Chelsea are unlikely to be the first club who spring to mind when scouring English football for examples of fan power.
At ownership level, they have helped the Premier League trend in the opposite direction, from Roman Abramovich’s takeover in 2003 heralding the arrival of true billionaire wealth, to the £2.5billion ($3.3bn at the current exchange rate) paid by the current owners to take over in 2022, the latest and loudest example of the growing influence of big American finance on the top division of English football.
But both regimes have been forced to reckon with an arrangement unique in the sport: Chelsea Pitch Owners (CPO), a supporters’ group which holds the freehold to the land on which Stamford Bridge, the club’s home stadium since they were founded in 1905, sits.
The creation of CPO is part of the bigger story of how Chelsea almost lost their ground, as detailed by The Athletic in 2020. For the uninitiated, here’s a brief summary: in 1992, at the end of a long, attritional battle with property developers who wanted to evict the club from a hugely valuable plot of land in south-west London, Chelsea’s chairman at the time, Ken Bates, and his lawyer Mark Taylor set out to devise a novel plan to ensure it could never happen again.
Bates’ initial idea was to divide up the freehold for the pitch into 70,000 squares and sell them to supporters for £100 each, but that ran into problems with VAT (a tax on nearly all goods bought and sold within the European Union), land registry and corporation tax.
Bates and Taylor realised the same result could be achieved by establishing CPO as a company that owned the pitch and offering fans the chance to buy a share for £100; if they sold all the shares, it would finance the activation of a £5million buy option the club had negotiated to purchase the stadium freehold from West Register (Properties) Ltd, a subsidiary of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), as part of a 20-year lease of the ground agreed in December 1992.
The problem was that very few Chelsea supporters actually bought CPO shares. By 1997 — a quarter of the way into the 20-year lease agreement — only around 7,580 had been sold, leaving the company a long way short of the original freehold valuation of £5million. That freehold valuation had also more than doubled to £10.2m, owing to significant expansion to the footprint of Stamford Bridge in light of stadium changes made under Bates in the mid-1990s.
“It was actually a total failure,” Taylor tells The Athletic. “If it weren’t for the fact that Chelsea did a Eurobond issue in 1997 (raising £75million, then loaning CPO the funds to purchase the freehold on soft terms), CPO would have been wound up and the money distributed back to its shareholders in 2012 (when the original 20-year lease agreement expired).”
Instead, the position of CPO as a gatekeeper of Stamford Bridge’s future was secured. It acquired the freehold with the aid of a loan from Chelsea that can run for 199 years, and in return granted the club a 199-year lease to use the site at a peppercorn rent.
CPO is duty-bound to repay the loan, and 85 per cent of the nominal value of each new share sold is designated for this purpose. In the accounts filed with Companies House for the year ending July 31, 2023, CPO declared that it had repaid £149,069, leaving an outstanding balance of £8,066,862.
Almost 27,000 shares have been issued to around 15,000 unique shareholders. The list of those who have invested their own money includes former Chelsea players and managers such as John Terry, who is also CPO president, Frank Lampard, Dennis Wise, Jose Mourinho, Antonio Conte and Thomas Tuchel.
Yet regardless of who bought in and how many shares they purchased, Taylor wrote a key safeguard into CPO’s articles of association that ensured power over the fate of Stamford Bridge could not be co-opted by a small number of wealthy individuals: each share was worth one vote, but nobody could have more than 100 votes regardless of how many shares they bought.
He also included an even bigger sting in the tail to deter any future Chelsea owner possibly minded to move the club away from Stamford Bridge against the will of CPO. “They have a right to cancel the lease if the club stop playing there, and to demand the assignment of the name ‘Chelsea Football Club Limited’ to CPO,” he says.
Chelsea cannot call themselves Chelsea if based anywhere other than Stamford Bridge unless CPO shareholders give the green light — a remarkable veto power for any supporter group.
In 2011, when Abramovich tried to buy back the Stamford Bridge freehold from CPO to facilitate a move to a new stadium, Taylor was on the other side of the fence, advising the club on how best to deal with the organisation he had helped to create. “Right at the start, I said to (chairman) Bruce Buck, ‘You’ll never get people (onside) unless they know what’s going to happen’,” he recalls.
