Seb Coe was (and still is) part of Sir Martin Broughton’s unsuccessful bid for Chelsea Football Club — though they remain on standby should something go wrong with the preferred Boehly bid — but above all, he just wants what’s best for the club. He’s been a fan for a half a century after all, through thick and thin.
And while we appear to be making progress in figuring out the financial details of this transaction, concerns remain over various aspects that could threaten not only the short- but the long-term future of the club. These range from minor, such as being unable to sell new tickets to home games (or merchandising), to difficult, such as being under a transfer and contracts ban, to major, such as plus potentially saddling the club with debt that Abramovich just wanted to forgive and forget, to catastrophic, such as dragging this process out so long that we run into Premier League operational deadlines.
Unfortunately, much of this depends on the UK Government making reasonable choices and decisions, and soon, which is a scary proposition when any one politician’s involved, let alone a whole mob of them.
Lord Coe’s hoping for some common sense to prevail however.
“[These] decisions have to be made properly, there is a process and this is a one-off. You don’t see clubs being sold in these circumstances so Government will have to be really clear what it wants out of this. [...] At this moment the one thing I hope we end up with is a swift set of solutions to this.”
At the end of the day, we’re all just hoping that Chelsea emerge more or less unscathed.
“Fans like me want a resolution to this but they want to make sure the club lands in the right hands and that the club isn’t lumbered with debt for the next 50 years. [...] I joined Martin’s bid with one simple proposition — I’m a Chelsea fan of more than 50 years” he said. I was in the ground in 1967, I was born near the ground and still have a house there.
“For me it was always about the club having the best possible ownership, one that was recognising one very simple fact — that is you don’t really own a club, you’re the stewards of a community sports organisation.”
-Lord Coe; source: LBC Radio via Mirror
Well said, Seb.
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