Clean out the Chelsea trophy cabinet and send a clear message to all of our football club owners – rogue money must never bankroll silverware
IF the Premier League, FA, UEFA and FIFA had any cojones they would strip Chelsea of the 21 trophies they have won under Roman Abramovich.
If the oligarch money he has used to bankroll the most successful period in the club’s history has been illgotten, then surely the silverware they have won in that time should be taken away and their records expunged.
Hopefully, such action would dissuade any other oligarch, nation state or rogue owner from getting involved in our game. Before Chelsea fans start screaming at me, I’d be saying this about any other club if Abramovich had owned them.
And my overriding emotion in all this for the Blues is sadness.
Protected
Sadness that a constituent English club, which has been around for more than a century, wasn’t protected effectively from seeming rogue ownership by the Premier League and FA back in 2003 when Abramovich was allowed to buy them.
What we have seen these past few days is unprecedented, but this still needs to be a line-in-the-sand moment for the fit-and-proper person’s test, with Abramovich now disqualified from being a Chelsea director after being sanctioned by the UK Government.
And I do hope the FA will have a really good look at the governance of our game to see whether the top-flight structure is fit and proper, because we cannot keep bringing English football into disrepute and, extraordinary as the situation is, I still wouldn’t be at all surprised if we saw similar problems involving other clubs down the line.
Anybody could have driven a horse and cart through our fit-and-proper person’s test in recent years and, as a result, this stain on English football will take some time to wipe away.
I’m not surprised that Chelsea’s kit sponsor, Three, have chosen to temporarily suspend their deal and I’d expect others to follow suit.
You can’t have a situation whereby your moral compass, quite rightly, guides you out of Russia but doesn’t take you out of Stamford Bridge.
Distance
As for the players, they won’t give a s**t about where the money has come from, they will distance themselves from it all. John Terry’s
social media post of a picture of him with Abramovich, alongside the caption ‘The Best’ and two hearts, was tone deaf, but he was just telling the truth. Which is that he didn’t give a flying you-know-what about Russia or Russians, he just looked at it and said, ‘Here’s a bloke who enabled me to live my dream’.
Players will use plausible deniability – ‘I’m just a player, I don’t get involved in politics’ – and will be protected by the PFA.
That’s why I’d like to see the players’ union starting to ask questions of clubs and owners. Such as, ‘Is the money players are earning coming from generated revenue in the United Kingdom?’
And, ‘How do we distinguish if it is or isn’t?’ When Robbie
Fowler stood up for the dockers and when Sasa Curcic protested that NATO were bombing Belgrade, they were sanctioned and told, ‘Don’t protest, don’t get involved, we don’t do politics’.
But as the game has become more aligned with politics, it has become more and more difficult to extricate yourself from people such as Abramovich.
Chelsea followers will look at the situation similarly to Terry.
As would most fans of rival clubs. But surely now is the time for those supporters to start questioning how comfortable they are with the origin of the money that has funded their team’s success.