Chelsea fans grapple with the art of omission by Boehly’s trainee regime | Chelsea

“The one thing I’ve learned about the British press is they exaggerate a lot and leave stuff out.” The words of Todd Boehly there, the jaw-droppingly handsome Chelsea chair whose name was being sung so passionately by fans outside Stamford Bridge last week. “We want Boehly ! We want Boehly !” they sang in their thousands, alongside a sea of banners bearing the words “BOEHLY ” and “CLEARLAKE & BLUECO ”.

Clearly Chelsea fans cannot get enough of their hybrid-leadership apparat, and frankly who can blame them when their leaders are in this vein of form? Perhaps, as a functional human with a life, you missed Boehly’s appearance at the Financial Times Business of Football Summit on Thursday, where he treated the audience to a little of the privileged wisdom he has accumulated during his 33 months in the game.

“Three years isn’t a lot of time,” he said, although clearly more than enough for the three permanent managers discarded in that period. “If you look at contracts in football, a seven-year contract is really a five-year contract,” he observed with a flash of insight that probably would feel startling to anyone who hadn’t been following football before 2022. Elsewhere, he explained away Chelsea’s lack of options up front with the truism that “you can’t get a striker from the grocery store”. Say what you like about the London School of Economics, Citibank and Credit Suisse: they do not breed fools.

For all this, Chelsea’s fans – at least those who turned out last Tuesday before the visit of Southampton – remain bafflingly lacking in gratitude towards a regime that has bestowed them zero trophies, no Champions League qualification, one League Cup final, more than £1bn spent on transfers, one ownership feud and the first ticket price rises in 13 years. Guys: do you not realise Todd and Behdad Eghbali have been going on a learning journey here? Do you not realise how hard it is to spend £1bn in an era of profit and sustainability rules?

And obviously it is worth saying this disgruntlement is in part tied to performances on the pitch, a rotten post-Christmas run that has put Enzo Maresca’s side out of the title race and left them wondering what purpose, exactly, this juddering investment vehicle is meant to serve. Win the Conference League, sign well in the summer, assemble an early tilt at the 2025-26 title, and inevitably the protests will subside.

If anything, though, this only underlines the fragility of the contract between ownership and fanbase. A club that is only ever six bad results away from open revolt is not – by the most generous definition – a healthy or functional club. Rather, what appears to have taken hold here is a kind of endemic sickness, a severe case of Long Chelsea, a disconnect and a division that feels permanent, or at least unsustainable.

These are issues that are not strictly limited to Chelsea. Spurs fans, Reading fans and Sheffield Wednesday fans have all taken to the streets in the past few weeks to protest against their boards. Indeed, if you extend the timeline to the past few years, the vast majority of English league clubs have probably seen some kind of direct action against their ownership. This is, by any measure, an era of unprecedented unrest and revulsion within English football, and while the triggers and causes may vary there is a common thread running through all of it.

Ironically, you could glimpse this in Boehly’s glib response to the Chelsea protests. “The sooner you learn you won’t keep all the people happy all the time, that brings freedom. So you don’t have to live with their words. People say different things, change their minds all the time. You can’t turn left and then right every three minutes.” Which, if nothing else, is pretty rich coming from the guy who signed Raheem Sterling and Kalidou Koulibaly before pivoting abruptly to a strategy of signing every imaginable teenager in world football.

But Boehly’s words are still instructive, largely because of his capricious habit of saying out loud the part that most owners are happy to keep quiet. Namely, that the fans are essentially the bottom-feeders of the enterprise, with the implication that anyone disgruntled at the direction of travel is simply a paying customer welcome to take their business anywhere else. Why bother listening to them when you could simply hire experts like Paul Winstanley and Laurence Stewart, or anyone wearing a Brighton tracksuit?

Perhaps the only point at which Boehly spoke with anything approaching genuine feeling was when he started talking about the power of Premier League football as a streaming product, an infinite scroll of Netflix content, like those soap dispensers you find in budget hotels that claim to be hand wash, body wash, shampoo and conditioner all in one.

Boehly has made no secret of his intention to harness the power of Chelsea’s global fanbase, to turn them into a fungible digital product that just so happens to play in west London sometimes. Where does the match-going fan sit in this vision? To what extent is Chelsea still a local club, a community good? Only as a slogan to put on a T-shirt, a nice yarn to spin the tourists, an adornment to the productbut never the product itself.

Of course the Chelsea protesters relinquished a lot of goodwill among rival fans when they started singing for the return of Roman Abramovich. But in wild and wayward times the silent strongman – be it the oligarch or the sovereign wealth fund – will always carry a powerful nostalgic appeal, an invocation of simpler, more patriarchal times. It is up to the rest of football to provide a more compelling vision of ownership, one in which everyone has a stake, in which fans have genuine ownership of their club, a say in decisions, a seat at the table.

Until this happens, fans will remain the last puppy at the trough: simply another lever to pull, simply another resource to be squeezed, an asset to be sweated for the enrichment of others. “You realise how important the fans are to the team,” Boehly said last week. Perhaps, on reflection, the British press are not the only ones with a talent for omission.