Sing along with the Chelsea Football Club diehards to the tune of “Robin Hood”:
Abramovich, Abramovich, buys all the men.
Tells you everything you need to know about how sports-washing works. It cleanses the most murky of reputations of the world’s billionaire class while it corrupts football fans’ love of the game into an oligarchical popularity-building contest.
Now the announcement overnight by the UK government that it was extending sanctions to seven more oligarchs in a list headed by Chelsea’s multibillionaire owner Roman Abramovich offers sport the opportunity to break the nexus. It could be the biggest change to the sports industry since the broadcasting wars of the 1990s.
The ownership of England’s Premier League Chelsea club by Abramovich is — or rather was — a turning point in modern sport in 21st-century capitalism, bringing together the green-washing of fossil fuel fortunes with the reputation laundering of the mysterious Russian oligarchs.
Football has been the vehicle of choice for billionaires wanting to wash off the stain of oil. The City Football Group is majority owned out of Abu Dhabi and controls English League leader Manchester City and Australian A-League men’s leader Melbourne City.
Late last year perennial EPL struggler Newcastle United was bought by an entity majority owned by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Its fans are already spending the money.
England is the laundromat of choice. Until just this week, it offered the perfect range of services: high-level financialised systems for moving money in, out and all around (now safely out of the remit of European Union regulators); property laws that safeguard money against arbitrary state seizure (unlike, say, Russia); party donation practices where the political tit has for generations been rewarded with the House of Lords tat; tough defamation laws to squash any unsavoury Grub Street speculations.
For the oligarchs, it’s not just England. The top club in the now-banned Russian competition, Zenit St Petersburg, is owned directly by the state energy company Gazprom. The past decade’s top club in Ukraine, Shakhtar Donetsk, is owned by local oligarch Rinat Akhmetov.
It’s got deep roots: most famously, the most unsurprisingly successful club in 1970s East Germany, Dynamo Berlin, was headed by Stasi boss Erich Mielke.
Sports-washing can be (sometimes literally) horses for courses. In Australia, the major contribution is through horse racing with the Melbourne Cup-winning Godolphin syndicate owned by Dubai’s Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.
For the oligarchs investing in English football, there’s quids that go with the pro quo. The billionaire-owned clubs have won over the fan bases by pumping money in to buy, develop and pay players, inflating wages bills beyond the capacity of non-billionare-owned clubs to participate. Chelsea, for example, is reported to have a wages bill almost 10 times that of, say, Burnley, who they beat 4-0 last weekend (and where their fans disrupted a tribute to Ukraine with their Abramovich song).
Abramovich has a reputation as the oligarchs’ oligarch. He made his money out of the privatisation of Russia’s oil and aluminium industries in the 1990s and is reported to have tapped Vladimir Putin as Boris Yeltsin’s designated successor in 1999.
Since buying Chelsea in 2003, Abramovich has vaulted the club from a mid-table also-ran to the global elite, delivering 19 titles or cups in under 20 years. In the last games under his control, the club won the Club World Cup, all but qualified for the European Champions League quarter final, and narrowly lost the final of the English League cup in an epic penalty shoot-out.
No wonder Chelsea fans sing his name. And no wonder fans of other clubs disparage the team as “Chelski”.
The challenge for Chelsea — and other clubs holding out for a sports-washing boost to their fortunes — is that once Russian oligarchs are taken out of the equation, there’s only so many billionaires with an uncertain past or a fossil fuel-tainted present who need the clean up that professional sport offers.
That’s driving football to adopt the US sports business-oriented approach where teams not only need to pay for themselves, they need to turn a profit for their owners.
That shift, too, seems hard for Chelsea, at least for the time being. Although they’ve been given a special exemption to continue playing while under sanction, they can’t sell merchandise or tickets to games (other than for pre-paid season ticket-holders). They can’t sign players for future contracts, nor enter into transfer arrangements.
Chelsea is not just one more football club owned by an immensely wealthy individual. It should be noted that Chelsea, the first English club bought by one of Putin’s pet oligarchs, was the top Tories’ club of choice. Chelsea’s supporters for many years has included a large part of the Tory government’s cabinet, its MPs and top Tory officials. Decide for yourself how coincidental it is that Chelsea, out of all the Premier clubs, was the Russian’s first choice.
Yet further evidence of the decline of the Cliveden set?
They would not have touched it – “Rugby is a game for thugs, played by gentlemen whereas soccer is a game for gentlemen, played by thugs.”
That might explain Chelsea’s ghastly supporters.
The gambling industry to the rescue ?
Never mind the irony.
Thatcher’s Big Bang in the City, when the further fringes of high-finance were untethered from physicality – in the form of siezable assets, has given us a different world of more money than value or ‘productive return’ (read:arbitrage) hence the constantly rising stock indexes.
They are unmoored from Price/Earnings (P/E) but that seems irrelevant.
It is an interesting psychological point that casinos give glossy plastic tokens in exchange for negotiable cash as it seems to numb the sense of loss.
Is gambolling in stocks & shares less removed from action/consequence?
To me it comes down to the industrialised hypocrisy of our era.
Chelsea just so happens to be one of those rare English football clubs situated in a wealthy area (hence the A-List celebrity fanboys and Tory politicians). But it also pulls from a fairly major catchment in the poorer areas of South London where only Millwall and Charlton Athletic had a historic reach (hence the far-right hooligan fanbase – which has at least diminished through both age, and the gentrification of the game introduced in the aftermath of the Hillsborough tragedy.)
Essentially, English Premier League football is a microcosm of the market, with success dependent on owners outgunning and outspending the competition, and consumers not too worried about the details of the product as long as it makes them feel better, as long as they win.
In addition, the Premier League itself was a cash-cow monopoly gifted by the Tory Party to Rupert Murdoch for services rendered.