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.

Pulling the plug

Picture: Reuters

I dabble in politics at my peril with this blog. Worse, dabbling in geo-politics. I’m just not intellectually equipped to process any sort of cogent argument, either to present as my own or replay that of others. But I do know, as if anyone else needed convincing, that the situation in Ukraine stinks. There: hardly the most sophisticated statement you'll read on the subject, but it does.

Amid the back-and-forth on the international reaction, with a consensus of world leaders condemning Russia’s menaces towards its independent democratic neighbour saying “this is a disgrace - we should definitely do something” (or “down with this sort of thing”, to quote from Father Ted), the response has so far been somewhat tentative, even if stern words and some actions have been proffered. As is the glacial progress of these things, Russia’s toes in south-east Ukraine have been met by initial sanctions by the US, the UK and the EU, but there is also a sense of things not too far too soon 

There is, though, an ominous sense that Vladimir Putin has only just got started. Ever since he annexed Crimea in 2014, and continued to invest in his military capabilities at a staggering rate, it is increasingly apparent that he has set his mind on reshaping Russia, petulantly repositioning himself on the world stage as a man who should not be ignored, or both. Some observers say that the events playing out now have been in his game plan for years. Of course, at time of writing, the official line is that Russian forces are merely “peace-keeping” in the so-called ‘breakaway republics’ of Donetsk and Luhansk, but with every public proclamation Putin makes, it is pointing towards the possibility that he has the entirety of Ukraine in his sights.And then what? Or, rather, and then who?

This afternoon Putin secured the permission of the Russian parliament to use force abroad, an ominous procedural development that merely seemed to confirm the inevitable. In a press conference, he once more referred to Ukraine’s potential NATO membership, pontificating on the country’s nuclear ambitions, not that I - or anyone in Ukraine - had any idea that it had any. Ah, the nuclear spectre. Believe it or not, there are actually people within Putin’s sphere of influence who believe that it would win a nuclear confrontation with the West. I’ll return to that shuddering thought later in this post.

It all ladders up to an increasingly isolated and even paranoid president. Which is a worrying flag to his state of mind. His rambling speech on Monday night to a rooted, rictus-grin collection of Kremlin apparatchiks provided sinister. apparent riffing on Ukraine’s cultural heritage. This had some equivalence to the Nazis dehumanising Jews and other minorities at the outset of the Holocaust, denying them an identity, later re-enacted throughout an occupied Europe. Effectively, Putin has now denied an entire nation its identity, effectively branding Ukraine a non-state and, effectively, an extension of Russia itself, rather than a separate, independent democracy which is the eighth most populous in Europe and the continent’s second largest after Russia itself. CIA reports that Putin's thugs have already drawn up a ‘kill list’ of Ukrainians incompatible with Russian state values, like homosexuals and political activists, is a frightening echo, not just of the Soviet past but of fascist Germany’s darkest days.

Whether Putin follows through with a full occupation of Ukraine or not, there was enough in his Kremlin unloading on Monday to suggest more of his inner psyche. Some have hinted at mental instability, of a paranoid loner increasingly isolated by COVID-19 (the ridiculous long table and cavernous meeting room for his security council was no posture - this was social distancing on an irrational scale). There is the suggestion, too, of the “ticking of time”, as the Ukrainian ambassador to the UK mentioned on the BBC’s Newsnight, hinting at Putin facing up to advancing age (he turns 70 in October) and, perhaps, a sense of impotent unfulfilment in the 22 years since he first became president. We know he’s a macho narcissist, with his preposterous bareback, shirt-free horse riding publicity pictures from holidays in the Russian wild, depicting a rugged huntin’-shootin’-fishin’ outdoors type (and, curiously, always pictured alone) rather than the more wholesome custom of world leaders being photographed with wives, children and pets, or pointing at fish in Cornish markets.

This raises the prospect of Ukraine being Putin’s last hurrah. After two decades quietly (or not so quietly) seething about Mother Russia being deprived of its empire, he has possibly been building to this. It’s hard not to meander off into trivialisation by comparing him to a fictional Bond villain: but while 007’s last onscreen adversary, Saffin, who hatches a maniacal plan to kill everyone with nanobots, was a somewhat underdeveloped character in No Time To Die, the parallels with a seemingly insecure figure like Putin can be easily drawn. At the end of the day, most despots resemble cartoons in some way, shape or form. Which makes our acceptance of them as entertainment ever-so-slightly worrying.

So what's the solution? Hawks are pushing for direct confrontation, but that can be interpreted in one of two ways: economic sanctions being one, pushing NATO to its extreme eastern edges being the other. For the first to work, analysts say, they need to be comprehensive and punitive. Here in the UK, that means Boris Johnson finally tackling the Russian money swilling around London. But will he act? Will he address the Russian donors to his own party, who supported his election in 2019, and who are rumoured to have been involved in the Vote Leave campaign before it? Will he clamp down on the City of London being used, quite blatantly, as a money laundering market for Putin's chums? 

I have to declare an interest here: my football club, Chelsea, has enjoyed unprecedented success since 2004 when Roman Abramovich bought it and invested millions of his fortune into the club. And while no one, least of whom me, has ever questioned his motives (and certainly not the outcome), should all of the oligarchs operating in the UK not be punished to send a signal back to the Kremlin? Boris Johnson mistakenly told the House of Commons that Abramovich was “already facing sanctions”, a point later clarified as incorrect. But more forensic examination of other Russian millionaires with business and political interests in London certainly provides a platform which politicians on all sides of the debate want to see cracked down on.

Then there’s the second scenario: NATO building up its forces in the Baltic states, in Poland, Romania, the Czech Republic and Hungary, all of which could soon sit on a border with the redrawn Greater Russia. Too provocative, say some, especially with Putin flexing his nuclear muscles with “missile exercises” in Belarus at the weekend and further rambling today about Ukraine which, of course, gave up it’s Soviet-era nuclear arsenal 30 years ago as it became independent. In exchange, Russia, the US and the UK guaranteed Ukraine’s security in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. That, like the Minsk Agreement, now appears to have been torn up or, at least, is hovering over the shredder. For now, the consensus that Putin is not prepared for a hot war with the West, either philosophically or strategically. But if a cold war returns, we go back to a state of being that I grew up in fear of - the Cold War becoming hot.

In the film The Hunt For Red October, the former submarine commander Skip Tyler tells Jack Ryan: “When I was twelve, I helped my daddy build a bomb shelter in our basement because some fool parked a dozen warheads 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Well, this thing [the Red October] could park a couple of hundred warheads off Washington and New York and no one would know anything about it till it was all over.” It’s a line that has been brought abruptly back to me, along with the anxiety I had as a teenager. When my brother got married and moved out, I moved into the back bedroom of our house. Its window faced west, and in the distance I could see planes coming in to land at Heathrow. Although, 15 miles away from the airport and the planes still tiny specs, I knew that Heathrow’s proximity put me and my family in the direct path of any conflagration caused by a direct nuclear strike on it. It gave me recurring nightmares. A resurgent, belligerent Russia might just bring those nightmares back.