But the Chelsea owner’s mask slips a little in the witness box at the Royal Courts of Justice

“A win,” the smartly dressed woman solicitor exclaims, greeting her client with a broad smile. She is not indicating optimism about the outcome of the case currently being heard on the third floor of the Rolls Building in London’s Royal Courts of Justice. She means the result of the weekend’s Premier League match involving the client’s football team: Blackburn Rovers 0, Chelsea 1.

In response, Roman Arkadievich Abramovich gives a polite laugh and a small bow. He makes a tiny gesture with his hands, opening them like upturned cups and spreading them apart: the semaphore of self-deprecation. “Yes,” he says, which is about as much English as he has allowed himself over the preceding five days in court.

One of the surprising things about Abramovich, a man of notoriously opaque facial expressions, is that he has such eloquent hands, which are in constant movement to add embellishment to the plainness of his verbal responses. While his left palm is held open and upturned, as if weighing the words he is about to utter in a tone of barely suppressed exasperation, the other hand will be clenched, only the index finger emerging to jab downwards in repeated emphasis. If you did not know that this was a man who made his money from oil and aluminium in the harshest imaginable business environment, you might imagine that they were the hands of an artist.

He turned up in good time for resumption of the case in which his erstwhile friend Boris Berezovsky is seeking compensation for shares in companies which Berezovsky claims they once owned together. Punctuality is the virtue of oligarchs, at least when someone is trying to take a few of their billions away.

Chelsea’s owner was occupying the witness box for the sixth day in a row, answering highly detailed questions about meetings and payments and favours given and received.

This is the longest close-up London has been given of the 45-year-old billionaire who bought Chelsea from Ken Bates in 2003, the first stage of an investment which must now be close to £1bn. That would represent around a tenth of his current fortune, of which Berezovsky is now claiming around half.

The minutiae of the case are mostly boring beyond belief but occasionally revelatory, as when he described the practice of krysha‚ the Russian word for “roof”, used to mean the sort of protection the well-connected Berezovsky provided his younger friend during the days when a small group of Russians were dividing the country’s wealth between them, or the concept of “transfer pricing”, which has nothing to do with Fernando Torres but is the arcane method of sale and repurchase of oil through which, at the expense of the Russian people, Abramovich amassed the fortune that kicked off the Premier League’s current financial arms race.

His friendship with President Putin is what appears to have saved him from the fate endured by Berezovsky, who is in exile in London, or Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was convicted of tax fraud and is currently banged up in Krasnokamensk, close to the Chinese border. Chelsea fans should pray that the relationship remains healthy.

During the breaks in the hearing Abramovich paces the floor outside the courtroom, grabbing a bar of chocolate or a bottle of water, smiling at associates and occasionally exchanging a word or at most two, observed by his trio of English bodyguards. When the day’s proceedings end they arrange themselves outside, scanning the street until he is picked up in a silver Mercedes people carrier, a modest vehicle, albeit armour-plated.

Yesterday’s proceedings were as dry as dust, except for when laughter greeted his remark that he never writes anything down because he usually can’t read his own handwriting, another example of his oft-proclaimed disdain for detail. But if there is any value for the disinterested observer in the proceedings in court 26, it is to demonstrate that the bland, slightly dopey image Abramovich projects from his upholstered seat in the West Stand at Stamford Bridge is very far from the actuality. As if we ever really thought any different.

At last Olympic organisers think inside the box

Thank goodness the London 2012 organisers are now trying to ensure that Box Hill, due to be climbed nine times by Mark Cavendish and his rivals during the Olympic men’s road race next summer, will be open to more than the few hundred spectators allowed on its slopes during the test event earlier this year. With a bit of thought, its ecological value can be safeguarded.

Meanwhile, cyclists experiencing withdrawal symptoms following the end of the road racing season are directed to Mountain High (Quercus, £20), a handsome volume by the photographer Pete Goding and the writer Daniel Friebe, who examine 50 great European climbs. Taking them in ascending order, they start with the malicious little Koppenberg, a feature of the Tour of Flanders, and end atop the 3,384m summit of the snow-capped Pico de Veleta, where the air is so thin that a rider’s oxygen intake is only 67% of that at sea level.

The Alpe d’Huez and the Stelvio are among the familiar names, but the authors also draw our attention to La Redoute, where Bernard Hinault permanently lost the feeling in two fingers in sub-zero conditions during the 1980 Liège-Bastogne-Liège classic, and the Croce d’Aune, the pass in the Dolomites where a mishap in 1927 inspired Tullio Campagnolo to invent the quick-release wheel, a boon to every subsequent rider. What they can’t solve is the riddle of why the Mont Ventoux should finish 3m higher when approached from the Malaucène side than it does from the more familiar Bédoin flank. But the great mountains like to guard their mysteries.

