Roman Abramovich and the End of Soccer’s Oligarch Era

There were, over the years, three stories that explained how Roman Abramovich washed ashore at Chelsea. Each one, now, serves as a kind of time capsule, a carbon-dated relic from a specific period, capturing in amber each stage of our understanding of what, precisely, soccer has become.

The first took root in the immediate aftermath of Abramovich’s takeover of Chelsea. It was light, fuzzy, faintly romantic. Abramovich, the tale went, had been at Old Trafford on the night in 2003 when Manchester United’s fans stood as one to applaud the great Brazilian striker Ronaldo as he swept their team from the Champions League.

Abramovich had been so smitten, it was said, that he had decided there and then that he wanted a piece of English soccer. He considered Arsenal and Tottenham and settled on Chelsea, drifting bohemian and glamorous just below the Premier League elite. He had fallen, so hard and so fast, that he bought the club in little more than a weekend.

And that, at the time, was almost enough. It was absurd, alien, the idea of this unimaginably wealthy enigma suddenly descending on Chelsea, lavishing hundreds of millions of dollars in transfer fees as if they were nothing. But it was flattering, too, in those early days of Londongrad, of Moscow-on-Thames, as the stuccoed houses of the capital’s finest streets were filling with Russian oligarchs, the country’s finest schools thronging with their children.

All of it appealed not just to the laissez-faire approach of Tony Blair’s Britain — come one, come all, as long as you can pay for the price of a ticket — but to the ego of both the country as a whole and the Premier League in particular.

Russia’s young plutocrats had more money than Croesus, more money than God, money that could buy anything they wanted. And what they wanted, more than anything, it seemed, was to be British. Abramovich wanted to be British so much that he had bought a soccer team, a plaything in the self-styled greatest league in the world. His money added just a little extra spice, a further dash of glamour, to the Premier League’s endlessly spinning drama; his money served to make the great English soft power project just a little more enticing.

It was only a few years later that the second story emerged, in the aftermath of the jailing of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. Perhaps, the idea was floated, Abramovich had not fallen in love with soccer; or, rather, he had not only fallen in love with soccer. Perhaps he did have an ulterior motive. Chelsea, after all, did not just provide him with access to the very highest echelons of British society; it gave him a profile, a fame, too.

He did not seem to relish it, particularly — “one day they will forget me,” he had said, in one of the rare interviews he has granted since arriving in England — but he seemed prepared to believe it a price worth paying. Being an oligarch was a dangerous business. Chelsea, perhaps, was Abramovich’s security against the shifting tides in the Kremlin.

That was the story we told ourselves as Chelsea went from usurper to establishment, the club that initially inspired the idea of cracking down on arriviste wealth suddenly recast as one of its foremost advocates. It was the story that took root as Chelsea racked up Premier League titles, as it conquered Europe not once, but twice: that soccer was the sanctuary, the ultimate mark of acceptance.

It was only, really, when others started to adapt Abramovich’s playbook that the narrative was challenged. First one and then two Premier League teams fell under the aegis of nation states, or of entities so closely aligned to nation states that it can be difficult to tell the difference unless you really, really want to squint. The idea of sportswashing bled into the conversation. The sense that soccer was being used took root. Abramovich’s possible motives were reconsidered.

And then, on Thursday, we saw for the first time — plain as day — what the purpose of it all had been, the story in its true, unvarnished form. For two weeks, the British government had dallied over applying sanctions to Abramovich, not necessarily the richest or even the most powerful but still by some distance the most high-profile of all of the caste of oligarchs, the face of oligarchy in the west.

A surprising portion of those two weeks, it turned out, had been spent trying to find a way to make sure that Chelsea could continue to function, roughly as normal, once Abramovich’s other assets were frozen. The players, the staff and the fans — especially the fans — must not suffer, the government said. A few hours earlier, Russian artillery had shelled a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine. But the government was clear: The sanctity of the Premier League could not be sullied.

That was the purpose all along, it seemed. Abramovich probably did cherish the profile that owning Chelsea brought him. He certainly seemed to relish the sport.

But mainly, he had come to soccer because it entangled him in British society in a way that owning any other business simply would not. None of the other oligarchs who have been sanctioned have been given a bespoke “license” to continue operating one of their businesses. That is not, after all, how sanctions are supposed to work. It had taken us 19 years, and the death of thousands of Ukrainians, to realize that, to see the world as it was.

Now, at last, we know why Abramovich was here. Now, at last, we can begin to understand the price we have all paid. It is not only Chelsea that must now face up to an uncertain future: not only the next few months, as the club picks through the thicket of restrictions on its existence — its club store closed, its hotel no longer permitted to sell food and rent rooms, its crowds restricted to season-ticket holders — but beyond, too.

