It will take more than a suspended transfer ban and £10million ($13.4m) fine from the Premier League to stop Chelsea supporters chanting Roman Abramovich’s name in times of trouble.
For many who follow the team home and away it has become a favourite form of protest against the BlueCo consortium led by Clearlake Capital and Todd Boehly: an angry, forlorn invocation of the owner who gave them the best memories of their football lives while building a club which, for better and worse, never valued patience in the relentless pursuit of the sport’s biggest prizes.
Many fans feel conflicted to varying degrees about Abramovich, but go to Stamford Bridge on a match day and it is not hard to find plenty who will never accept the substantive basis for the UK Government’s sanctions that compelled him to sell up following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. They will never sour on him — and BlueCo have operated in the shadow of his successes ever since.
BlueCo have also operated in the shadow of this Premier League investigation. It is worth taking a moment to lay out the scale of what the governing body found and Chelsea accepted: the Premier League’s sanction agreement says there were no fewer than 36 payments, totalling more than £47.5million ($63.25m), made by third-party entities controlled by or associated with Abramovich to 12 individuals or corporate entities between 2011 and 2018 for the benefit of the club and not reported to the league.
If that sounds a little abstract, then consider the fact that the signings of Eden Hazard, Willian, David Luiz, Ramires, Nemanja Matic, Samuel Eto’o and Andre Schurrle are among the deals involved. Several other names are redacted in the sanction agreement that the Premier League published as part of their announcement on Monday. There is no suggestion that any of the players were involved in or aware of any wrongdoing.
The signing of Eden Hazard is among the deals involved (Ozan Kose/AFP via Getty Images)
Chelsea are also still waiting for the conclusion of a separate Football Association investigation into 74 breaches, which could well result in a further punishment.
According to the Premier League’s sanction agreement, these were not only “obvious and deliberate breaches of the rules” but also “involved deception and concealment in relation to financial matters”. Consequently, had they been uncovered without Chelsea’s current ownership self-reporting and demonstrating “exceptional cooperation” with the investigation, the agreement states the Premier League board would have regarded a two-window transfer ban and £20million fine as the appropriate sanction.
The one saving grace, and a big reason why Chelsea were always confident they would avoid a sporting penalty, is the Premier League’s conclusion that “in no scenario would the club have breached the league’s Profitability and Sustainability Rules (PSR) during the relevant periods, had the relevant payments been properly included in the club’s historical financial submissions”. All parties have taken great pains to stress that point, perhaps with a view to heading off furious complaints from rival clubs who have received points deductions for PSR breaches.
But it strains credulity to claim that Chelsea gained no sporting advantage from the deals linked to these undeclared payments. Hazard is one of the club’s greatest-ever players and inspired Premier League title-winning sides in 2015 and 2017. Willian and Matic were also key contributors under Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte. Luiz and Ramires helped bring the Champions League trophy to Stamford Bridge for the first time in 2012.
Do the deals for those players to join Chelsea still happen if those payments are not made? Most significant of all, does a rising superstar like Hazard, who was coveted by all of Europe’s elite clubs in the summer of 2012, end up somewhere else? No one will ever know, but the documented record of these transactions is an unfortunate stain on the indelible moments and the major trophies that they helped bring to the club.
That reality is unlikely to prompt some grand cancelling or even a significant reappraisal of the Abramovich era among Chelsea supporters. For some, it may even constitute fresh cause for admiration, evidence that they once had an owner so desperate to build a winning team that he was prepared to break the rules in order to do it.
But it might be healthy if it tempers a little the rose-tinted view of the Abramovich era that has taken hold under BlueCo’s widely unpopular ownership.
Thomas Tuchel’s surprise Champions League triumph in 2021 papered over the cracks of Chelsea’s quiet decline from perennial Premier League title winners in 2017 to expensive top-four chasers. Recruitment was decidedly patchy and extraordinarily wasteful, culminating in the disastrous return of Romelu Lukaku in the weeks after glory in Porto. Valuable players were allowed to run down their contracts, while others sat on the books on unshiftable deals.
In the grander scheme, the proposed “cathedral of football” solution to Chelsea’s seemingly intractable stadium problem was allowed to wither on the vine due to Abramovich’s standoff with the UK Government over a renewal of his investor visa. That extraordinarily ambitious and eye-wateringly costly Stamford Bridge redevelopment project, like almost everything else Chelsea did under Abramovich, was not remotely sustainable without a figure like Abramovich.
Abramovich sold Chelsea in 2022 (Michael Regan – FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)
None of which is intended to shield BlueCo, who made the difficult transition to the post-Abramovich world as painful as possible for many supporters by completely overhauling the club on and off the pitch at dizzying speed. What they have constructed at great expense in its place has yet to truly resonate with the masses who fill Stamford Bridge, or convince many that another golden era lies ahead despite its focus on youth.
In the final five seasons of Abramovich’s ownership (following Conte’s title triumph), Chelsea finished an average of 25.4 points behind the Premier League winners. As things stand, that average gap under BlueCo is 27.5 points, skewed by a catastrophic 2022-23 season which yielded the club’s worst league finish (12th) this century. The big picture is more of relentless personnel churn than it is of marked sporting decline from much of what preceded it.
Whether it gets better or worse from here is an open question, but the Premier League’s punishment is a timely reminder that the invoking of Abramovich as a stick with which to beat BlueCo is pretty far removed from harking back to pure, uninterrupted glory.