Todd Boehly’s Arrival Marks the End of Premier League’s Era of Quiet Americans

Todd Boehly sanctioned the £75m purchase of Wesley Fofana (left) from Leicester. Photograph: Matthew Childs/Action Images/Reuters
Todd Boehly sanctioned the £75m purchase of Wesley Fofana (left) from Leicester. Photograph: Matthew Childs/Action Images/Reuters
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Todd Boehly’s Arrival Marks the End of Premier League’s Era of Quiet Americans

Todd Boehly sanctioned the £75m purchase of Wesley Fofana (left) from Leicester. Photograph: Matthew Childs/Action Images/Reuters
Todd Boehly sanctioned the £75m purchase of Wesley Fofana (left) from Leicester. Photograph: Matthew Childs/Action Images/Reuters

Bob Dylan once had a piece of advice for aspiring artists: write 10 songs a day, and then discard nine. In a way this also appears to be Todd Boehly’s approach to improving English football. He is just putting stuff out there, you see. Running ideas up the flagpole and seeing if anyone salutes them. Throwing them out on the stoop and seeing if the cat licks them up. Not necessarily good ideas. Or practical ideas. Or popular ideas. Or ideas that really bear the weight of a moment’s logical thought. But ideas nonetheless.

As such it is not necessary at this stage actually to engage what the Chelsea owner said on stage at Bros, Brews and Brunch business conference in Jerky Falls, Connecticut last week. Spoiler: none of this is actually going to happen. To soberly assess the merits of a north/south all-star game, or relegation playoffs, would be to lend these ideas more consideration and seriousness than Boehly has probably lent them himself. More interesting is the shrillness and scorn of the subsequent discourse: why the throwaway comments of a man named Todd seem to have created such a bruise on the psyche of English football.

In large part this appears to boil down to Boehly being American but more specifically, a very particular kind of American. Boehly is by no means the first American guy trying to make his fortune in English football or to dream of changing it. But he is perhaps the first to be overtly, unashamedly, vocally … American about it. In so doing he is tugging at a largely unresolved tension in our game: between the culture and outlook of the game itself and that of the people who through ownership and viewership exert a greater influence on it than probably any other foreign nation.

Most of Boehly’s predecessors, of course, neatly sidestepped this tension with distance and deference. A strategic and affected deference, perhaps, but deference all the same. Randy Lerner at Aston Villa made a point of downplaying his Americanness, immersed himself in the traditions and history of the club and rebuilt the decaying Holte pub across the road from Villa Park. John Henry at Liverpool has strived to depict himself as a benevolent custodian rather than a career profiteer. Stan Kroenke and the Glazers, in common with many other foreign owners, have made a point of saying and doing as little as possible. There is an unspoken, often duplicitous compact here: hey, this is your thing, and we don’t want to change it.

And so for almost two decades, this has been the palpable extent of the American influx: a procession of wrinkly guys in baseball caps only ever glimpsed through the searching long lens of a Sky camera. On the pitch it was a similar story: insofar as Americans were tolerated it was as stalwart goalkeepers, burly defenders, technically limited strikers with large brows. In essence English football was basically fine with Americans as long as they silently wrote cheques or stayed in goal.

Tonally Boehly is different. Boehly is neither distant nor deferent. If the Glazers are largely content to milk English football, Boehly wants to fatten it, clone it, put it on a diet of alfalfa and steroids and create the world’s most decadent bionic steaks. Let’s do all-star games and cheerleaders and the metaverse and a super league that we are not going to call a super league just yet. Let’s buy Cristiano Ronaldo. Let’s sack the weird gawky German guy. Let’s install a bowling alley in Buckingham Palace.

This, perhaps, explains the acid reflux that has greeted Boehly’s ideas: not simply the ideas in themselves, but what it means to utter them, the discourtesy of saying the quiet part out loud. In many ways he strikes at English football’s primal fear, what one might even call its central delusion: that even as it sold off pieces of itself, flung out its sails and embraced the trade winds of global finance, danced and contorted itself for the market, it could retain its basic essence. That for all its foreign stars and foreign money the Premier League could somehow remain fundamentally, authentically English.

And so whenever an overtly American influence reared its head – the rise of analytics, ageing players moving to MLS, Bob Bradley – it was invariably met with a mixture of defensiveness and derision. We saw it again last week, with Jürgen Klopp quipping about the “Harlem Globetrotters” and Gary Neville claiming that US investment was “a clear and present danger” to the game. We saw it in the ridicule that accompanied Jesse Marsch when he was appointed at Leeds United, in Adrian Chiles’s deliciously over-the-top monologue as he introduced ITV’s coverage of England v USA at the 2010 World Cup. “We really love Americans,” he quipped. “We just couldn’t eat a whole one.”

