Putting the existential threat facing Chelsea into perspective

© Simon Poulter

When it was looking likely that Russia would invade Ukraine, and discussion began as to how the world would react, we Chelsea fans started shifting uneasily in our seats. Elephants can remain disproportionately hidden in a room: for 19 years we’ve enjoyed unprecedented success with our club owned by Roman Abramovich, into which he has poured his personal millions. We just didn’t question how those millions had been arrived at. Ignorance is bliss, and geo-politics is rarely a topic of debate on the terraces. 

Under the Russian’s ownership, open-top bus parades down the King’s Road have become regularity. “We’ve won it all!” we cockily bate our rivals. And we have: 21 trophies in all, including, most recently, the European Cup (for a second time) and the World Club Cup, plus five FA Cups and five Premier League titles in the Abramovich era. It was never always thus: when Chelsea went to Wembley in 1990 for the somewhat Mickey Mouse ‘Zenith Data Systems Cup’ it was the first time in my conscious lifetime that the club had competed for even a minor honour, let alone one of the big ones. Even 1994’s 4-0 FA Cup Final humiliation by Manchester United felt like Chelsea was finally moving into a higher echelon. Three years later we actually won it, but even then we couldn’t have imagined where, since Abramovich’s arrival in 2003, we would have gone next. 

When the away end at Stamford Bridge trolls us with choruses of “Where were you when you were shit?” I always mutter “right here”. I know exactly where I was: standing in the Shed, watching no more than 7,000 loyal, if deluded fans each match watching the Blues struggle in the old Second Division. So when Jesper Grønkjær scored his spectacular volleyed goal against Liverpool on the final day of the 2003-2004 season, securing fourth spot in the Premier League and a place in Europe, the club’s fortunes changed forever. Abramovich, who had apparently been choosing which out of Chelsea and Liverpool he would buy, acquired the club in blue. Success, not survival, became the currency at Stamford Bridge. Relentless silverware, and when there was no silverware, managerial change to fix the deficit.

In the early days of Abramovich’s ownership you could buy Cossack-style hats with the club badge on them - novelties that I doubt purchasers gave any thought to the cultural appropriation involved. It was just a good gag, the kind of irony football fans are renown. ‘Roman’s a Russian, ergo...’. I’m surprised there wasn’t a commensurate uptick of Lada ownership amongst the fanbase. As season followed season, and success followed success, we celebrated - quietly, it must be said - the oligarch whose personal largesse was making it all possible. We sang the name of the shy, seemingly reticent proprietor who’d bought our glamorous but serially under-achieving football club, turning football itself on its head in the process. And now it is the club itself that has been turned on its head. 

As Putin’s army rolled into Ukraine on 24 February there wouldn’t have been a single Chelsea fan - with their priorities and world perspective skewed as always - who didn’t sense that something existential might result. As the last two weeks of Russia’s increasingly genocidal “special military operation” has ensued, football - as it did during the height of the pandemic - has taken a deserved second place. How could anything matter more than the millions of fellow human beings being bombed, shot and displaced, whose lives and livelihoods have been destroyed forever? 

Even when Abramovich announced, out of the blue, on the eve of the Carabao Cup final between Chelsea and Liverpool, that he was placing control of the club into a trust, many speculated about the timing. It wasn’t lost on anyone that as the world looked to punish Putin, Abramovich would surely come within the scope of sanctions against the Russian oligarchy, looking for any opportunity to tighten the economic grip on Putin. Boris Johnson even let slip, in error, that Abramovich had already been sanctioned. MPs like Chris Bryant kept up the pressure; newspapers started to dig into the money trail that led Abramovich to owning Chelsea, linking him to the Kremlin through suggestions of influence and the toxic relationship that Russia’s oligarchs have with the country’s autocratic, expansionist and possibly deranged president.

Yesterday that pressure came to a head, with Abramovich sanctioned along with six others. With his assets frozen, it means the sale of Chelsea - which was looking like a fire sale when it was abruptly announced on 2 March -  is now on hold. Effectively, the club is now in government hands. For political reasons it holds the keys to the club’s future - and its survival. It is, apparently, open to a sale if a buyer comes along,  but with Abramovich apparently wanting £3 billion, an actual buyer might not be forthcoming. And then even if one is found, the government will need assurances that no proceeds will go to Abramovich. Meanwhile, commercial operations have been suspended, the club shop closed, and prospective player sales and acquisitions have been halted for the foreseeable future. 

