.
Even if Chelsea, whose executives have spoken of targeting £1bn in annual revenue in the near future, can supersize their income, they need to stop all of that money immediately flowing out again while simultaneously competing on the pitch.
Alan Sugar, former owner of Tottenham, once likened football’s revenue to ‘prune juice’. It’s in one end, out of the other. Even the new regulations coming into force across the game are unlikely to materially change that dynamic any time soon.
The Premier League’s new Squad Cost Ratio (SCR) rules will be introduced next season and limit spending on players, wages and agents’ fees to 85 per cent of turnover plus a three year average of player sale profits. That rule change was at least partly informed by Chelsea short-circuiting the existing PSR system by selling property assets and the women’s team to themselves to book artificial profits.
SCR could theoretically taper competition from below, but not from Chelsea’s peers. The rest of the ‘Big Six’ all earn more than Chelsea and can therefore spend more over the long term under the Premier League’s rules and UEFA’s equivalent system, which caps spending at 70 per cent.
There are dozens of areas we haven’t explored here. One could write a thesis about the ways football’s new wave of private equity owners think the game is inefficiently monetised – eliminating piracy and direct-to-consumer streaming are the most topical at present, but there are more quixotic ideas about immersive technology at global scale, clubs as loss leaders for real estate projects and shrinking the calendar to accommodate smaller, less expensive squads too.
And yet, whichever way you look at it, it will be a tall order for Chelsea’s owners to exit at a profit, and certainly not in the oft-cited private equity timeline of five to 10 years.
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Chelsea to debut new front-of-shirt sponsor IFS.ai against Burnley in the Premier League
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Perhaps, to borrow a phrase often used by apologists for Chelsea’s owners on social media, BlueCo really are playing 4D chess. Maybe they can see around corners and are the first owners to figure out how to make the numbers add up in elite football’s dysfunctional financial ecosystem. Maybe they’ve chosen the red pill while the rest of us have swallowed the blue.
If so, it will be the high watermark in football club ownership and will change the game – for better or for worse – forever. If not, someone at Clearlake’s Santa Monica offices will find another place to put their money to work while bedrock Chelsea fans count the cost.
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