Chelsea ownership: Clearlake takes full control as Todd Boehly sells up and exits

By Jack Shaw · London · Published: 08:05 BST

• Clearlake Capital has acquired full control of Chelsea after chairman Todd Boehly and director Mark Walter sold their stakes in the club, BBC Sport reports.
• Boehly, Walter and Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss each held a 12.8% stake, with Clearlake previously owning 61.5%. The club said Wyss “will remain an important stakeholder and partner in the ownership group”.
• Boehly leaves the chairmanship he has held since 2022, when the consortium bought Chelsea for £2.3bn from Roman Abramovich. He and Walter have also sold their shareholding in Ligue 1 partner club Strasbourg.

Chelsea’s ownership is no longer a partnership. Clearlake Capital — led by co-founders Behdad Eghbali and Jose E. Feliciano — now controls the club outright after buying out Todd Boehly and Mark Walter, and Boehly, the public face of the post-Abramovich era, is leaving his role as chairman.

How the Chelsea ownership split played out

This did not arrive out of nowhere. BBC Sport reported in August that Boehly and Walter were exploring a sale of their stakes, with multiple sources saying talks began inside the ownership group after a rift — first apparent in 2024 — led both sides to explore buying each other out. Clearlake won that standoff. The consortium had bought the club in 2022 after Abramovich was sanctioned by the UK government over alleged links to Russian president Vladimir Putin, something he has denied.

Boehly, who also co-owns baseball franchise the Los Angeles Dodgers, called it an “honour” to serve as chairman and said he was “confident that Chelsea is well positioned for continued success under Clearlake’s leadership”. The full running timeline is tracked across the network at JOE Sport.

The expert angle: one owner, and nowhere left to hide

The most important thing about this deal is not who left. It is that Chelsea have stopped being run by committee. For four years the club’s defining feature was a shared control structure in which a private equity house held the majority and a group of high-profile co-owners held the microphone. Every eye-catching decision could be claimed by somebody and disowned by somebody else. That ambiguity is gone: Eghbali and Feliciano now own the outcome, good or bad.

The record they inherit in full is genuinely split. Since 2022, Chelsea’s highest Premier League finish is fourth, in 2024-25 — a modest return on the money. In that same season they won the Uefa Conference League and the Fifa Club World Cup, so the cabinet is not bare. Between those poles sits the thing everyone argues about: a remarkably high turnover of players, built on signing young talent on long-term contracts. That model was always a Clearlake signature rather than a Boehly one, which is why this reads less like a change of direction than a removal of the brakes — and why the valuations will keep making headlines, as they did when Chelsea held out for £120m for Enzo Fernandez.

Wrap-up

Boehly was the loudest owner in English football and, for long stretches, the most mocked. Now the quiet money is in sole charge. So: is a single decisive owner exactly what Chelsea have been missing — or have they lost the only person willing to answer for it in public?

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