Ken Early: What now for Abramovich and the Premier League?

In the 2019 League Cup final against Manchester City, Kepa Arrizabalaga had defied his manager Maurizio Sarri by refusing to allow himself to be replaced by the supposed shootout specialist Willy Caballero before the match went to penalties, and then failing to deliver the shootout victory for Chelsea.

On Sunday, Sarri received his karmic payback. Kepa, now allegedly a shootout specialist himself, was summoned from the bench at the last minute for his manager, only to first torch his reputation as a specialist by conceding all 11 Liverpool penalties, including one that seemed to hit the sweet spot of his right glove on its way into the net, and then missing his own penalty to lose another final for Chelsea.

Not that anyone at Chelsea cared. The only question that matters there right now is what is about to become of the owner Roman Abramovich, the world's most famous Russian oligarch at a time when Russian oligarchs have gone out of style.

The scrupulously reticent Abramovich has spent the last week trending on Twitter, as opposition MPs demanded to know whether Boris Johnson’s government intended to sanction one of the very few members of the Russian elite who is a household name in the UK.

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On Saturday evening, two days after Russia launched its attack on Ukraine, Abramovich released a statement with the dramatic-sounding news that he was handing over the "stewardship and care" of Chelsea to the club's charitable trust. "Stewardship and care" turns out to be a pretty baggy phrase that might sound a bit like "ownership and control" to the uninitiated, but wouldn't fool any lawyers. Was Abramovich trying to make it look as though he had pre-emptively removed himself from the scene so that the British government might feel absolved from the responsibility to take further action?

Intentions

If so, it seems unlikely to work. Just before the game at Wembley, the Daily Telegraph reported that the Chelsea charitable trust had not been informed of Abramovich’s intentions until Saturday and was unsure whether it would be accepting his offer of the “stewardship”. And then, during the first half, Ursula von der Leyen announced fresh EU sanctions targeted against Russia and its billionaire elite. With the UK government taking Ukraine’s side against Russia’s invasion, and the violence and chaos of the war spiralling in a manner as terrifying as it is unpredictable, it is becoming increasingly difficult to imagine that Abramovich will continue as Chelsea owner for much longer. If the story is to end here it will bring to an end a near-20 year association which encapsulates much about the Premier League era.

Russia's richest man at that time was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who would the following year be sent to prison, where he ended up serving 10 years

The first I ever heard of Roman Abramovich was in 2002, the year before he bought Chelsea, when he was the subject of a profile in Time magazine which included some actual on-the-record quotes; to my knowledge he has never given another such interview. “Meet the second-richest man in Russia” was the title of a celebrity-style puff piece so glowing that Abramovich was even described as “tall”. Russia’s richest man at that time was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who would the following year be sent to prison, where he ended up serving 10 years; his fate helps to explain Abramovich’s reluctance to become a public billionaire like Trump, speaking his brains on the issues of the day.

Gigantic wealth

This profile was coy on the subject of how Abramovich amassed his gigantic wealth, saying simply that "Abramovich's big break came in 1992 when Boris Berezovsky, then the most powerful of the moguls, befriended the promising young man and brought him into the Yeltsin coterie. Nine years later, when Berezovsky fell out of favour with the new Putin regime, Abramovich took over his erstwhile patron's assets in the oil industry."

Thanks in part to Berezovsky’s failed legal action against Abramovich in a London court 10 years ago, we now understand a little better how that fortune was made amid the chaotic post-Soviet privatisations of the 1990s. With the help of western advisers, Russia’s economy was restructured according to the doctrines of neoliberal “shock therapy” – a set of policies which quickly ended up transferring ownership of the Soviet state’s vast assets to a tiny class of new billionaire oligarchs, with Abramovich to the fore. This was the founding disaster of the new Russian Federation, and echoes of the resentment it provoked could be heard in the speech with which Putin announced the invasion of Ukraine last Thursday.

Not that any of this was very apparent to Time magazine readers back in 2002. That profile presented a benevolent eccentric who, though described by one source as “the real financial genius of the bandit-capitalism epoch”, seemed mainly interested in spending his fortune improving the lives of the people of Chukotka, the remote northeastern province where he had recently stumbled into the governorship.

We know now that Abramovich instead became the dominant figure in the most successful sports league of the bandit-capitalism epoch. The newly liberalised and internationalised economic and financial systems of the early 21st century allowed him not only to obtain vast wealth in Russia but legally to transfer much of it abroad and spend it on, among other things, Chelsea FC. Imagine telling the workers who built the Siberian oil infrastructure, or even a 1980s Soviet bureaucrat, that one day soon wealth created by the Soviet oil industry would be converted into huge mock-Tudor mansions, Range Rovers and Rolexes in the stockbroker and now footballer belt of Surrey.

Such were the wonders of the second age of globalisation, on which the tide is now going out. With hindsight, we can date the high-water mark to January 2017, the month Donald Trump became US president, and when Shanghai SIPG paid £67 million to sign Chelsea’s lightweight attacking midfielder Oscar on a salary of £400,000 a week.

Greatest fool

Back then the Chinese Super League was a reliable greatest fool propping up the European transfer market, supplying giant cash injections to European clubs in exchange for unwanted squad players. These days even the league’s Chinese broadcast partners can’t be relied upon to pay their bills – and plausible speculation suggested that the collapse of the last Chinese TV deal was linked to the way the British government had suddenly cooled on various planned partnerships with Huawei at the urging of the Americans.

Brexit was a headache, increasing friction and reducing efficiency, but the escalating confrontation with Russia is a crisis of another magnitude entirely

The Premier League has been an icon of the post-cold war international economic order: a model of openness, internationalism, minimal regulation and unheard-of concentrations of wealth, with widening inequality justified by a blithe ideology of trickle-down economics and “to the victor the spoils”. Now, the crumbling of that order is creating new problems for the league. Brexit was a headache, increasing friction and reducing efficiency, but the escalating confrontation with Russia is a crisis of another magnitude entirely, which exposes the weaknesses and instabilities in how the league allows itself to be owned and operated. The league prefers to think of the world as a couple of hundred markets waiting to be conquered, and has always wished that football and politics wouldn’t mix; unfortunately, politics keeps insisting.

And, as club owners will have considered, if Russian and Chinese oligarchs are off the menu, who exactly constitutes the market for these supposed multibillion-dollar institutions? It’s a problem they don’t want, but they can ignore it no longer.