So, the genius who doesn’t have much of a clue about football, other than watching soccer in his native USA, but decided to put a few associates together and buy Chelsea FC, has really stirred the pot now.
Not that the owner wanted to sell – but under a directive that looked pretty much like forced nationalisation of private property (I guess some lawyers are having a mighty good time disassembling the [il]legality of the government-imposed deal), or in more simple terms, theft, Abramovich was forced to sell.
The condition was that he wouldn’t get a penny, after having re-invented what was an ailing club for decades, one that hadn’t won any trophies in eons, before he arrived as the Phoenix that lifted them out of their home-made ashes.
Whoever thought that due process in England was a thing, quickly learned two things:
- It isn’t, and
- If you’re a Russian billionaire, you’re toast by definition, that is if the British government of the day thinks you should be.
The diktat came from a Tory government that feels so comfortable with breaking the law that it wants to ship refugees (they prefer to falsely call them ‘migrants’, no matter what) to Rwanda, the famous democracy that slaughtered over one million of its people as a result of an idiotic tribal-cum-border war the very same Brits had artificially caused and drawn, while still in colonial power.
It was a tested proposition to draw borders and boundaries through lines that would divide tribal nations – and suddenly hundreds of thousands found themselves in an artificial country that they had never wanted. And in the midst of another tribal nation that they had warred with for centuries. Divide and conquer. Neat.
Pretty much the same happened on the Indian subcontinent where the empirical Brits chopped up an entire region to artificially create three nations, thus directly stoking religious and ethnic fires, which continue to this day. Kashmir being a case in point (good old Queen Victoria played a special part in that rotten deal). And Britain’s Home Secretary of the day intelligently imported the Kashmir phenomenon the other day to Britain, by claiming that it was “Pakistani Brits” who did all sorts of nefarious things, even if she knew of a 2020 report that people of mainly white ethnic origin were/are historically responsible for the abuse of young boys and girls, and not the country’s brown minority. (Saville is not only a Row, remember?) It looks, feels and is a bit very odd, when an “Indian Brit”, daughter of immigrants herself, starts pissing about with “Pakistani Brits” – while admittedly, neither of the terms makes much sense to begin with: in my somewhat limited view of things, you are either a Brit or you are not a Brit. But then, what do I know. I’m only a lowly continental European.
So, this government – which changes PMs and Cabinet Members with such a frequency that one could get the impression that they are all utterly useless – determined that Abramovich had to go. Without an indictment, charges or having been proven and found guilty – a process usually determined by a court of law and adjudicated by the defendant’s peers who populate a jury. Looks like they couldn’t find any ‘peers’, who would have fit the bill to play jury: not many billionaires around as peers, are there… and those who are, would not necessarily have been unbiased, right? So best forget about the law, don’t try the man, just tell him he’s guilty for having the wrong friend. Cool world we live in.
Therefore, Abramovich – suspected of multiple crimes but never charged, tried, or convicted of any in a British court – was forced to sell Chelsea FC. All that, after spending billions of pounds creating a super club, with real professionals like Bruce Buck and Marina Granovskaya at its helm – a woman who actually knows what football is about (unlike the Boehly-amateurs who took over and thought – hell knows what they thought…).
The club was sold for an eye-watering £4+ billion, and I for one would like to know where all that money really ended up: who wouldn’t? You wouldn’t? This is a UK government that isn’t so keen on financial transparency – at least with the ilk of Baroness Mone (y?) around, we all know where the PPE millions went, don’t we?
Boehly, who studied at London’s LSE, among other things (you’ve got to give him that) and a number of his co-investors, certainly paid the price, took charge and now the club is paying the price for their ability to screw up pretty much everything they possibly could. And so fast.
To begin with he kicked out the Manager who had won the Champions League for the Club (PSG have never even came close as yet although the pockets of their owners are certainly even deeper than the Boehly’s) and was a true professional. They then proceeded to hire a man, a decent man, whose claim to fame was somewhere in Sweden before, then at Brighton, only to be elevated to the top of the Premier League as new manager of Chelsea.
Not a good idea. Nor was the one to go shopping in an astonishingly haphazard way, and for half a billion Pounds. Chelsea was already sitting on talent, and lots of it, and all of them wanted to play in the starting eleven but unfortunately, there are only 11 players that can. Boehly & Co don’t seem to understand that football at this level – at any level, really – is predominantly about Ego management. And if a Manager who has never coached at this level before (I mean no disrespect to Brighton & Hove Albion), suddenly finds himself confronted with 30+ hungry achievers who want to over-achieve, and demand to be considered, then he’s likely to become toast quicker than his five-year contract would ever permit.
It was only a matter of time before Graham Potter would be sacked and paid off for a five-year contract that barely lasted one. Cool money management that (to be fair, Abramovich and his team did pretty much the same, except that they won trophies).
With Potter gone, a 30-something fired by Bayern Munich, is apparently among the flavour of the day. And that should be a feast, too: the new Man will no doubt nail it if the Nailsman does get a chance.
So here we have it: a perfectly solid and successful club gets sold to yet another American whose claim to fame is what being American is all about: money. He has no clue about football but very early on started to daydream loudly about “bottom line”, “marketing” and “adding value” by “maximizing income”. None of that is new because all American sports investors sing the same tune: it’s ultimately about ROI, money – ok, and a bit about status, too (that didn’t work out too well for another bunch of Americans who bought Man Utd, much to the displeasure of the fans – but they did rake in the cash).
Football today is about Return on Investment to American owners. It is about sports washing for Middle Eastern and Far Eastern owners. And it is about fretting about what the next season will look like for most other owners. Football is no longer about a game. It is about entertainment-income at best, and always about income when you are talking top level English football: it is the same in Italy and Spain, where one needs to add corruption and bribes to the equation. A concept not alien to other Clubs and Leagues either, who live or vegetate in Southern European leagues.
Football has lost its naïveté a long time ago: when tv money entered the fray and the same people who run politics (from behind) started to control the relevance of football. Money, some would say, fucked up the game. The fans who are admittedly at the core of the pyramid, who used to take their little boys and girls to watch some good fun on a Saturday afternoon at 3pm, those fans no longer matter.
Or so the owners think. Owners, whose only achievement is to have made a shipload of money somewhere else. And who feel that they need that one little addendum to make them desirable, get them to the top of a pyramid they have not built, rarely understood nor ever cared about. Except of course when it is about money.
It is always about money, isn’t it. Yet it isn’t. But times are a-changing. The fans have become the excited chanters of abuse in the Circus Maximus of money and gladiators, and the ever-more unqualified club owners – whose only objective is cash-as-cash-can, or indeed a status-building exercise – are the Roman-style Senators in an imperial senate of like-minded money-clowns.
One starts getting the impression that it is not the Managers and coaches who need to be kicked about as if they were deflated footballs, but the clueless owners who should look in the Club mirror and run before they are sacked.
But that’s not how the cookie crumbles. It’s their money that calls the shots, not knowledge and expertise.
I may be wrong but football at the top of the pyramid needs a reboot if it is to survive as a mass event for the billions. Instead of degenerating into a money-mule that shits golden bricks.
James Dostoyevsky was a Washington-based author until the end of 2018, where he reported on sports politics and socio-cultural topics. He returned to Europe in 2019 and continues to follow football politics – presently with an emphasis on the Middle East, Europe and Africa.