It has been said that the antics of José Mourinho this season have brought shame upon Chelsea and their owner, Roman Abramovich. But let’s be frank: Mourinho couldn’t bring shame upon the Russian oligarch if he turned up to Stamford Bridge dressed in drag, proceeded to insult every football referee in history and then sacked 20 of the medical staff before breakfast.
I don’t wish to diminish the actions of the Portuguese manager — they have been shameful — but let us not compare them with one of the great, unfolding scandals in English football. The money that has bankrolled Chelsea these past 12 years, which has brought multiple trophies while sanitising the image of one of the most dubious individuals ever associated with British sport, was corruptly amassed. Don’t take my word for it: listen to the man himself. It was in the High Court, during his legal battle with Boris Berezovsky, his fellow oligarch, that Abramovich admitted what many had suspected but had been constrained by libel laws from stating. As Jonathan Sumption, his QC, put it with immaculate phrasing: there was “an agreement to sell media support to the president of Russia in return for privileged access to state-owned assets”. He described the auction process as “easy to rig and was in fact rigged”.
That is squalid quid pro quo that has funded Chelsea. Abramovich and his peers provided Boris Yeltsin (then trailing in the polls for the 1996 election) soft cash and free TV advertising in return for a rigged auction that would hand them the natural wealth of the Russian people at a knockdown price. Within months, Abramovich was richer than Croesus, purchasing super-yachts and luxury homes while his countrymen came close to starvation. “The largest single heist in corporate history,” said Paul Gregory, the economist. This is the elephant in the room. When Abramovich is shown in the directors’ box, commentators talk almost affectionately about his eccentricity, charming grin and beautiful young wife. He is portrayed as a lover of Chelsea. One newspaper once described him as “an astute businessman”.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. This is a manipulative and ruthless chancer whose money was gained through dubious means, and whose calculated purchase of Chelsea had nothing to do with love of football. He did it to shield himself from possible retribution from Vladimir Putin’s gangster state. He knew that it would be politically tricky, even for a man with as promiscuous an attitude to the rule of law as the Russian leader, to come after a man so closely associated with a high-profile British asset.
This wasn’t his only insurance policy, however, as Karen Dawisha, the Russia scholar, pointed out in her book, Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? “Abramovich helped fund the purchase for $50 million [£32.7 million] of Putin’s first presidential yacht, the Olympia, fundraising for which preceded Putin’s being elected president,” she wrote. She also quotes Sergey Kolesnikov, the businessman turned whistleblower who said that Abramovich funnelled the first funds towards the construction of Putin’s palace in Gelendzhik.
It is a testament to how successfully Abramovich has been rehabilitated that he is talked about without a hint of irony as being undermined by the behaviour of Mourinho. The Chelsea board is reported to be worried about the “reputational effects” of the Portuguese’s actions. This is the grotesque fantasy land into which we have descended, lured into moral blindness by the grin of a man whose past is so often skirted around.
Perhaps the most extraordinary thing of all is that merely discussing the activities of Abramovich is considered “controversial”. Could there be anything more symbolic of how narrow the debate within football has become?
We talk about tactics and the high jinks of the transfer market, debate managers blaming referees or getting shirty with each other in the dugout— this is part of the modern game and the soap opera it has become. It is all good, knockabout fare.
But how often do we talk about the wider context? How often do we debate the motives of Abramovich, or the strategic aspirations of Abu Dhabi’s ownership of Manchester City, or Qatar’s foray with Paris Saint-Germain? Football has become a pawn in some of the highest stakes games of all, political and strategic: isn’t this part of its meaning, too?
Many Chelsea fans bitterly regret the identity of their club’s owner; others tolerate his presence. But there are some who see it as a badge of honour to defend his past. “What about the owners of other clubs?” they say. “Are not all rich people at least a little dubious?” This is cognitive dissonance of a kind that even Leon Festinger, the sociologist, would have found comical. It is whataboutery on turbocharge, and it is pitiful to behold. There is nothing anti-Chelsea about condemning Abramovich. Indeed, many of those who love the club are the most outraged that it should have been tainted by him. Even if it is difficult to figure out how to obtain redress for the Russian people from the swindle they suffered in the 1990s, it is surely obligatory to resist the way that Abramovich has been so seamlessly integrated into British cultural life. Certainly, the fawning coverage has got to stop.
Berezovsky died on March 23, 2013, alone in a locked bathroom with a ligature around his neck. Professor Bernd Brinkmann, an expert in asphyxiation, told the coroner that the marks on his neck could not have been brought about by hanging and suggested that he had been strangled and then hanged from the shower rail in the bathroom. The coroner delivered an open verdict.
Was the oligarch yet another victim of the so-called aluminium wars? There has never been any suggestion that Abramovich was in any way involved. But it does seem symbolic of the violence that raged in Russia after the Yeltsin era as rival gangs fought for control of the recently privatised industries. What we do know for sure is that billions in state assets were handed over for a fraction of their true value to a select group of men, including Abramovich, who became rich beyond imagination.
It is not just the Russian people, who have endured so much over the centuries — at the hands of self-appointed elites of all political colours — who have the right to feel a sense of outrage.
