Chelsea bidder names two people who will decide winner in race to buy the club

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One of the Chelsea bidders, Sir Martin Broughton, has named the key two people at Chelsea who will effectively decide the next club owners.

Broughton, alongside fellow Blues fan Lord Sebastian Coe, has reportedly submitted a consortium bid to buy Chelsea.

Their group is obviously not the only one in the race.

At least four confirmed bids were submitted to New York-based merchant bank Raine Group before the Friday deadline according to Sky Sports.

These four bids are from four different consortiums led by Broughton, Nick Candy, Todd Boehly, and the Ricketts family.

Like everyone else, Broughton will now have to wait.

He believes Raine Group and the key people at Chelsea will eventually decide on one preferred bidder before the UK government and the Premier League get involved.

“What we know [about] the process is that all the bids went into Raine, an investment bank in New York,” Broughton told talkSPORT.

“They assess the bids and discuss the bids with the Chelsea boards — that’s [club chairman] Bruce Buck and [director] Marina [Granovskaia].

“I don’t know how much, if any, say Roman Abramovich has in that.

“But if it’s Chelsea who hired them [Raine Group] to do this, so they go back to Chelsea.

“Bruce Buck and Marina are the two key people who will make the determination of which bid is in the best interest of Chelsea.”

Broughton added that Raine and Chelsea may whittle down the list to just two or three bidders or just one straight away.

“The government only wants one,” the former British Airways chairman explained.

“The government wants to say, ‘OK, who is it?’, and they will look at [the bid] [before] issuing a special licence to allow the deal to go through.

“That can be done very quickly, or it may take a little bit longer. I hope, for the interest of Chelsea, that it [will be] very quick.”

Many fans will likely be relieved if, as Broughton suggested, it is the familiar faces in the Chelsea board who will decide the winning bid.

Buck and Granovkskaia are the two people who run the club and make decisions in the past years anyway given Abramovich’s relatively hands-off approach.

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