If Chelsea successfully defend their Premier League title, it will not be the usual victory for mammon but a reflection of traditional football values embodied by Lampard, Drogba and company
In November 2006, before Chelsea were due to face Manchester United in an earlier “Super Sunday” clash, Peter Kenyon, their then chief executive, delivered an infamous pledge. Describing Stamford Bridge as “a fairly soulless place” before Roman Abramovich’s takeover, Kenyon said: “By 2014 we want to be internationally recognised as the No1 club. Our revenue has grown dramatically and is now on a par with United. It’s a very ballsy vision but one that has captured the interest of the owner.”
This corporate bombast made most Chelsea supporters wince. It was the price they paid for ending a 50-year wait for a second English championship and for Abramovich’s generosity. But the cost was higher than they thought. The shallowness of Kenyon’s proclamation rendered it harder for Chelsea to spread the word around the world because audiences in America and the Far East thought it presumptuous for a Russian oligarch to think he could buy their affections.
Chelsea are a “ballsy team” again, a fact that was in doubt before the 2-1 home win over United on 1 March started a run of eight wins in nine league games. Victory at Old Trafford this weekend would lift Carlo Ancelotti’s side to the summit, on goal difference, with two games left. As ever with Chelsea, the question is: would anyone outside Stamford Bridge feel anything grander than apathy should the blue bulldozer crash its way to a successful Premier League title defence?
The question is asked neutrally. The hostility to Chelsea around the land is irrational, in part, because it is rooted in the old antipathy to the idea of “buying” trophies, which is a ludicrous allegation these days, because they almost all do: either through sugardaddyism (Chelsea, Manchester City) or debt (United, since the Glazers took charge).
The lingering disgust at Abramovich’s spending is not so sophisticated that it reveals our concern about the appropriation of public wealth by Russia’s oligarchs. Oh no, let’s not pretend it’s the hungry family in the Moscow tower block people care about when Chelsea go out and snatch Fernando Torres for £50m. But there is still a visceral resistance to the ostentation: the fleet of yachts and the ex-SAS bodyguards, not to mention the inscrutability of Abramovich himself, which can come across as a kind of rich man’s contempt.
Even this is selective. There are corporate people who have damaged British society far more than Abramovich ever could or would, but are still allowed their larcenous bonus culture. In the football context, though, Chelsea players are still judged in relation to their owner. Each indiscretion becomes a display of “decadence” or “arrogance” – an image that is harder to dispel when John Terry misuses the office of England captain or Ashley Cole shoots an intern with an air gun.
Harder, too, when Abramovich fires managers the way Cole dispatches work experience staff. With his sackings, Abramovich has about a 50% success rate. Claudio Ranieri was popular and capable but it took José Mourinho to drive the team over the finishing line. Avram Grant was steady but out of his depth. Luiz Felipe Scolari was a bust, as several senior players told the owner. But both Guus Hiddink and Ancelotti have been solid bets.
It is the instability that causes the damage, of course: the constant culture shifts, which this team has done well to assimilate over seven years. The global proselytising continues but with less chutzpah. This week Chelsea, who posted a loss of £70.9m in their most recent accounts, hired a firm called ECN Management to market players such as Torres and David Luiz in China. What does this really mean? Search me. But ECN says: “Chelsea players are some of the most prominent ambassadors of the world game.”
Anyone whose love of the game predates this new imperialism could tell these air-mile collectors that it is all about the team, results, trophies, the personality of the manager and the ethos around the club. These are the things neutrals warm to.
Ancelotti and Hiddink have both been statesmen, and there are several Chelsea players you would enjoy having a drink with: Petr Cech, Frank Lampard, Nicolas Anelka and Didier Drogba, who, from personal experience, is charming company away from the combat zone.
Their curse is to be associated with a style that has drawn more on power than finesse, and which elevated gamesmanship to a dark art during the Mourinho years, while their bosses frantically opened soccer schools in America and started websites in Mandarin, which is standard business practice these days in the crusading Premier League.
But if Chelsea sneak up on United’s blindside with a £50m striker adding little, it would not be the usual win for mammon. It would be a victory for the powers of recovery.
ChelseaRoman AbramovichPremier LeaguePaul Haywardguardian.co.uk
