“Any knocks, Thomas?” “How’s Kepa feeling after that penalty shootout, gaffer?” “Oh, and while we’ve got you, do you have any comment on the fact that the ruler who has links with your ultimate paymaster has invaded Ukraine and sent Europe to bed each night wondering whether someone is going to press the red button and cause our mutual destruction?”
Before Thomas Tuchel lost control a little, telling reporters to stop asking questions for which he had no answers, he pleaded that discussion should focus on what happens on the pitch. “I think we have a right to focus on sports, the players have a right to be focused and this is what we can tell the fans,” he said. Which works up until the point that those supporters cannot think about anything else but war on their doorsteps.
We can easily paint Tuchel as a victim of this scenario, two parts football coach and one part unwitting political correspondent. He is the public face of Chelsea because he is the only high-profile face of Chelsea as the awkward questions land on the mat.
If your club makes an announcement that provokes more questions than it answers, you should prepare to be asked questions the next time you are in the only environment where a club employee answers questions.
Roman Abramovich’s statement was both everything and nothing all at once. It formally transferred “stewardship and care” to a group of trustees who appeared to have received little forewarning and had even less appetite to take on the mantle. In that context, stewardship and care become the post-tragedy “thoughts and prayers” – probably well-intentioned and possibly helpful but ultimately meaning nothing at all on their own. Because this is Abramovich, a man with almost no public persona, we can presume that the vagueness was deliberate.
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This goes beyond Tuchel. Chelsea are one arm of Abramovich. They did not ask for his money, but they accepted it and used it to pay for players and managers and thus their success. They sold matchday programmes that commemorated a decade of his ownership. They – Tuchel, the players, supporters – can choose to disassociate (and we are all guilty of moral selectivism when it suits) but they cannot be surprised when it is scrutinised.
This goes beyond Chelsea. The same is true of Manchester City and Newcastle United and any other football club that welcomes investment whatever the source. Football made money its god and then treated any examination of that money as an act of blasphemy. The irony is that questions about wealth sources only ever seem to land when things go wrong on the pitch. Wealth makes football’s world go round; as it spins it creates a noise that deafens all disapproval.
This goes beyond football clubs. Fifa’s initial mealy-mouthed response to this invasion, when Poland, Sweden and other countries too took a stand and demanded Russia’s exclusion, might have shocked people but it shouldn’t have surprised them. Fifa’s president was the recipient of an Order of Friendship award from Putin in 2019 and uttered words that are now soaked in almost as much blood as irony: “The world has created bonds of friendship with Russia that will last forever.”
And the final step: this goes beyond football too. The more we learn about this invasion and the potential conflict that may follow, the more we learn about how western states have acquiesced to Russia and so created the stage on which Putin is now determined to perform. This isn’t a war that began last week, but began with the invasion of Georgia in 2008. And still Russian money was welcomed and Russian oil was relied upon.
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That is the greatest trick of sportswashing: it deliberately narrows the gap between those different actors – employees, clubs, governing bodies, countries. Usually, that might not matter. Sportswashing is successful because those actors are able to ignore its presence by focusing on the minutiae of their own experience. But this is its end game, played out in horrific circumstances. If football allows vast investment without care for the source, it is repeatedly rolling the dice. And when the wrong number lands and s**t gets real, it doesn’t get to avoid the questions that follow.
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