Stories
Only 17 days to save Chelsea.
There was a time when this kind of headline might have startled some people but now does not seem the time to be startled by anything other than existential threats.
The alarm at the fate of a football club might not have been in keeping with the wider mood, where it can sometimes feel that we have about 17 days left to save the planet.
But that is football, that is the Premier League, a deeply dysfunctional and compelling institution that demands and usually receives attention which sometimes is out of all proportion to its importance, especially at a time of war and global anxiety. But its importance in more innocent times is what first attracted Roman Abramovich to it.
With its constant whirling storylines, the Premier League will never detain itself too long on one subject (VAR being a tiresome exception). Even those stories that came out of Stamford Bridge over the years (Will Wayne Bridge shake John Terry’s hand? Why has Mourinho humiliated Eva Carneiro? Is Roman Abramovich’s company supplying steel for Russian tanks in Ukraine? ) told of how the Premier League was, if not quite a Dream Factory, a place where storylines came to become fantastical.
And how crazy they were with Abramovich in charge. Who would detain themselves too long on the source of his wealth or his ties to Vladimir Putin when there was nobody at the club who knew the answers anyway. If it was asked, they wanted to stick to football as long as your interpretation of football was loose enough to include Jose Mourinho calling Arsene Wenger “a voyeur” or making false statements about a referee which prompted him to give up refereeing. That was the football, that was the fun stuff and the geopolitics could wait.
So it was the perfect place for a man who didn’t want attention but wanted the attention that came with not getting attention. This may explain how Roman Abramovich got here and how for so long some of the elements of his ownership that now seem so glaring were normalised.
The Chelsea fans who have been singing his name recently qualify more as useless idiots than useful ones, but they also illustrate that one of the benefits of club ownership is the immediate acquisition of a loyal army who will defend your interests as long as you give them what they want: cash for their club.
Newcastle United supporters are not pro Saudi Arabia and anti Mike Ashley’s business Sports Direct but pro and anti what their owners have done with their club. Roman Abramovich provided 20 years of unimaginable success so he has earned their loyalty. He did not save Chelsea, as some like to think, he just saved it from ordinariness. Their devotion is entirely transactional. They were both the other’s mark.
On Friday evening, it was reported that Chelsea’s bank accounts had been frozen, although this was then downgraded to a temporary interruption. Chelsea are said to be in negotiations with their banks, after one report described them as “risk averse” following the sanctions imposed.
While there are plenty of innocent employees at the club who will find it a stressful, there is also a sense that the club hasn’t quite grasped what they are dealing with.
Having benefitted from the largess of Abramovich, they are now experiencing the downside of being utterly dependent on one man, especially when that man, according to the UK government, is “one of the few oligarchs from the 1990s to maintain prominence under Putin”.
One journalist referred to the “doomsday scenario” Chelsea had laid out to the government as they asked for the restrictions to be lifted a lot. These apocalyptic bulletins included the terrifying news that there might be “no programme sales on Sunday” and “parts of Stamford Bridge would have to be shut”.
When it comes to the various doomsday scenarios knocking around at the moment, I think I’d take the one where the Matthew Harding Stand is shut over, say, the firefight at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. And as for “no programme sales on Sunday”, I’m not sure we’re ready to live in such crazy times after the past two years.
In this failure to grasp what is going on, there may be a reflection of a wider inability to understand the significance of this moment. This, too, might be a function of the Premier League, where one storyline just fades to black or is elbowed out of the way by another of equally significant insignificance. It is hard not to believe that this is not just another story of a club with a cracked badge to signify their crisis but for Chelsea, and the Premier League, it is.
Chelsea are instead offering a glimpse of the future – if there is one. It is a future which shows us how it ends, a future where thing may be as uncertain for Manchester City or Newcastle United as much as for Chelsea.
This time may now be at an end, just when Saudi Arabia were getting ready to join the party.
For some, the answer to the Premier League’s problems is an independent regulator which may provide better scrutiny of those who dream of owning football clubs or, if they don’t dream of it, make a strategic corporate decision to expand in the arena of sporting franchises.
That regulator may have teeth but we know in this country there is often no guarantee of that.
Instead the glimpse of how it ends may lead others to hesitate or to start hastily drawing up exit strategies.
These clubs may grasp fan ownership but it would take not just an economic shift, but a cultural one, for that to happen.
The nation state ownership model may be at an end, even if Abramovich has always denied connections to the Putin regime.
“It’s taken a war for us to see that this model was unviable,” Paul Hayward says in the podcast that accompanies this article.
Instead there may be something a little more palatable, clubs owned by working billionaires whose ownership may not require managers to answer questions on wars or human rights abuses in their post-match press conference.
The Super League too remains in the background, a plan that was deeply flawed but inspired by the need of the traditional clubs in Europe to compete with those nation states. Chelsea were part of it too, but were the first club to withdraw, which may have had something to do with the fact that they didn’t need to be there in the first place.
They were hailed then for their part in the people’s revolt. It was a more innocent time or, at least, a time when we pretended we didn’t know what was happening, which is a corrupted form of innocence.
