In between advising on multibillion-pound FTSE takeovers, investment banker Simon Robey this year found himself playing a role more akin to counselor to the owners of English football club Chelsea FC.
The City of London veteran, 66, acted as go-between for squabbling US private equity executives Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali as they negotiated a change of control at the Premier League team they’d jointly run for four years.
Eghbali’s Clearlake Capital ultimately agreed to buy out Boehly and fellow Chelsea investor Mark Walter in September, capping a turbulent period of co-ownership that extended through talks over the deal.
“Somebody needed to intermediate,” Robey said in a rare interview, providing a behind-the-scenes look at one of the most high-profile deals in European sport. He described Eghbali and Boehly as having “fundamentally different” personalities.
“I think I suggested the role because I’m old, experienced, liked both men and I don’t take sides,” Robey said. “I knew I had a really important role because they both trusted me.”
Robey is one of the UK’s most recognized bankers, having steered trillions of dollars of, often complex, transactions involving the country’s biggest companies during a 40-year-plus career. He now works at Evercore Inc. after the Wall Street bank last year bought his eponymous advisory firm Robey Warshaw LLP to help it win more business in Europe.
Evercore was lead bank on the Chelsea buyout but Robey was already familiar to Eghbali and Boehly after advising their consortium on acquiring Chelsea from the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich in 2022 .
“I was with them both in the pub near the ground when they completed the deal,” Robey said. “I’d been at all the negotiations with them. I went with them to see government and I saw a lot of them together in those early days.”
Back then, the banker helped hammer out what he called a “grand bargain” at Chelsea. This meant Clearlake held the lion’s share of Chelsea’s equity, with Class A stock that stood first in line to get capital back in any sale. Meanwhile, Boehly and his backers — Walter and the Swiss businessman Hansjörg Wyss — shared control.
Co-ownership didn’t go smoothly, however.
The west London club went on to spend comfortably more than £1 billion ($1.3 billion) on players, often tying them to long and expensive contracts, in an effort to build a squad that could compete for trophies in domestic and European competitions. Despite that heavy outlay and some success in smaller tournaments, Chelsea has been unable to mount a serious challenge for the Premier League.
The Clearlake consortium instead presided over some of the worst seasonal performances in Chelsea’s Premier League history. The club ended the 2025/26 campaign in 10th place, meaning it failed to qualify for the lucrative UEFA Champions League — a competition it had won in 2021 .
‘Shuttle Diplomacy’
Robey said the volatile performance last season, which included a five-game run of defeats , impacted negotiations over Clearlake buying out Boehly. That was before the arrival of Xabi Alonso, considered one of the top young coaches in European football, who signed on as Chelsea’s new manager earlier this year in a move that helped reinvigorate the parties.
“Originally we all had wanted to get things sorted out before the end of last season,” Robey said. “Getting Alonso was big. It brought a lot of optimism.”
Bloomberg News reported in 2024 that Eghbali and Boehly were exploring whether each could buy the other out. Differing opinions on Chelsea’s recruitment policy, the team’s on-field performance and a failure to make progress on building a new stadium, had all contributed to relations souring.
For a while during the subsequent discussions, it wasn’t clear which of the parties would sell. Tensions mounted as briefings from either side appeared geared toward destabilizing the rival. That’s when Robey stepped in as an intermediator.
The banker began to play what he called a “shuttle diplomacy role,” sending emails to Eghbali and Boehly and gradually reducing the number of “open points” between them. He said he had to be disciplined about passing on information in a way that protected confidences.
“Both are very successful and hard driving,” said Robey, himself a football fan and supporter of Chelsea’s London rival and reigning Premier League champion Arsenal FC. “Both men were extremely ambitious for the club.”
Eghbali and Boehly declined to comment.
Robey had already been kept busy this year amid a boom in takeovers targeting UK companies. He was personally involved in the sale of budget carrier EasyJet Plc to Apollo Global Management Inc., a deal that played out around the same time that Eghbali and Boehly were going back and forth to settle the ownership situation at Chelsea.
Boehly and Walter were in the end able to sell out in a transaction that gave Chelsea an enterprise value of about £5 billion, allowing the pair to book a small profit on their initial investments. Wyss has retained his stake. Raine Group, BDT & MSD Partners and Bank of America Corp. also advised Clearlake on the buyout, while Goldman Sachs Group Inc. worked with the sellers.
The agreement means Eghbali and Clearlake will now be able to focus on improving Chelsea’s fortunes without the distraction of clashing personalities in the boardroom. Chelsea will look to bounce back from a recent defeat to Brentford FC when it hosts AFC Bournemouth at its Stamford Bridge stadium this weekend.
“Both men, and the other shareholders, were hugely relieved to get the deal done,” said Robey. “Strategically they were not that far apart.”