Abramovich changed Chelsea, and he changed English football. But he leaves a tainted legacy

EXPERIENCE teaches a person to beware billionaires bearing gifts so you will have to forgive me if I do not buy into the narrative that Roman Abramovich, the pathfinder for the Premier League’s mega-rich generation of club owners, is leaving Chelsea in a blizzard of generosity and philanthropy.

It has long been said that London is like the Wild West for the opportunities it offers to foreign investors and, now that the game is up for the allies of Vladimir Putin, Abramovich is getting his investments the hell out of Dodge as fast as oligarchically possible.

The idea of writing off £1.5billion of loans as a parting present to the club he has owned for nearly 20 years is beguiling until one remembers that he bought Chelsea for £140m in 2003 and is hoping to sell it for north of £3bn.

It is also worth waiting for the small print of his proposal to establish a charitable foundation where all net proceeds from the sale of the club will be donated, a foundation, he says, that ‘will be for the benefit of all victims of the war in Ukraine’. Others have already noted the qualification inherent in ‘net proceeds’.

In the statement Abramovich released last week, he does not mention that the war was started by his associate, Putin. Nor does he mention that the invasion is becoming a slaughter, a bombardment of an outgunned nation of brave men and women whose lives are being ruined, whose towns and villages and cities are being destroyed, whose families are being murdered.

Maybe billionaires like Abramovich think that money can cure everything, but it can’t. It can’t bring back the dead. It can’t buy a kid a new father or a new mother. So here’s an alternative statement: all the money in the world, all the net proceeds to all the charitable foundations, will not be enough to wipe away the blood of innocents that continues to be shed in Ukraine.

It is like one of those books where the postscript changes everything. Yes, in football terms Abramovich’s reign at Stamford Bridge was a success. In terms of trophies, it was the best period in the club’s history. His investment catapulted Chelsea from also-rans to the kings of Europe.

In football terms, the first real Chelsea team of the Abramovich era, the team with Jose Mourinho at its head and John Terry, Frank Lampard and Didier Drogba as its leaders, will be remembered as one of the iconic sides in English football history. They played with the swagger and the grit imbued by the Special One when Mourinho was at the height of his powers.

Abramovich’s money lifted them to the heights of the club game, too. They won the Champions League in 2012, when they shocked Bayern Munich and again in 2021, when they shocked Manchester City. Abramovich’s money funded new iterations of Chelsea sides and kept them at the top, or close to it, for all of his time as owner. So I understand why Chelsea fans sang his name at Kenilworth Road before the FA Cup tie with Luton Town last week as the news broke he had put the club up for sale. Doing it during the minute’s applause for Ukraine at Burnley yesterday was pathetic and despicable but tribalism in English football knows no bounds.

For Chelsea supporters, Abramovich was a good owner. He spent lavishly on players. He brought the fans success they had only dreamed of before his arrival. When it came to who his friends were and how he had made his money, most of us looked the other way.

His influence on the game is more open to question. Abramovich ushered in the Billionaire Boys’ Club era in the Premier League. We can draw a line from him taking over at Chelsea to Sheik Mansour’s acquisition of Manchester City and Saudi Arabia’s annexation of Newcastle. Sportswashing works and Abramovich was its pioneer.

Chelsea’s spending was intoxicating at first as it shattered the duopoly that had recently been established by Manchester United and Arsenal. Arsene Wenger’s fortunes never recovered from Chelsea’s new-found power in the transfer market.

But Abramovich’s deep pockets had other consequences, too. The money spent by the Russian oligarch led to steady inflation in the fees other clubs paid for top players and the money paid for their wages, too. As others spent more to catch up, the gap between top and bottom widened. In terms of the money the Premier League raked in from television deals, it had never had it so good. And yet most of their clubs lost money.

Abramovich has loaned the club £1.514bn, which means that the total cost of his investment in the club, including the purchase price, is almost £1.7bn. Chelsea have racked up losses of £896m during his two decades of ownership, the highest in the Premier League.

Abramovich’s arrival in English football changed our game in a way we could not have anticipated. Now our top division is peopled by nation states owning our clubs and by a host of other billionaires from across the globe. Increasingly, they want more. Unversed in the history of our game, some have tried — and will try again — to create a European Super League that would destroy our pyramid if it became reality.

Abramovich was good for Chelsea but his influence has harmed the English game. We can tell ourselves that these billionaires are beneficent men, we can tell ourselves that these states who own precious pieces of our football culture want nothing in return for their largesse, but we are kidding ourselves if we persist with that. Many have warned of the insidious

He thinks money can cure everything, but it can’t bring back the dead

When your club owner has friends like Putin, bad things happen

repercussions of hawking our clubs to owners like this but, still, there was something about the way it is ending with Abramovich that felt as if a mask had been pulled away from our eyes and we could see clearly again.

When your football clubs are owned by men like Abramovich, who have friends like Putin, sooner or later, bad things are going to happen. When your football clubs are owned by the Saudi Arabian state, which murders journalists and is conducting its own war in Yemen, sooner or later there will be a price to pay. When your football clubs are owned by men like Mansour, the deputy prime minister of the UAE, and the UAE fails to condemn the war in Ukraine at a UN Security Council meeting, it embarrasses our game.

Abramovich changed Chelsea. And he changed English football. But when we think of his legacy to our game, we will think of the circumstances in which he sold the club, we will think of the things he did not do and the things he did not say as Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine and the world shuddered.