Chelsea appoint three new executives, depose ‘President of Business’ Tom Glick

At the start of the summer, Chelsea appointed a new CEO in Chris Jurasek, a company man from Clearlake Financial, whose first order of business and main focus was to get our sponsorship situation sorted out. That took a bit longer than expected, but we did eventually get a deal agreed with Infinite Athlete — and even get it past Premier League slow-as-molasses approval, with the IA logo appearing, at long last, on the Chelsea shirts for the first time earlier this week, in our 2-0 win over Fulham.

With that business done, Jurasek has evidently turned his attention to shaping up the rest of the back-of-house, starting with Tom Glick. We had wondered what would become of Glick, the previous de facto CEO, and it turns out rather unsurprisingly that he was indeed just made redundant. Farewell, “President of Business”, or whatever it was that you did ... or didn’t do.

As relayed by the Daily Mail from a Chelsea statement sent out to inboxes that did not include mine, we also appointed a new Chief Financial Officer in Adriel Lares, who comes from a tech background, having served as CFO at the likes of Stash (micro-investing), Fastly, and Lookout (both in cloud computing). He’s also a founding partner of Memento Mori winery in Napa, who make ridiculously expensive wine.

In addition, we have confirmed earlier rumors that AC Milan sponsorship director Casper Stylsvig will be joining us next month as “Chief Revenue Officer”.

But perhaps the most important appointment is that of Jason Gannon, whose official title is Chief Operating Officer. He is “expected to lead the way on the club’s stadium redevelopment plans”. It’s unclear if that will be in conjunction with or instead of Jonathan Goldstein, who’s part of the ownership group and sits on the Chelsea Board.

Gannon’s biggest claim to fame is as Managing Director of SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, the award-winning and fairly unique semi-open-air stadium shared by NFL teams LA Rams and LA Chargers (as well as a host venue for the 2026 World Cup and 2028 Summer Olympics), starting all the way at its groundbreaking in 2016. Gannon probably didn’t have any input on the actual design of the stadium (which was done by the firm HKS), but he has the experience to manage such a project for us. (Not that it’s relevant, but HKS designed the gorgeous Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, and less impressively, had once also proposed this thing as an Anfield rebuild for Liverpool.)

Photo by Qian Weizhong/VCG via Getty Images