The club could yet slide into bankruptcy, sold off to the highest bidder by the government. Or perhaps it will wither, slowly and irrevocably, its players leaving whenever they are permitted, the club unable to sign replacements. Maybe there will be peace, and an easing of the sanctions, and maybe Abramovich can recoup his investment and his loans. No matter how it plays out, there is no going back. The fans do not, and cannot, know what comes next. It is up to them to decide if the memories and the trophies were worth it.

The echoes of Abramovich’s swift, abrupt exit, however, will carry out further into the game. His arrival marked the start of what will come, in time, to be thought of as soccer’s oligarch age. It was Abramovich, as noted last week, whose arrival kick-started the inflationary spiral that has fractured European soccer beyond repair, with only a handful of clubs hoarding all of the wealth of the game, ruthlessly stripping its natural resources for their benefit.

His departure will prove to be no less epoch-defining. Modern elite soccer is built on growth, the conceit that there is always more money out there. That is why Real Madrid and Juventus and Barcelona want, so fervently, to launch a European Super League, because they are convinced that if only they did not have to deal with UEFA, they would be able to harvest the bottomless riches of all of the broadcasters and sponsors desperate to fill their accounts.

It is why UEFA has been so determined to expand the Champions League, so convinced that it can find the money to satiate the boundless greed of the great and the good. All of it is based not only on the idea that the golden goose will keep laying, but the faith that there are a hundred, a thousand more golden geese out there, a whole flock of them.

If that was ever true, it is not now. UEFA will find another sponsor for the Champions League to replace Gazprom, but it will not find one that is quite so generous. There is, after all, a premium to be paid for exercising soft power. Exponential growth is rather more challenging when one of the prime drivers of it has closed down.

So, too, the clubs face a reckoning. Not only the teams owned by princelings and nation states and politicians, but those that are not. It is not just the promise of soaring television rights deals that have drawn the “acceptable” investors into soccer, the private equity groups and the hedge funds and the Wall Street speculators. They have no more fallen in love with the game than Abramovich.

All of them have bought in to get out, at some point in the future, when they have made their clubs as profitable as possible, when the prospect of a lucrative return is at hand. And yet, all of a sudden, they find their list of potential buyers limited. Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia: They all have their clubs now. The great gushing of cash from China ended years ago, as Inter Milan might attest. Now Russian money is out of the question, too.

There is no shortage of the rich and the powerful and the speculative, of course, even with those markets closed up and sealed off. But those that remain are a different type of buyer: They are other private equity firms, other hedge funds, other Wall Street and Silicon Valley types. They are, for the most part, the ones who want to make a profit. They do not want to be the ones who buy at the peak of the market. They did not make their money by being the sucker.

That might seem, perhaps, a little indistinct, a touch theoretical, but it has real consequences. It means reassessing how much profit might be made, and how large the payout might be. That, in turn, means altering the equation of how much it is worth putting in. The change will not be immediate, overnight, dramatic. But it will be a change nonetheless.

That will be Abramovich’s ultimate legacy, the lasting impact of the era he began on what seemed to be a whim and he ended, in the space of a couple of weeks, in the middle of a war. Soccer’s age of the oligarch is over. This time, there can be no excuse for failing to understand what the game has become. On that, we have clarity. Where it goes from here remains shrouded in doubt.

Correspondence

We would be here for a long time if I listed every single Brooklynite who wrote in, last week, to inform me that there are, as it happens, several cricket grounds in Brooklyn. There are so many, in fact, that my impression now is that there is little but cricket grounds in Brooklyn, and so if anything it perhaps needs to diversify its sporting offerings a little.

The exact number of cricket grounds in Brooklyn remains the subject of fevered debate. Fritz Favorule pitched five, with the mention of a Brooklyn Cricket League, too, while Laurence Bachmann made mention of “at least half a dozen that I know of,” rather suggesting the real number could be in the thousands.

Credit to Laurence, too, for being the only correspondent willing to take on the thornier side of that equation. “There are thousands of bakeries,” he added. That may be, Laurence, but do any of them do a steak slice? (Admittedly, he vouches for their sausage rolls, which is a good start.)

Sorry, regardless, for causing such offense in what is, without question, one of the top five New York boroughs. If I’m honest, I don’t think Brooklyn particularly needs to worry about competition from Headingley.

On a less fractious note, thank you to Felipe Gaete for offering a Chilean perspective on Bielsa. It was Chile, you will remember, that Bielsa transformed for a few, wondrous years into the foremost power in South American soccer. “I’ve thought a lot about why he is so loved in a field in which silverware is all that matters,” Felipe wrote.

“I think he holds a good deal of the values that many of us know are right, but can’t afford to apply: He gives back a goal in the name of fair play. He is also an incarnation of what the majority of fans enjoy the most: hope. The joy of winning is usually very short compared with the sense of what it might become.”

That is a wonderful, and accurate, sentiment, Felipe, so it seems fitting to leave you with the last word.