Home Premier League games will now only be attended by season ticket holders, no new tickets will be sold for fixtures including cup ties, and while the club will continue to pay the wages of its staff (including players), the outlook, for a club in existence since 1905, seems uncertain. 

In the short term, play will continue. I’ll be at the Bridge on Sunday for Chelsea-v-Newcastle, which will surely be an emotionally charged game. “As long as we have enough shirts and a bus to drive to the games, we’ll be there and will compete hard,” head coach Thomas Tuchel said after last night’s fixture at Norwich. As he has been called upon to do in recent weeks, in the absence of anyone else from the club making themselves available to the media, Tuchel added: “Of course the [sanctions] subject is there, the talks are going on, so there is a certain distraction. The level of impact it has - the news of today is big - in time we don't know how big. We cannot influence it.” His Chelsea Women counterpart Emma Hayes, whose side was also playing last night, took a similarly stoic view, adding some necessary perspective: “I can’t get too wrapped up in it when there’s a war going on in Ukraine. We are Chelsea and we will prevail. There will be solutions, we just need to be patient.”

As ever, a source of rationality in all matters Chelsea has been Pat Nevin, the club’s cultured former winger who was yesterday speaking on a BBC podcast: “It is quite shocking for any Chelsea fan out there, all around the world. We are in uncharted water,” he said, adding that the future of Chelsea Football Club was serious. Of course, put into perspective, with maternity hospitals being obliterated and Mariupol being starved of water, food and electricity, “The only place to be/Every other Saturday” pales deeply into insignificance. But that doesn’t ease the discomfort we ordinary fans have with why Abramovich is being sanctioned now. It’s not like his association with Vladimir Putin is new.

The threat now facing Chelsea is without doubt existential. If - as is now possible - the club collapses, the big-name players will simply ply their trade elsewhere, continuing to draw the same mad wages from another benefactor. Those players already know it and won’t be worried. They younger players, the academy group and those less fancied by Thomas Tuchel (and, it should be said, Hayes) might have more to be concerned about. And, of course, the club’s employees - the physios, caterers, bar workers, matchday hospitality workers, grounds staff, medical, administrative, security, the list goes on - face the bleakest future of all.

“You are in different circumstances now,” Nevin told the BBC. “I can't say ‘everything will be OK’. There is a valuable asset there, long term [in Chelsea FC]. It would be stupid for the government to drive it into administration or liquidation. That doesn’t make any sense.” Nevin thinks the club will survive, but in what form he couldn’t say. “You can have a full recovery. Say if you sell it to another businessman or conglomerate, that’s fine. If they get lucky they could co on very well.”  The question, Nevin says, is who the club gets sold to, assuming the Government allows it. “[Abramovich] shouldn’t sell it to the biggest offer but the best offer, to the right people,” adding “The temptation will be to sell it to the biggest bidder if it is government owned within these sanctions. As a Chelsea fan you want it sold to someone you can trust to take it forward.”

There is a mix of emotion amongst Chelsea fans. Anger, sadness, bafflement, confusion, fear. For some, it’s the end of the world, while others have been more sanguine, concluding that the last 19 years, with its 21 trophies, has been a great run and nothing lasts forever. But to take that disposable view belies a club that we have supported through thick and thin. I’ve been a regular attendee at Stamford Bridge for over 40 years, and a season ticket holder for more than 20. I’ve not spent several thousand pounds in that time for a seat (not to mention all the TV subscriptions and merchandise) to just see it all disappear for the sake of political expediency.

Here, though, is where I can’t deny I’m not conflicted. The source of Abramovich’s money has been an inconvenient truth every single one of us who supports Chelsea has chosen to ignore, going right back to 2003. Did we ask what made him an oligarch in the first place? No, we just continued to froth with excitement with every new player acquisition, even in the inflationary environment that Abramovich’s ownership has led to. £98 million for Romalu Lukaku? Yeah, we’ll have some of that! A nailed-on centre forward in the ranks again, banging them in week after week! Not once would we have given a second thought to the fact that Abramovich allegedly controls Evraz, a company providing the steel for Russian tanks. 