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And so, as a thought exercise, what might an Americanized Premier League look like in practice? Perhaps you might start seeing loud music after goals, big furry mascots, steadily rising ticket prices, an explosion in corporate hospitality and a relentless focus on the customer experience, a competitive model that increasingly resembles a closed shop.

You might start seeing Hollywood actors buying up a local club and turning it into streaming content, an American Premier League coach in charge of American players, being analyzed on Monday Night Football by an American-owned broadcaster. You can celebrate these developments or lament them. But either way you would be casting judgment on something that has already happened.

The Guardian Sport



Swiatek Crushes Anisimova 6-0 6-0 to Win Maiden Wimbledon Crown

Poland's Iga Swiatek celebrates with the trophy after beating Amanda Anisimova of the US to win the women's singles final at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)
Poland's Iga Swiatek celebrates with the trophy after beating Amanda Anisimova of the US to win the women's singles final at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)
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Swiatek Crushes Anisimova 6-0 6-0 to Win Maiden Wimbledon Crown

Poland's Iga Swiatek celebrates with the trophy after beating Amanda Anisimova of the US to win the women's singles final at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)
Poland's Iga Swiatek celebrates with the trophy after beating Amanda Anisimova of the US to win the women's singles final at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

Iga Swiatek took another stride towards tennis greatness by ruthlessly tearing apart American 13th seed Amanda Anisimova 6-0 6-0 and lifting her first Wimbledon trophy on Saturday.

The big occasion turned into a nightmare for Anisimova who became the first woman to lose a Wimbledon final by that painful scoreline since 1911 and the first to do so at any major since Steffi Graf routed Natasha Zvereva at the 1988 French Open.

Already a US Open champion and a four-times French Open winner, Swiatek's demolition job at the All England Club meant that she became the youngest woman since a 20-year-old Serena Williams in 2002 to lift major titles on all three surfaces.

Her superb display on the sun-drenched lawns of London also ensured that she emerged as the first player since Monica Seles in 1992 to win her first six major finals.

"It's something that is just surreal. I feel like tennis keeps surprising me, and I keep surprising myself," Swiatek told reporters after hoisting the gilded Venus Rosewater Dish.

"I'm really happy with the whole process, how it looked like from the first day we stepped on a grasscourt. Yeah, I feel like we did everything for it to go in that direction without expecting it, just working really hard.

"It means a lot, and it gives me a lot of experience. Yeah, I don't even know. I'm just happy."

Swiatek's triumph ended a barren 13-month run for the Polish 24-year-old, who served a short suspension late last year after an inadvertent doping violation linked to contaminated sleep medication melatonin.

"I want to thank my coach (Wim Fissette). With the ups and downs now, we showed everybody it's working," Swiatek added.

SCORCHING START

On another warm afternoon on Centre Court, Swiatek got off to a scorching start by breaking a nervous Anisimova three times en route to dishing out the first bagel, prompting some spectators to get behind the shell-shocked American.

A frustrated Anisimova shrieked and desperately looked to her team in the stands for any kind of guidance after conceding yet another break point early in the second set and it was not long before her machine-like opponent pulled away further, Reuters reported.

Anisimova continued to disappointingly crack under pressure, before Swiatek completed the brutal mauling in 57 minutes with a backhand winner on her second match point to become the first Wimbledon champion from Poland.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk celebrated with a picture of himself watching a post-match interview while holding a bowl of pasta and strawberries, Swiatek's cheat meal at Wimbledon, while President Andrzej Duda was effusive in his praise.

"Iga! Today, on the grasscourts of Wimbledon, you wrote history - not only for Polish sport, but also for Polish pride. On behalf of the Republic of Poland - thank you," Duda wrote.

Victory took Swiatek to 100 wins from 120 matches at the majors, making her the quickest to get to there since Williams in 2004, and denied Anisimova the chance to become the first American to win the title since her compatriot in 2016.

Swiatek jumped for joy on court before running towards her team in the stands to celebrate her triumph. The Friends fan was equally delighted to receive a congratulatory hug from American actress Courteney Cox, who was among the spectators.

All this while, Anisimova was left to wonder what could have been as she sat in her seat, before the tears began to flow during her on-court interview.

Few would have envisioned the American to hit the heights she did in the last fortnight after she fell outside the top 400 following her mental health break two years ago.

"I didn't have enough today," said Anisimova, who began the tournament with a 6-0 6-0 win over Yulia Putintseva but admitted to running out of gas in the final.

"I'm going to keep putting in the work, and I always believe in myself. I hope to be back again one day."

It was bitter disappointment for US fans hoping for an "American Slam" this year after Madison Keys won the Australian Open at the start of the year and Coco Gauff triumphed at the French Open last month.