“The driving force” – Todd Boehly lost Pochettino power battle and may lose Chelsea

There is only one story dominating the Chelsea headlines this weekend – the civil war brewing behind the scenes. If you thought you were going to get a quiet international break, you thought wrong.

The two main groups of the club’s ownership are preparing to try and buy each other’s shares after falling out, and every day brings a new angle from a new writers, with juicy new details about how it’s all fallen apart. Matt Law had a go for the Telegraph yesterday, and today that same paper’s chief football writer Sam Wallace expanded even further upon that.

His piece has lots of new context for the falling out between Todd Boehly’s group and Clearlake Capital.

It sounds very much like Wallace puts the ruthless removal of Mauricio Pochettino on Behdad Eghbali and Clearlake rather than Boehly. Everything requires a sign off from both parties, but it was Eghbali who pushed for that controversial footballing decision.

Eghbali moves in the shadows to take over

Boehly’s dominance in the media in the months around the takeover of the club cast him as the ringleader in the public imagination, but as Wallace points out, that’s becomes less true over time:

“Inside the club it became clear that Eghbali, with 61.5 per cent under the control of Clearlake Capital, was the driving force. A Californian private equity investor with utter conviction in his own methods, it was Eghbali whose presence around the club was felt by those inside Chelsea to be that much stronger. By this summer, with the ownership’s second permanent managerial appointment, Mauricio Pochettino, departing after just a single season it was Eghbali who was in charge.

Given their two quite different approaches and ideas for the club, one is left wondering how they ever ended up working together in the first place – and how it might ever be resolved for the good of the club.