But what is frustrating is the amount of faux indignation now streaming out of Fleet Street. The sanctions imposed yesterday have prompted a flood of “Why-oh-why?” pieces today, belatedly drawing attention to the moral ambiguities of Abramovich having been allowed to own and fund Chelsea for the last 19 years. I suppose, much like this blog post, something has to be written about the story, but it is ludicrous that sports writers who’ve freely gorged on the gifts that Chelsea have kept on giving - player acquisitions, managers being hired and fired, the ‘Chelsea-buying-titles’ memes - are now criticising the Russian’s ownership from the very beginning. One or two more dogged journalists have, to be fair, called out Abramovich’s associations (as they have done with the controversial Saudi-funded takeover at Newcastle), but for the most part, the media has simply gone with the Abramovich story. And what about the football authorities who seek to over-regulate the sport? As we know, from FIFA on down to local league associations, there’s little moral steerage at the game’s administration level. Money talks and that’s alright. If it’s OK to stage a World Cup in a country like Qatar, it’s clearly OK for a Russian oligarch with, apparently close ties to a dictator now trying to eradicate an entire nation of 44 million people to own a football club loved by Londoners for 117 years. 

Last week, The Times’ Matt Dickinson wrote that Abramovich’s arrival in English football got us hooked on money in the game, and that it had become a drug. Football has always been something of an opiate for the masses, but in the Abramovich era, it has changed out of all recognition, especially in the UK. Generations ago there were always remarks about the ‘Chairman’s Roller’ but then football owners were invariably local industrialists, self-made proprietors who pumped their relatively meagre fortunes, by today’s standards, into the town’s club as a community gesture. 

Football, irrespective of Roman Abramovich, has become a multi-billion pound/dollar/euro industry. Money from whatever source - Russian oil, Middle Eastern oil, name your lucrative commodity - has transformed the game in just about every dimension. It’s wishful thinking to expect football to return to the muddy pitches and players indulging in Saturday morning fry-ups that was the custom when I first started going to Chelsea at the end of the 1970s. 

As for what happens now, I genuinely don’t know what to expect, or what I want to happen now. I obviously don’t want my club to collapse - I hold a season ticket at Stamford Bridge because I derive enormous pleasure and entertainment out of going there, for good or for bad, for the pantomime traditions of fan banter, for the outrage at refereeing decisions and bafflement at substitutions. But if the worst was to happen, life would move on in a way it cannot for the 2.5 million Ukrainians who have streamed out of their homeland in the last two weeks, their homes bombed, their livelihoods destroyed. There really can be no equivalence.

Accidents can happen

Every Christmas, the shelves of the big book emporia bow with a barrage of dreary footballing memoirs - stocking fillers for dads, mostly, and invariably ghost-written by Fleet Street hacks. Rarely, if ever, are they of much real interest. Occasionally, a Roy Keane or Peter Crouch might come along with something mildly controversial or amusing, but for the most part, they chart a similar trajectory: local park ➤ boys club ➤ youth team ➤ first team ➤ different clubs ➤ retirement/management/punditry. 

So it’s quite an event when a football book comes along that is genuinely worthy of note. The last, I recall, was Black And Blue, the intentionally uncomfortable read by Paul Canoville, Chelsea’s first black player. It recounts his troubled youth but also, more dramatically, his even more troubled debut for the club: away to Crystal Palace, in April 1982, he was subjected to a torrent of racial abuse - from his own fans. A month later, he made his home debut against Luton Town at Stamford Bridge, a game I was at. His arrival on the pitch was met by monkey chants and bananas thrown from the home stands. It sickens me to this day.

The following year Chelsea signed a diminutive Scottish winger from Clyde, whose mercurial talents would eventually limit Canoville’s appearances. But, at the same time, the newcomer befriended Canoville, even taking on the racist abusers, despite receiving death threats himself for his effort. “I couldn’t not intervene,” Pat Nevin said in 2017. “At the time the black players were being told to shut up about it when a lot of them wanted to talk about it. Me speaking about it may have sounded brave - unusual - maybe I was the only one at the time, but it was my background.”

