Any doubt about the effectiveness of sportswashing and soft power has surely been erased by events that have unfolded between Roman Abramovich and Chelsea since Russia invaded Ukraine.
We have watched the downfall of the original Premier League sportswasher and continue to see the uncomfortable consequences of a relationship turned sour.
There was always a spectrum of perception to Abramovich, even from the start: from almost god-like in the eyes of the most hardened Chelsea fans who weigh their sheer existence in the amount of silverware their football club wins, to “he’s a bit dodgy but seems to love Chelsea so let’s let that slide”, to the minority seeing Abramovich’s actions for what they were.
And then, last week, when the UK Government sanctioned Abramovich for supporting Vladimir Putin’s war, he became the pariah whose football club now clings to survival. And Chelsea could so easily have been Manchester United or Arsenal, who Abramovich considered buying.
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Historians argue we can learn from our mistakes of the past and if you cast your mind back 19 years to one of Abramovich’s first – and one of the rare – interviews when he spoke with the Financial Times in the Millennium Suite at Stamford Bridge, his words are as prescient as they are chilling. “I’m sure people will focus on me for three or four days but it will pass,” Abramovich said. “They’ll forget who I am, and I like that.”
And we kind of did. Abramovich slunk into the fabric of football like Homer Simpson backing into a hedge. He was not there, and then occasionally he was there: posing for a photograph on the pitch holding the latest trophy with that disturbingly expressionless face of his.
Whatever he did away from the pitch — whoever he associated with — was considered acceptable, as long as Chelsea kept winning. Yet within weeks of the tanks supposedly built using steel from Abramovich’s company — a claim denied by Evraz — rolling into Ukraine, he became one of the really bad bad football club owners. And his sanctioning by Government triggered a failed Premier League Owners’ and Directors’ Test, even though Abramovich himself had probably done little different than he had done for the previous 19 years.
Nonetheless, the man who is helping Putin had to go. But what happens if, say, Saudi Arabia decide to start helping Putin, too?
Relations between two of the world’s largest oil providers have improved in recent years, since they signed a pact to maintain higher prices for oil. Only last week, Russian arms companies — including UralVagonZavod and state-owned Rostec who have been sanctioned by Britain — were listed as exhibitors at an arms fair in Riyadh, the Saudi capital.
If Abramovich had to go because his steel company helped Putin, what if the Saudis start supporting the Russian president, too? Do the Premier League step in then?
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Gelhardt gets Leeds believing again with nine more games to secure Premier League survival14 March, 2022The Premier League had already decided the Saudi atrocities committed in neighbouring Yemen should not rule the state out of buying one of the country’s prime football clubs. What if the country’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who chairs the Public Investment Fund that owns Newcastle, starts supporting the war that isn’t so palatable to the Premier League or British Government tastes? Putin’s oligarchs are also said to have fled to Dubai for safe haven — the largest city in the United Arab Emirates, whose capital state, Abu Dhabi, owns Manchester City.
Changes are afoot to the Owners’ and Directors’ Test, the Premier League’s chief executive Richard Masters said recently. But where do they draw the line?
If the Premier League blocks investors with sportswashing and soft power motives, doesn’t that skew the top of English football forever? Because those are the only owners willing to pay the Premier League premium for a level of PR that simply isn’t for sale anywhere else.
It buys you an online army of millions of readymade trolls, it buys you fans willing to sing loudly and proudly about the sanctioned war-supporter during a show of support for Ukraine, it buys you prestige and global reach and a constant reminder to everybody of your gilded status on the global stage.
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Chelsea needs to be sold before next season or club can't continue as normal, ministers believe11 March, 2022Owners who do not wish to buy that kind of power aren’t interested in paying that premium. Abramovich was – he literally funded a Chelsea capable of becoming club football’s European and world champions from his own pocket. And that was always his intention. “I don’t look at this as a financial investment,” he said in that early FT interview.
Not so long ago we were told the Premier League had been given “legally binding assurances that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will not control Newcastle United Football Club.” Seemingly nobody beyond the Premier League’s Paddington offices was convinced that the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund was not controlled by, er, Saudi Arabia, whose crown prince also happens to chair the fund.
And so the Premier League becomes ever more irretrievably entangled in a web of its own creation and there appears no escape without a radical ownership overhaul. Historians also say that history repeats itself and, as it is, we are seeing the mistakes of the past become the mistakes of the present and very soon the future.
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