Last week saw Chelsea co-owner Todd Boehly give an update as to the current state of play with the club’s plans for a new stadium.
As it turned out, the update from the billionaire businessman was hardly one that suggested that it was going to become a reality any time soon, with it being hinted that it may be 2042 before the Blues move into a new stadium.
Stamford Bridge has been Chelsea’s home since 1905, and while it has undergone plenty of renovations and facelifts since, including the building of hotels, its location has hamstrung the ability to increase the capacity much beyond the 40,173 that it currently sits at.
With the ownership group of Boehly and Clearlake Capital looking to keep the club in its locality, the huge cost of land and real estate in London means that it is an incredibly difficult task, but one that is vital when it comes to the club being able to keep pace with its main rivals when it comes to the revenue pillar of matchday income.
Speaking to Bloomberg at the Milken Institute Global Conference last week, Boehly, who said further talks about the stadium plan would commence at the end of the season, said: “It’s years in the making. When we originally bought the club we agreed initially that we had 15 or 20 years to figure this out but it is a big project in a really interesting city like London where there’s a lot of constituencies that have an opinion.
“Obviously the number one constituency for us is our fan base and what’s going to be the best for Chelsea.
“I think everyone recognises that a club as big as Chelsea should have a stadium that reflects the size of the club and ultimately that’s going to be a strategic advantage.”
Boehly will know only too well about how utilising stadia and making sure brick and mortar are maximised for clubs are vital for futureproofing revenues of clubs in the face of stagnating broadcast revenues that are likely to decline in the not too distant future. Many clubs see stadium revenue as key to reducing the reliance that has been seen on broadcast revenues up to this point.
Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester City and Tottenham Hotspur have all had either new stadia, redeveloped, or have plans for existing stadia to be revamped. Manchester United are planning a 100,000-seater stadium on land adjacent to Old Trafford, while Newcastle United, Aston Villa, Nottingham Forest and Leeds United all have major stadium plans in the pipeline.
Chelsea have the lowest capacity of the so-called ‘big six’ clubs. To compare to Spurs, the matchday revenue earned for the Blues over the course of a 38-game season is around £54 million, with the additional sums in the 2023/24 accounts of £80m coming from nine extra home games in the Carabao Cup and FA Cup. Spurs sits at around £5.6m, a difference of £2.7m per game, or £51.3m per Premier League campaign. If that lasted until 2042 it would be, based on the current figures of 19 Premier League games over the next 17 years, be a sum of around £872m less than what Spurs could achieve.
That is a lot of revenue opportunity to be missing out on, and revenue that can be fed directly into investing in the competitive element of the football club on the pitch.
Chelsea’s turnover for 2023/25 was £468.5m, with broadcast sitting at £163.1m. That meant that for the most recently reported financial year, the Blues’ broadcast revenue made up 34.8 per cent of total revenue, with commercial income at £225m helping to shoulder a significant amount of the burden.
That is by no means the worst in the Premier League and Chelsea’s significantly improved commercial performance, as well as potential for a Champions League return, not to mention the money that is on offer in the Club World Cup, means that the short-to-medium term picture doesn’t look too bad, although sales may well be needed on occasion and the club will need to continue the conveyor belt of talent from Cobham.
But not being able to make a new stadium a reality sooner means that Chelsea do run the risk of falling behind in a key revenue pillar that many clubs across Europe, including Real Madrid and Barcelona, believe is necessary to compete and sustain high revenues ahead of uncertain times.
What would be the strength of a new Chelsea stadium, being in London, one of the world’s most populous and popular cities, in one of the most sought after areas with excellent transport links, is also one of the major obstacles for the club when it comes to finding an appropriate site, at a cost that isn’t grotesquely overpriced and that can be financed at a lower rate of interest.
The plan would undoubtedly be a grand one. In the way that Spurs have bagged NFL regular season games and included an F1 Karting Experience track underneath the stadium, any new build in the nation’s capital would have to offer something unique, and something that can be monetised 365 days a year. It’s an enormous job, and Boehly’s timeframe means that Chelsea are at risk of falling behind their main silverware-chasing rivals when it comes to what many owners see as the most important deployment of capital to deal with the coming years.
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