Nevin is certainly unusual, which is what makes his memoir The Accidental Footballer so eagerly-awaited. The Glaswegian has long been a refreshing counter to footballing culture. In the Chelsea dressing room he was called “Weirdo” - a tag he now laughs at - purely because he read the NME and The Guardian, and listened to Joy Division and the Cocteau Twins, rather than Shalamar and Kool & Gang, or whatever his bubble-permed teammates had on their Walkmen at the time. Most entries in the footballing oeuvre follow a refrain of ‘It’s is all I ever wanted to do’. Nevin had other ideas. As a child he wanted to be a teacher like his brothers, or even a professional writer. While his book’s title suggests an unplanned career path, his reluctance to play professionally came more from his love of the game: “I didn’t want anything spoiling my love of playing.” Speaking on a Zoom webinar to publicise the book, Nevin says that in his career he’s worked with plenty of footballers who’ve fallen madly out of love with the sport. These same issues might have warded him off, but didn’t. Football pulled him in, taking him first, as a professional, to Clyde, then Chelsea, Everton, Tranmere, Kilmarnock and Motherwell.

At the end of the 1987-88 season Chelsea were relegated, and Nevin was sold to the Merseyside club, but he remains today a popular figure at Stamford Bridge. This is partly down to the five years he spent there, including three seasons as part of a formidable trio with Kerry Dixon and David Speedie, producing 200 goals between them. The trio contributed to the club’s promotion out of the old Second Division, but couldn’t prevent it yo-yoing back down again, leading to Nevin’s departure. He didn’t, though, cut his ties completely, and continues to work for Chelsea TV, the club’s website and matchday programmes. Thankfully, things have moved on since the disgraceful days of Canoville and Nevin’s playing days together, and the Bridge is mostly a more socially reconstructed place, with the club doing much in football’s fight against racism.

As the book and, indeed, the Zoom webinar underlines, Nevin is one of football’s rarer coves. Eloquent and clearly intelligent, his BBC radio commentaries demonstrate a view of the game that is thankfully bereft of the monosyllabic cliches of his peers (an apocryphal tale has it that he once accepted a bet - possibly from Danny Baker - to work David Bowie references into his commentary of a Scottish league game some years ago, allegedly with statements such as “He’s a terrific Station To Station player”. Nevin has been asked by this blogger to confirm the story, but would be delightful if true). 

Music, however, remains his passion. He still gets a buzz, he says, from discovering new material, especially music you’ll not have heard of. On the wall behind him as he talks on Zoom, Bowie’s Heroes is placed prominently, along with My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. Each chapter of the book is a song title - The Mighty Wah’s The Story Of The Blues, Elvis Costello’s I Don’t Want To Go To Chelsea, London Calling and numerous Bowie titles, and so on - as it covers the first three phases of his playing career, in Glasgow, London and Merseyside. Each is a convenient fit to the narrative, but it does also emphasise Nevin’s encyclopaedic musical knowledge. 

Pat Nevin: the Johnny Marr years

The webinar meanders between questions about football and questions about music, with anecdotes about writing for the NME (he even shared a flat with that publication’s Adrian Thrills early in the day) and attending John Peel’s birthday parties (despite having played for arch rivals of Peelie’s beloved Liverpool). In his playing days he bore little resemblance to anyone else in the game, looking more like one of the indie rockers he obsessed over. A picture of Nevin in camel overcoat and black beret bears more than a passing similarity to Johnny Marr. He even appeared in a Fuzzbox video. 

So, you could say that in a world of sheep-like social conformity, as football is, Nevin was - and remains to this day - a refreshing alternative. “I loved being called ‘Weirdo’,” he recently told The Times’ Henry Winter. “I remember taking Simple Minds’ album [1982’s New Gold Dream] into the dressing-room, saying, ‘You should listen to this,’ and it was, ‘Get that shit off’. Seven years later they’re all listening to Simple Minds.” Today he will occasionally DJ in clubs, playing Joy Division and the butterfly it produced, New Order, amongst his decidedly well-curated set lists.

After music, one of Nevin's other big differentiators from regular footballing folk is that he’s a deep thinker. Not that all footballers are brain dead, of course, but at the core of The Accidental Footballer is an unease with the sporting world around him. Preferring a night out at the Royal Ballet, rather than Stringfellows, would have marked a player out in the 1980s and, frankly does still. We shouldn’t, here, discount the fact that professional, elite football still doesn’t have an openly gay player, not that Nevin is. But football has never managed difference well. Chelsea’s Graeme Le Saux, who cites Nevin as a role model, was frequently the subject of homophobic innuendo, simply because he, too, read The Guardian, could string a sentence together, and didn’t pursue the same lifestyle as others in the sport. Just the other day my girlfriend remarked that you never see any professional players of an Indian or Pakistani background. How things have come since Paul Canoville made his debut, though after the apparent booing during the taking-the-knee gesture before Chelsea’s game at Aston Villa last Sunday, we may not have come as far as we’d like to think.

