Chelsea’s new £40m sponsor has reassured anxious supporters that big-spending owner Todd Boehly plans to secure success for decades to come.
Charlie Ebersol, boss of the Blues’ new shirt sponsor Infinite Athlete, has worked closely with Boehly since he bought out Roman Abramovich last summer.
Boehly and fellow owners of Chelsea buyers Clearlake Capital have been criticised for seemingly attempting a quick-fix £1bn spending spree since taking over in 2022.
The turnover in players has been dramatic, but Ebersol, a serial entrepreneur himself, has seen a similar pattern up close before and believes Chelsea are safe.
He explained: “Take when Todd bought the Los Angeles Dodgers in professional baseball in 2012. The Dodgers had atrophied to the point of not being able to do anything. Now they’re perennial playoff contenders. They’re constantly in the conversation for the World Series.
“He’s not looking at three, six, nine-month increments [at Chelsea], he’s looking at decades of ownership. I’ve always appreciated that about him.”
Boehly was quick to contact Ebersol, also a renowned television and film producer in America, to tap into his company’s AI tech and media expertise as a way of boosting Chelsea’s performance on and off the pitch immediately after buying the club.
Ebersol added: “It was a very easy decision to choose Chelsea.
“Look at the investment they’ve made in the academies, the type of investment they’ve made in scouting, the type of investment they’ve made an understanding of value players – it’s remarkable.
“They went from just about the oldest team in the Premier League to the youngest. If you look at their expected points in every match, they are the only team in the entire Premier League who has had a higher expected points in every match.”
The link-up between the two Americans with successful track records in US sport, now finding their way in football, has resulted in Chelsea taking on the sports technology and media products before the recent massive shirt sponsorship deal.
Infinite Athlete was born of the marriage between Ebersol and his partners’ other companies Tempus Ex- Machina and Biocore.
The Premier League investigated relationships with Clearlake and a number of fellow American Premier League owners before approving the Infinite Athlete deal.
Asked why Premier League rivals would back a company working so closely with Chelsea, Ebersol countered: “Well, I think making money is probably their primary goal as investors in my company.
“We worked really hard to have investors who are not only the top private equity and venture firms in the world, of which a number of them own Premier League teams, NBA teams and NFL teams.
“When people were saying derogatory stuff about the company, I was entertained. We’re a privately held company that has never published any numbers. The only leak that’s ever come out is that we’ve raised hundreds of millions of dollars from all these huge funds.
“The Premier League is probably one of the only, if not the only, third party entities that got to do an autopsy of our business. We could say ‘these are all of our investors, you can talk to all of them, these are all of our partners, you can talk to them, and learn about what we’re actually doing.’
“Someone was saying there’s a challenge with the investment because there’s an investment from Clearlake. And I was like, ‘but there’s also larger investments, from all these other Premier League owners’.
“Have you ever in your life heard of an owner of another team trying to help their opponents? That would be the weirdest thing. To the Premier League’s credit, they took the time to interview those people and understand the process and what we’re doing.
“I’m not terribly upset about the fact that it allowed me to have six weeks of basically free press, with many people talking about Infinite Athlete.”
Their deal with Chelsea does not preclude rivals from investing and adopting their technology, as Ebersol further outlined.
“We’re currently negotiating with close to a majority of the Premier League clubs to sign deals to use our technology,” he revealed.
The relentlessly enthusiastic Ebersol is in London this week to see his company’s name on Chelsea’s shirts in person for the first time in a competitive match when they clash with Arsenal on Saturday.
“I can’t wait to experience the atmosphere”, he concluded. “I have heard some people calling us a lucky charm. Who knows, but the women won wearing our name on the shirts for the first time against Tottenham and are unbeaten since. Poch’s men won at Fulham the following day and then beat Burnley. Things are heading in the right direction.”