Abramovich’s proposal included no guarantees that he would limit his search to alternative stadium sites near Stamford Bridge. He also gave CPO members just 24 days from Chelsea’s formal announcement of their desire to buy back the freehold to the formal vote held on the issue at an emergency general meeting. Those 24 days were marred by the sudden sale of £200,000 worth of shares to 20 individuals, widely interpreted as an attempt to tilt the vote in the club’s favour.
Opposition mobilised under the slogan “Say No CPO”. Abramovich needed more than 75 per cent of votes cast in order to secure the freehold — a formidably high bar that Chelsea’s current ownership will also one day need to clear to ratify their chosen stadium plan. In the event, just 300 votes controlled by shareholders at the meeting were required in the ‘no’ column to ensure he fell short. The Russian billionaire ended up with only 61.6 per cent on his side.
This rare defeat forced Abramovich to reassess his options, eventually alighting on the grand “cathedral of football” redevelopment of the ground that he paused indefinitely in 2018. It also soured relations between Chelsea and CPO for several years, and fermented the view in the eyes of some that a relatively small number of supporters had blocked the club’s best route to a shiny new stadium.
A lot has changed since then — not least CPO itself, which now has shareholders in more than 80 countries, including Kazakhstan, Guatemala, South Korea and Venezuela. Shares can be purchased through Chelsea’s official website.
In 2018, new ‘B’ shares were issued at the cheaper price of £25 in an attempt to attract a younger demographic, but were withdrawn in 2021 after failing to spark an uptick in sales. Those shares afford one vote, while the traditional ‘A’ shares are now worth four votes each, and the limit of votes any single shareholder can amass has been raised from 100 to 400 accordingly.
Wounds from the acrimonious 2011 vote healed considerably in the final years of the Abramovich era and, acting on behalf of new owners Clearlake Capital and Todd Boehly, club president and chief operating officer Jason Gannon has made an early effort to build closer ties with CPO.
“We feel we’re in a good place with the senior management team, we feel they are being positive and it’s a good relationship,” CPO chair Chris Isitt tells The Athletic.
CPO’s focus now is on building its profile online, raising awareness among Chelsea’s global fanbase that they can have a direct say on what happens to Stamford Bridge. Two new directors with knowledge of social media and digital marketing were added to the board in March this year.
It helps their cause when Chelsea supporters at large feel uncertain about the club’s direction. “When the club was up for sale, we sold the equivalent of five years’ worth of shares in six months,” Isitt says.
There is also the knowledge that whoever emerges from Chelsea’s ownership power struggle will soon be looking to push on with their own stadium project. Any plan that involves the team moving, temporarily or permanently, from Stamford Bridge will require CPO approval — a reality that concerns some supporters who fear the club being left behind by their domestic and European rivals if such a proposal is blocked.
Nobody in Chelsea’s current ownership group enjoys anything like the goodwill Abramovich was afforded by fans in 2011, so how can they hope to succeed with CPO where he failed? Presenting a clear, specific plan and communicating it in a manner that does not come across as dismissive or adversarial would be a positive start.
Beyond that, expecting more than 75 per cent of CPO shareholders to effectively vote their organisation out of existence seems fanciful; to even stand a chance of passing, any proposal would likely need to include the transferral of the CPO arrangement to the new stadium, whether it be a revamped or rebuilt Stamford Bridge or a new stadium on the former Earls Court Exhibition Centre site less than a mile away.
This would allow CPO to continue to safeguard Chelsea’s home against non-football interests well into the future. It was also another condition Abramovich was unwilling to countenance 13 years ago. “The whole point of him doing what he was doing was control, and if he’d agreed to that, he would just be transferring one restriction for another,” Taylor says. “He wasn’t prepared to concede on that at all.”
More than two years after Abramovich was compelled to sell Chelsea following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, supporters are still waiting for Clearlake or Boehly to communicate a stadium plan.
When they finally do, the unique presence and nature of CPO means some of those supporters will have a significant say in whether that proposal ever comes to pass.
(Top photo: Ryan Pierse via Getty Images)
