Todd Boehly’s vision for Chelsea? Glossy spectacle and ruthless profit

A billionaire completes a spectacular takeover of one of the world’s most cherished sporting institutions and immediately goes on a lavish, jawbone-loosening spending spree. New signings pile up like presents under the Christmas tree. Debts spiral into the hundreds of millions, piquing the ire and envy of their rivals. But on its own terms, it works: success is duly bought, the people placated, the sport gently bent to its will.

This is the story of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team under Todd Boehly and his business partners and, for all the sense of cataclysm and upheaval surrounding Chelsea of late, what is most striking of all is what hasn’t changed. Results on the pitch have largely been maintained: the same players and the same coach playing roughly the same level of football in front of roughly the same people. Third place and Champions League football next season were secured. And now one ambitious tycoon has simply been replaced by another.

It’s easy to forget, amid all the familiar mood music, the unspeakable strangeness of the events that have led us to this point. The systematic murder of the Ukrainian people has largely been forgotten, or at the very least internalised, by the game at large. Shall we talk about the lessons football can learn from its indulgence of a man accused by the UK government of having “the blood of the Ukrainian people on his hands”? Or shall we talk about what this all means for Romelu Lukaku’s future? Football has long had an unmatched talent for extracting the serious from the trivial, and the last few weeks have proven that the reverse is perhaps also true.

We have seen this, too, in some of the fawning early press coverage of Boehly’s arrival in London. Look, he stopped to