FREEZE ON OWNER PUTS CHELSEA IN A BIND
Can Premier League power survive without Abramovich's riches?
It was a fantastic 24 hours for fans of European club soccer and also schadenfreude.
First came the humiliating capitulation of Paris Saint-germain, the super team owned by the royal family of Qatar. Up by an aggregate score of 2-0 in a Champions League two-legged tie and looking every bit in control of the proceedings, PSG managed to barf up three quick goals on Wednesday afternoon, all of them scored by Real Madrid’s Karim Benzema, to crash out of the competition.
It would have been a shock outcome, except for the fact that PSG always seems to manage an embarrassing Champions League exit. Still, it was hilarious: the Qatar-backed project added another pile of costly superstars to its roster in the summer, including no less than Lionel Messi, as it chased the Champions League title that has eluded it.
Winning it this year, with the final scheduled to be in Paris, just a few months before Qatar plays host to the World Cup, would have been quite the jewel for the Emir and his family, who are only in the soccer business to soften their image abroad. Instead, all of their money again produced a team that couldn’t protect a twogoal lead for 45 minutes. Soft power, it turns out, doesn’t mean much when your defender makes a disastrous pass that leads to the winning goal.
But with the grins still on the faces of soccer fans who enjoy watching an ultrarich team soil their britches, news came on Thursday that the British government has clamped sanctions on Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, owner of Chelsea Football Club, the London team that happens to be the current European and world champions.
The move effectively freezes Abramovich’s holdings in place, which is significant because less than a week ago he suddenly announced that he would sell Chelsea, and with particular haste, in what was quite accurately considered an attempt to get his billions out of the club before the Brits swooped in and grabbed it like a luxury yacht named Oligarch on the Sea.
The international legal justification for all this is beyond the scope of a sports writer, or at least this one, but in short the U.K. government has declared that Abramovich is a close associate of Vladimir Putin, and has had material benefit due to his relationship with the Russian leader, and as such his assets are subject to seizure given Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The fascinating part, purely in soccer terms, is that Chelsea under Abramovich’s stewardship kicked off a two-decade transformation in Europe in which a small number of clubs with huge resources and accompanying budgets competed for most of the trophies. His spending turned Chelsea from a modest club into one that has won multiple Premier League and European titles, and paved the way for other fabulously wealthy foreigners to get in on the fun. Without Abramovich’s success at Chelsea there might not be the Abu Dhabi era at Manchester City, the recent Saudi takeover of Newcastle United or indeed the Qatari purchase of Paris Saint-germain.
The crackdown on Russian sport has hardly been subtle, with everything from a Paralympic ban to the cancellation of matches with Russian club teams to the dismissal of a Russian Formula One driver, but this move is of another order entirely. Abramovich has always denied a special relationship with Putin, but Britain is ignoring those denials as meaningfully as it can. If the United States, for example, were to go after the assets of Russians in the sports sphere known to have good relations with Putin, there are at least a few hockey players who might want to scrub their social-media histories.
While early reports from the U.K. suggest that Chelsea will at least be able to operate while its owner is sanctioned, it’s unclear what will happen next. He cannot sell it, and until now he has subsidized its massive costs with his own cash; when Abramovich announced the sale he said he would forgive loans totalling almost US$2.4 billion that he has made to Chelsea over his 20-year ownership. But the club also cannot raise new revenues, which apparently includes selling everything from tickets to tea cozies, and it cannot spend beyond a modest limit, throwing into doubt next week’s Champions League trip to France. Will Chelsea have an Everything Must Go sale when the season is over? Is everyone going to still get paid?
There had been much speculation in the British press that the government of Boris Johnson was avoiding sanctions on Abramovich precisely because Chelsea is a huge club with a lot of fans in the U.K. who are of voting age. No one cares if a Russian billionaire’s house or boat is seized, but when your soccer team might go from powerhouse to pauper in a blink there is bound to be outrage.
It will also not escape notice that, if Britain is of a mind to sanction the owner of a Premier League club because of awful things happening in a foreign land, the government might be persuaded to cast its eyes at some of Chelsea’s soft-power rivals.
At the least, some lawyers are likely receiving anxious phone calls from various Gulf royals right about now.