Chicago Cubs owners no longer want to buy the Blues

The owners of the American baseball team Chicago Cubs from the MLB, the Ricketts family, are no longer interested in buying Chelsea FC. The Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich wants to sell the Champions League winner to a new investor.

The Ricketts-led consortium will not submit a final offer, it said. Cubs owners Tom and Laura Ricketts had teamed up with billionaires Ken Griffin and Dan Gilbert and announced a purchase offer. Now the backtrack followed.

A New York commercial bank had set the deadline for offers to buy Chelsea, where team manager Thomas Tuchel and German internationals Timo Werner, Kai Havertz and Antonio Rüdiger are under contract, until Thursday.

“After careful consideration, the Ricketts-Griffin-Gilbert group has decided not to make a final offer for Chelsea,” the Ricketts family said in a statement.

A few days after Russia’s attack on Ukraine, Abramovich announced that he wanted to sell Chelsea. The British government had imposed sanctions on the Russian oligarch in recent weeks.