On 18 April, Chelsea face Manchester United at Stamford Bridge. Fans of Racing Club de Strasbourg are flying to London to march alongside Chelsea supporters, because they share the same problem and the same ownership. This week, Chelsea published their financial statements, and what those numbers reveal about the future of both clubs is something every supporter deserves to understand, because most of what is being written about them is missing the point entirely.
What Bates and Abramovich built
In the early 1990s, Ken Bates established the Chelsea Pitch Owners (CPO), a supporters’ trust that holds the freehold of the Stamford Bridge pitch and the rights to the Chelsea name. He did it to protect the ground from property developers, but what he created was something far more enduring. Without CPO approval, there is no new stadium on that site, and that power sits with supporters, not owners. This has never mattered more than it does right now.
When Roman Abramovich bought the club in 2003, he inherited that structure and worked within it. Over 19 years, he transformed Chelsea from a club that nearly ceased to exist into one of the most decorated in the world. Fans who lived through the Bates and Abramovich eras do not need reminding of what serious ownership looks like compared to what we are watching now. We are not marching out of ingratitude. We are marching because we have seen the best and we can see what is being done to our clubs.
Roman’s final gift to supporters
When Abramovich was forced to sell Chelsea, he did not simply hand the club debt free to the highest bidder and walk away. He forced the buyers to make a legally binding commitment of £1.7bn to the club, ring-fenced specifically for the stadium, the academy and the women’s team.
This is disclosed in the 2023 accounts of 22 Holdco Limited, the company that owns both Chelsea and Strasbourg, filed at Companies House and available for anyone to read. The stadium he wanted built, the academy that produces future generations, and the women’s team were all written into the purchase agreement as a binding obligation for whoever bought the club.
Here is how Blueco actually funded that commitment:
| Source of funds | £m |
| Ares PIK private credit | 500 |
| JP Morgan / Bank of American syndicated loan | 750 |
| Owners’ equity | 450 |
| Total | 1,700 |
To complete the funding of the commitment, Blueco put in only £450m of their own equity. The remaining £1.25bn was borrowed from institutional investors who expect to be repaid on time. The stadium remains unbuilt, and the debt is still on the balance sheet. It is growing every month with only interest being paid to JPM/BOA, while the remainder is compounding at double-digit interest rates.
The scale of the losses
Chelsea FC recorded a pre-tax loss of £262.4m for 2024/25, the largest single year loss in the entire history of English football. That number is alarming enough on its own, but it is only part of the story.
The parent company that owns both Chelsea and Strasbourg and carries all of the debt is 22 Holdco Limited. At that level, the pre-tax loss for the same period is £700.8m. The accumulated losses since Blueco took over now stand at £1.788bn. In three years, Blueco has lost almost exactly the same amount Abramovich required them to invest in the club’s future.
Strasbourg supporters will recognise this story. Their club recorded a net loss of €78.3m in 2024/25, the worst in the club’s history. Two clubs, one owner, the same outcome of record-breaking losses.
The project is failing
This is the part of the story that most financial journalists are not writing, and it is the part that matters most to supporters of both clubs. There are three distinct and concurrent threats to the future of Chelsea and Strasbourg, and all three are running simultaneously.
1. The cash burn
Based on the 22 Holdco accounts, the group is losing approximately £58m every single month. That is not a rounding error or a one-off bad year. Chelsea FC have recorded an operating loss above £200m for three consecutive seasons. The equity base at 22 Holdco currently stands at £1.125bn. At the current rate of losses, and with no committed capital remaining from any source, that equity is gone within two years without further injections.
The Clearlake funds that bought Chelsea are closed and they cannot make further cash calls to their investors. The owners have deployed their full £450m contribution. There is nothing left to inject.
2. The debt wall
The £755m of debt owed to JPMorgan and Bank of America is due in July 2027; just 15 months away. The group had £129m of cash on its balance sheet as of June 2025. It cannot repay that debt from its own resources. It needs either a refinancing on terms that will be considerably worse than those available in 2022, or a forced asset sale; neither is disclosed.
The Ares PIK debt of £500m sits behind the bank debt and compounds silently until 2033, growing larger every year it goes unpaid. The Federal Reserve is already asking US banks about their exposure to private credit of exactly this kind. JPMorgan and Bank of America are among those banks.
3. The model isn’t working
The sell-to-buy model was supposed to generate the cash to service the debt and cover the losses. Chelsea generated a reported £300m from player sales in the summer of 2025, yet only £32m of that translated into accounting profit at Chelsea FC level.
More fundamentally, when you look at the cash Chelsea have spent buying players against the cash received from selling them, the return on investment is negative. They are buying high and selling low, and the engine that was supposed to keep the whole structure running is not producing what the structure needs to survive.
What happens when Ares don’t get paid?
Supporters do not need to imagine what happens when this structure breaks down. Ares, the same private credit fund that holds £500m of debt secured against Chelsea and Strasbourg, has just repossessed Olympique Lyonnais after its owner John Textor could not meet his obligations. Textor lost control of the club to its creditors. Lyon now belongs to Ares.
The security Ares holds over Chelsea and Strasbourg is the same in nature. It covers the shares in both clubs, the bank accounts and every asset the group holds. The mechanism that took Lyon from its owner is sitting on Chelsea’s balance sheet today.
What this means on the pitch
With no capital left to deploy, Chelsea can only buy players by selling them first, and that is not a transfer strategy so much as a hard constraint imposed by a balance sheet that was broken from the moment the acquisition was structured. Chelsea are currently 6th in the Premier League, while Strasbourg are 8th in Ligue 1. Blueco’s response to having no money has been to strip Strasbourg of their best players to subsidise Chelsea’s needs and to cycle through young players who have not yet proved themselves at the highest level.
Supporters only need to look at Tottenham Hotspur to understand where this road leads. A club that prioritised financial returns over the health of the squad, allowed things to deteriorate year after year, and is now staring at relegation from the Premier League. That is a real-time picture of what happens when financial mismanagement goes unchallenged long enough, and it is happening to a club that was finishing above Chelsea in the table not long ago.
Our leverage
The CPO gives supporters a legally-enforceable say over any redevelopment of Stamford Bridge. Blueco cannot build the stadium that Abramovich’s £1.7bn was meant to fund without CPO co-operation, and that power belongs to the fans of this club. Ken Bates built it into the fabric of Chelsea for exactly the kind of moment we are now in.
The protest on 18 April is about making our message visible to the owners, to the regulators and to the football world. It is about fans of Chelsea and Strasbourg standing together and making clear they understand exactly what is being done to their clubs and they will not accept it quietly.
Come and march with us
We are not marching because we hate our clubs. We are marching because we love them and we can see what is being done to them by people who clearly do not share that love. The numbers are now public. The evidence is in the accounts. Abramovich protected the future of this club on his way out the door, and that protection is being dismantled season by season by owners who have spent close to four years proving they are not worthy custodians of both clubs.
Come and march with us on this Saturday, because this is exactly the moment where we need to be heard.
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