Chelsea ‘are set to fetch the highest price for a sports team EVER at over £3BILLION after 20 bids flooded in’ for Abramovich’s frozen asset

Chelsea ‘are set to fetch the highest
price for a sports team EVER at over
£3BILLION after 20 bids flooded in’ for
Abramovich’s frozen asset – and the
winner ‘will be picked by the second.

• Chelsea could collect the biggest sum ever received for a sports team  
• The Blues are braced for offers exceeding £3bn as interest ramps up in the club 
• There are understood to be 20 bids lodged with a winner picked in mid April  

Chelsea could receive the highest ever price to purchase a sports team with a bid of over £3billion as interest ramps up to take the club off Roman Abramovich.

The Blues were plunged into a crisis earlier this month when the club’s Russian billionaire owner Roman Abramovich was sanctioned by the Government amid his close ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin, who the UK are looking to stifle after his decision to invade Ukraine.

Chelsea have been hit hard by the sanctions are are not currently permitted to buy players, agree new contracts, sell match day tickets and their away day travel budget has been capped at £20,000 – with the club given a special licence to continue to their desperate search for new ownership.

The club’s sale has been overseen by the Raine Group, and 20 offers have now been received after interested parties were given until last Friday to submit their bids, according to the Athletic.

Initially there were fears Chelsea would only collect around £2bn after Abramovich’s assets were frozen, combined with uncertainty over the club’s future, but given the overwhelming interest in buying Chelsea, it is thought bidders will have to lodge an offer of more than £3bn, the report adds.

Should that final offer stick, it would mean Chelsea will collect the highest ever sum for a club in sports history – eclipsing the £2.5 billion that was spent on basketball team Brooklyn Nets by Joseph Tsai.

Further down the list are the New York Mets baseball team, NBA outfit Houston Rockets and NFL franchise Carolina Panthers – who all attracted offers of around £2bn.

And Chelsea’s potential offer would totally gazump the highest price paid for a football team – which stands at just £790m after the Glazer family finished buying shares in Manchester United between 2003 and 2005.

Chelsea still had bids arriving over the weekend, the report goes on, but none of those will be considered after missing Friday’s deadline due to the size of the transaction – and a winner will be picked in the second week of April.

Raine hope to whittle down the final candidates to just four by that time, with the firm needing to request a second licence from the Government to seal the deal.

The Government does not want Chelsea to go under, meaning it is within their interests to ensure the acquisition gets done as quickly as possible.

Abramovich is not permitted to receive a penny from the sale – so the funds from the deal will need to be placed into a frozen bank account initially.

There are a number of frontrunners to finally wrest control of the club away from Abramovich after the troubled end to his tenure. The Ricketts family, who own the Chicago Cubs, have teamed up with entrepreneur Ken Griffin – who has a fortune of around £20bn – to buy the Blues and are set to fly to London to meet stakeholders.

Another US bid from a Todd Boehly-led consortium is also a strong candidate, as is an offer from London property developer Nick Candy.

On Monday night Candy increased his consortium’s offer for Chelsea to more than £2.5billion after receiving additional backing from an unnamed South Korean group.

Candy’s Blue Football Consortium are understood to have submitted proof of funds to the Raine Group, who are in the process of whittling down around 50 initial bids to a shortlist of three or four.

Former oil trader and venture capitalist Bob Finch, hedge fund manager and real estate investor Jonathan Lourie, along with Nizam Al-Bassam, the co-founder of asset management firm Centricus, and its CEO Garth Ritchie have also emerged as contenders to take over from Abramovich