Paul Canoville in action

The Accidental Footballer shows a football professional whose view of the game, limited to just the three phases of his career, is one of contrast. Journalistically, it recalls the highs (and lows) of playing and balances them with the cultural upheavals of the period. At 58, Nevin is proud of his roots and the principles he acquired from growing up in an East Glasgow tenement. His dad boxed, and taught him how to do likewise. When he lost a playground fight with five other boys, he joined his brothers in exacting revenge, one by one. For such a relatively small feller, he never shirked. It’s what has empowered Nevin to take up causes, such as the racism Canoville faced, even confronting members of the National Front. The same with tackling the homophobia he and Le Saux faced, simply for being…well, nothing more than different.

“We’ve not fixed racism,” he told the Royal Blue Mersey Everton fan site in an interview about The Accidental Footballer. “We’ve come a decent distance but we’ve not fixed it within society. We’ve certainly not fixed homophobia. But when a footballer comes out, that will normalise it further. There’ll be a hell of a lot of people like me, standing shoulder to shoulder, fighting for the cause. It will be great to see when it happens.”

One of the more uncompromising sections of the book focuses on the historic sexual abuse scandal that emerged in 1996 surrounding Celtic Boys Club. Nevin trained with the club himself as a youngster, but was released for being too small. Revelations by former Scottish international-turned talkSport presenter Alan Brazil, that he’d been abused by a club coach, reverberated around the game, opening up the path to wider allegations of abuse at other clubs, Chelsea included. “I couldn’t not write about what happened at Celtic Boys,” Nevin told Royal Blue Mersey. Ignorance, he says, was the result of a lack of eduction. “That level of ignorance does not exist anymore, which is great, but it’s really sad that it took that to actually happen.” He says that none of the kids involved were to blame: “Certainly not the ones who suffered from it, but neither were the other kids who weren’t abused.” Paedophiles, he says, are good at hiding. “They’re manipulative. So I had to write about it, although there were plenty of other things in the book I enjoyed writing about more than that.”

Indeed there are. Music, largely. His friendship with Peel - even sitting in for him on Radio 1 - his regular DJing sets at The Victoria pub in Dalston, the gigs he worked around his playing schedule (even travelling to Paris midweek to see the Cocteaus), or even being excused the second half of a Chelsea game to get to see New Order. But even in his music life, Nevin’s stance on things could attract trouble - he once had a knife pulled on him at a Clash concert by a thug who took issue with his campaign against racism. He still stands against it, and wholeheartedly embraces the institutional approach football now takes against it. “The great thing now is that I don’t have to stand up there shouting and bawling in front of everyone else,” Nevin told Sky Sports recently. “There are better people doing it now. Raheem Sterling can do it. Marcus Rashford can do it. But I do feel vindicated that I was there saying it all the time.” Nevin remains active with the Paul Canoville Foundation, and he is clearly pleased that things have moved on since his teammate’s horrific 1983 debut. “You won’t see a banner for me at [Stamford Bridge] but you will see one for Canners and that is great. I don’t need a banner. Canners, for what he did, needed a banner. It is so important.”

By focusing on his playing years, which ended in 2000 after returning to his native Scotland to turn out for Kilmarnock and later Motherwell, The Accidental Footballer draws attention to Nevin’s time in the game when things, like the player himself, were different. The Premier League was only eight years old when he retired, and he’d largely missed out on the astonishing wealth that professionals today command. Not that he seems bothered. He’s a proud working class Glaswegian, whose principles are solidly based on a fairer society. 

To return to my premise, he remains one of my favourite people in football and, for those five years he graced Chelsea’s numbers, for his history at my club. But, mostly, he’s one of my favourite individuals - erudite, intelligent, principled but not hectoring, and with - without doubt - the finest Zoom background you will ever see a footballer, past or present, putting on show.

The Accidental Tourist is out now, published by Moonray.