Chelsea are among the clubs who are seeking a revolution in the way the Premier League is consumed around the world.
Chelsea have been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Premier League’s relationship with Sky Sports. Since 2010, they’ve earned almost £3bn in media income, the majority of which came from domestic TV.
Even in abysmal seasons like the one that came to an end with defeat at Sunderland on Sunday, Chelsea will likely earn around £165m from the Premier League’s UK and international media deals, as well as the money it makes and distributes from central sponsorship agreements.
The deal with Sky Sports and TNT Sports is worth £6.7bn in the current four-year cycle, which began in 2025-26. The overseas rights are now worth even more, and it is that fact that has enticed Todd Boehly, Behdad Eghbali and the rest of the BlueCo clan to commit nearly £5bn to Chelsea since their 2022 takeover.
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Players of Chelsea form a huddle
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There will be no European football next season for Xabi Alonso, but the Premier League’s globality means that Chelsea can still command premium prices from sponsors. Just look at the club’s commercial income compared to, say, Inter Milan, who generated about £130m from sponsorship and merchandise compared to Chelsea’s £200m last season – and the Blues did that whilst missing a front-of-shirt sponsor worth in the region of £60m.
The Premier League’s TV deal and the approach it took to sell itself to the world all the way back in 1992 is the holy grail for football finance people. And yet, some club owners are seemingly hell-bent on shaking things up.
Earlier this year, The Chelsea Chronicle was in attendance for the Financial Times Business of Football Summit, where Premier League CEO Richard Masters announced the launch of Premier League +, a new direct-to-consumer streaming service in Singapore.
The service has been widely billed as a trial run for a global rollout of a Netflix-style, in-house Premier League platform, albeit one which is likely many years away. And as it happens, Chelsea co-owner Boehly is among the executives who have predicted that this is the direction of travel for some time.
Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali walk across the pitch at Stamford Bridge
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Last week, Premier League + announced its price list, with the service costing about £25 on the monthly plan which will cover all 380 matches in a season.
Based on that price, the Premier League would need to sell about 40 million memberships to match the value of its current TV deals, before costs. Granted, that’s a very crude calculation, but it does provide a flavour of the task at hand if the so-called ‘Premflix’ model is to be a genuine success.
So why might Boehly and his peers in Premier League boardrooms be prepared to take on the risk?
“There’s a lot of risk associated with this model,” says University of Liverpool football finance lecturer Kieran Maguire, speaking exclusively to The Chelsea Chronicle
“You sign players on contracts with a certainty that you know what you’re paying them for the next four, five or, in the case of Chelsea, eight or nine years. Therefore, you want certainty in terms of revenue streams and you budget accordingly. The danger is that, let’s say Chelsea have a poor season on the pitch and they are selling tickets on a pay-per-view basis, once you get to February and the club is 10th or 11th in the Premier League, who is going to pay the match fee if they are playing a small club like Crystal Palace?
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“So, it would need to be done at Premier League level, not club level. That’s the big battle. There is no doubt that Chelsea and the other large brands in the Premier League want to end the current deal – they want a much bigger slice of the cake for themselves. That will have huge ramifications for competitive balance, but Todd Boehly isn’t interested in competitive balance.
“All Todd Boehly is interested in is trying to extricate himself and Behdad Eghbali from the financial disaster that Chelsea has been to date. A direct-to-consumer streaming model might be one way to achieve that, but how you do so when the Premier League needs a two-thirds majority vote is a separate issue. There are a lot of complications here.”
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