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Chelsea Football Club owner Todd Boehly is threatening to gatecrash the £550mn sale of The Telegraph with an offer to help finance a bid for the 169-year-old conservative British national newspaper.
The US billionaire had held talks with RedBird IMI in recent weeks about the possibility of becoming involved in the deal, according to three people familiar with the situation.
The people said that Boehly’s involvement could be alongside or instead of ongoing talks with US media executive Dovid Efune, who has been in exclusive negotiations to acquire The Telegraph for more than a month.
Two people said Boehly had held talks with Efune’s team to explore working with them, although the Chelsea FC owner would prefer to pursue the deal alone. RedBird IMI would not engage in with any new bidder until the exclusivity period with Efune had expired, said a person familiar with the talks.
Boehly, who is co-founder and chief executive officer of Eldridge Industries, has invested across a wide range of industries from financial services to technology. He is best known in the UK as co-owner of Chelsea FC, but in the US also owns a stake in the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team.
“He is looking to be involved,” said one person close to the situation, who added that Efune — publisher of The New York Sun — remained in exclusive talks. “Boehly is interested and engaged in conversations.”
Questions have arisen in recent weeks about whether Efune will be able to complete the deal before the next deadline before Christmas given the lack of clear-cut financial backing. He was given a further month to pull together the necessary financing for the bid at the end of November.
A person familiar with Efune’s bid told the Financial Times last month that there was “strong momentum” in the financing consortium and “between debt and equity sources, there are dozens of funding parties involved in these discussions”.
Former Conservative chancellor Nadhim Zahawi had also talked about helping the investors in the consortium, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Robey Warshaw and the Raine Group are advising on the sale.
Boehly’s involvement marks the latest twist in a convoluted, 18-month search for a permanent owner for The Telegraph, a right-of-centre newspaper whose original owners, the Barclay family, lost control in the summer of 2023 after failing to pay back mounting debts to their lender, Lloyds Banking Group.
Lloyds sold the newspaper that autumn to RedBird IMI, the Abu Dhabi-backed investment group. The UK government vetoed its ownership earlier this year over concerns about a foreign state-funded investor owning an influential British newspaper.
Efune was then picked as the preferred bidder in a subsequent auction process, when he offered more than rival bidders including Lord Maurice Saatchi and Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild.
RedBird IMI and Boehly declined to comment. Efune was not immediately available for comment.
