Will The Sale of Chelsea Change Football?

We don’t normally cover football news on this website, but this article isn’t really about football news. It’s about politics, investment, and financing. However, if you’re a football fan, you’ll probably be familiar with our subject matter already. Roman Abramovich, the Russian billionaire who has been the owner of Chelsea Football Club in the English Premier League since 2003, has put the club up for sale. We all know why he's been forced to put the club up for sale. We don't need to go into the details of that because it's a topic covered in depth elsewhere on this website. Still, the fact remains that the man who arguably started the trend for wealthy foreign owners to invest in English football clubs is now leaving the stage. This is a move that could have implications for models of football ownership not only in England but across Europe and the wider world.

Since Abramovich moved into Chelsea, foreign ownership has almost become the norm in English football. Manchester United - arguably the most famous football club in the world despite its lack of recent success - is owned by the Glazer family in the United States of America. Their neighbours Manchester City are owned by the Abu Dhabi-based billionaire Sheikh Mansour, who has turned the team into multi-time Premier League champions. More recently, Newcastle United has been bought by a consortium that has close links to the government of Saudi Arabia. The deal's completion was met with protests by fans of other football clubs in England. The idea of foreign ownership is more common in England than elsewhere, but you don't have to look very far to see that it's been replicated in other countries. The best example is across the English Channel, where Paris Saint Germain is in Qatari hands.

The people who own these football clubs aren't football fans. They're businesspeople. They didn't grow up supporting the clubs that they now own, and they had no attachment to the team before deciding that they wanted to buy it. The consortium that now owns Newcastle United freely admitted that they'd given serious consideration to buying Chelsea before settling on Newcastle. The identity of the club that they purchased wasn't important to them - all they wanted was to have a team and have the possibility of making money through owning that team. The Premier League is so flush with television money, sponsorship money and merchandising cash that owning a club can be a hugely profitable endeavour so long as the team remains in the Premier League. So out of touch are some of these owners with the finer points of football that they sometimes don't even realise that relegation is a possibility. That was famously the case when Venky's, a poultry company based in India, bought former Premier League club Blackburn Rovers. They didn't realise that it was possible for Blackburn to be relegated from the cash-rich Premier League, and they've been counting the cost of that relegation ever since. Their investment is now worth a fraction of what they paid for it.

When overseas investors assess a football club as a potential purchase, they don't look at how many trophies it has or doesn't have in its cabinet. They don't care about the club's history, and they don't necessarily care about its supporters so long as they keep buying matchday tickets and official club merchandise. They look at the amount of money coming in and the amount of money going out. Investments of any kind are a gamble, but it's possible to picture these investors as if they were looking at online casinos on a casino comparison site and trying to decide where to spend their money. A site that compares casinos will list the rate of return, bonuses, potential pitfalls and key features of a casino and then leave it up to a player to decide whether it's the right place to splash their cash. Players rarely make decisions based on emotion or attachment to a particular casino website - they make them based on where they think they're most likely to walk away with a profit. There's almost no difference between that and a billionaire debating whether or not to buy Chelsea - it's just that much higher stakes are involved when you're buying a Premier League football club.

This is not the way things are done in Germany, where it’s a legal requirement for supporters’ groups to own a 51% stake in a professional football club as a minimum. Investors are welcome to pump money into a German club if they wish, but they’ll never be allowed to hold the controlling stake or have the controlling vote. The fate of the club and all the important decisions that are made regarding its future remains in the hands of the supporters - the people who were there long before the investors came along and will still be there long after they’ve walked away. There are many fans in England who support the idea of a similar rule being introduced to govern the ownership of English Premier League clubs. There is an increasing number of politicians who feel the same way. Squeezing out the billionaires who already have their hooks into the country’s biggest clubs won’t be easy - but it might be possible.

Just a few short days after Abramovich decided he was selling Chelsea, an investigation by the BBC revealed that his billions may have been earned through corrupt deals. This was not new information. This is information that's been publicly available for well over two decades but is only coming to light now. Nobody cared to peer behind the Abramovich curtain and find out where his wealth came from before his nationality became an issue. They're only doing so now because Abramovich has to go anyway. There has been an attitude among football authorities for far too long that anyone with money is welcome to invest or buy, and the source of that funding doesn't matter so long as it can be made to appear legitimate. These latest developments might persuade the authorities to change their minds. If they do, English football will take one step closer to being back in the hands of supporters.

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