From kings of world football to third-best side in London?
Would you buy Chelsea Football Club if you had a spare couple of billion? World champions, European champions – as their large fan base are fond of telling everyone, they’ve won it all.
Chelsea possess a valuable and deep squad, a sharp manager and a strong youth set-up. They are based in a swanky part of one of the world’s great capitals and, courtesy of their success under Roman Abramovich, exert a global pull.
Yet the seller’s name, as a Russian oligarch, carries with it a problem.
You might be buying the club debt-free and at a knockdown rate in Abramovich’s haste to dispose of his UK assets before any potential sanctions, but the possibility of sanctions cast a long shadow.
Abramovich wants out fast but these deals take time and, as recent exchanges in Parliament have shown, he is a marked man.
Labour want action taken against him and the Foreign Secretary Liz Truss is thought to agree. She has talked about a “hit list” of oligarchs.
What if Chelsea are frozen mid-negotiation? What if they are suddenly no longer Abramovich’s to sell? Abramovich has promised to donate the net proceeds of any sale to the victims of the war in Ukraine but when Germany is seizing oligarch’s superyachts there are no guarantees that the UK Government will not rule football clubs fair game if they were to impose sanction.
Of course, there will always be someone with an ego big enough to overrule logic – someone will take on Chelsea. But there will never be another owner like Abramovich. The depth of his pockets, his willingness to reach into them and the emotional buy-in that he had for Chelsea ensure he stands apart.
His methods may have been ruthless – the coaching churn was savage – but the pedigree of the people he was able to bring to the club delivered an extraordinary train of success. The World Club Cup completed the collection and he was there in Abu Dhabi to lift it.
The next phase for Chelsea looks a good deal less certain. Since the Premier League began, no club have made bigger losses. Abramovich has plugged the gap. Without his regular cash injections, this is going to feel like a junkie going cold turkey.
In the same way that Sheikh Mansour has inflated Manchester City to the status of super club, Abramovich has enabled Chelsea to punch above their weight. Chelsea are unlikely to go into any sort of terminal tailspin but at the pointy end of the Premier League life is about to become much, much harder for them.
When it comes to keeping up with the Joneses, money isn’t everything but, as Chelsea more than anyone over the past 20 years know, it doesn’t half help.
Chelsea squeeze the pips in terms of match-day revenue but with a capacity of 41,000 Stamford Bridge delivers barely more than half that of Old Trafford. Tottenham and Arsenal take more money each weekend.
London’s third-best club? The prospect would send a shiver down the spine of every Chelsea fan.
But financial reality is about to hit and the blue flag is unlikely to be flying quite as high from now on.