Florian Albert’s finest day

Florian Albert, the great Hungarian centre-forward, died last week, aged 70. For some of us the abiding memory of the 1966 World Cup will always come from Hungary’s 3-1 victory over Brazil at Goodison Park, and the move, started by a wonderfully perceptive pass from Albert, which climaxed with Janos Farkas volleying Ferenc Bene’s cross past a helpless Gilmar. A masterpiece of lethal fluency, invented by a blacksmith’s son.

Poppy row is a red herring

It is amusing, in a grim sort of way, that the campaign for England’s players to be allowed to override Fifa’s sensible ruling in order to wear the Remembrance Day poppy at Wembley on Saturday should be led by the newspaper that once proclaimed: “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!” Bogus patriotism does the dead no honour.

ChelseaRoman AbramovichRichard Williamsguardian.co.uk

Arsène Wenger is in danger of being swept aside in the spate of cash unleashed by Chelsea and Manchester City

Arsenal have been swallowed up by the long shadow of that 8-2 defeat at Old Trafford. In addition to the immediate agony, the result raised questions as to whether the club can maintain its membership of the Premier League elite. The fees are exorbitant and Arsenal have come no higher than third since they were runners-up in 2005. Property development around the Emirates should be a boon eventually, but a sluggish economy causes delays.

Manchester United have no such worries and means could even be found for a splurge if necessary. The sport is usually dominated by the wealthy. If United’s commercial operations are formidable, Chelsea and Manchester City, the expected challengers, are funded by indulgent proprietors. The public’s mind is often taken off financial anxieties by the extravagance that still persists in football.

Only a curmudgeon could complain when City have David Silva and Sergio Agüero in the lineup as well as Edin Dzeko, scorer of four goals in the 5-1 rout at White Hart Lane. It was just last season that Tottenham Hotspur were in the Champions League, where they got to the quarter-finals before going out to Real Madrid.

Fans might look back on that campaign with disbelief. Access to the tournament appears, after all, as if it will be even more restricted in future. Money has often been critical to success in football but the materialism is unusually pronounced among most of England’s elite at the present. The Glazers, proprietors of United, are exceptions of a sort since there is no requirement to subsidise the club from their own funds.

Elsewhere, owners bear regular losses. Since the start of 2011, Roman Abramovich, right, has approved outlay at Chelsea of well over £100m, in total, for Fernando Torres, David Luiz, Juan Mata and Romelu Lukaku, with the desire to sign Luka Modric still intense. The Stamford Bridge club, however, cannot face quite so many charges of gross materialism when indignation has to be kept in store for City.

While a club such as Liverpool have made great efforts to improve their squad, the arrival of Luis Suárez, Andy Carroll and others has been financed to a notable extent by the Torres sale. Cash is generated more easily by those who are already wealthy.

Sir Alex Ferguson’s impact at Old Trafford has intensified the allure the club has held for generations. The craving of businesses to be associated with United verged on self-parody when DHL chose to sponsor the training kit for £10m a year.

Liverpool, aiming to achieve a better financial footing, have long contemplated a new stadium to be built in Stanley Park but such a project is taxing even to contemplate. Indeed the club has been pondering the scheme and striving to advance it since 2001.

Elsewhere these matters can barely be a consideration. While City may not own the ground at which they play, the naming rights to what is now the Etihad Stadium still brought them £400m, over a 10-year period, from the airline. City, of course, are owned by Sheikh Mansour, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family.

There are dilemmas in all this. Efforts by individuals to spend their way to domination of football are nothing new and there is often comic effect when projects go badly wrong. No one in the public at large minds a fiasco of that sort, but money can obtain success, especially when it is spent with the sort of finesse that made Jack Walker’s Blackburn Rovers champions of England in 1995.

There was a romance to that, all the more so since the club were not to repeat the achievement. The present-day situation is rather different, with owners aiming to put their club in a permanent elite dependent on means that others will never enjoy.

Manchester United cannot be put in that category and would most likely by overjoyed if financial fair play regulations encumbered their challengers. As it is, the spate of cash unleashed by City and Chelsea in particular sweeps the game along excitingly, despite the misgivings among the authorities.

Michel Platini, the president of Uefa, presses on with his financial fair play initiative and many clubs would be grateful if they were saved from their extravagant selves and forced to be prudent. A dilemma lies at the heart of all this. The spectacle of astonishing footballers holds us in thrall to such an extent that we avoid thinking of the way in which wealth warps the sport as a whole.

Ultimately, however, there would be an increased diversity and a greater element of surprise if clubs were denied “financial doping” and made to play clean. The perspective of an oligarch is one the rest of us can barely imagine but perhaps even they might come to value the element of surprise that is critical to sport.

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