Roman's Ruins, Chelsea Boots
As Russia wages its war on Ukraine we are being inundated with round-the-clock news, a cascade of information, discursive jibes and cynical war-mongering. All the while one scampers through the muck to find viable positions and develop an informed opinion of the forthcoming nuclear war that may destroy us all. What has become quite apparent is the lack of a simple principled position that might both explain and transform the conditions of the conflict beyond denouncing the war and calling for humanitarian support. The unreconstructed anti-imperialist position, rooted in a Third Worldist outlook and socialist liberation of which I fervidly ascribed to in my younger years, doesn’t quite cut the mustard, lest you end up supporting a blood-thirsty revanchist regime on one hand, or a European nationalist struggle propping up sovereign whiteness on the other. However, what a global event like this has the capacity to do is accelerate and accentuate various antagonisms that fail to align into any neat singular whole. While this may not be revolutionary time per se, aspects that have been laying latent are suddenly forced out of their stasis. Roman Abramovich’s attempt to sell Chelsea FC and subsequent sanctioning is case in point.
Abramovich emerged from the state of capitalism that ran rampant in years that followed the USSR’s dissolution, with the emergence of the 15 independent nation-states, already recognised as republics within the union. Russia’s independence was decided behind the back of reformer Mikhail Gorbachev. Boris Yeltsin, with support from America and the West, goes on to establish a national political regime that opens up economic markets while concentrating and consolidating political power. This flew in the face of the sort of social democracy that Gorbachev’s wing of political thought espoused through the doctrines of perestroika and glasnost, and would be replicated, to varying degrees, within all of the former Warsaw Pact nations. The great promises of open markets and liberty were of course not all that they cracked up to be, and the privatisation of nationalised assets was a corrupt and bloody affair within Russia. Out of this wreckage a group of capitalists and high-ranked members of the security and political apparatus coalesce around Yeltsin first, then Putin, concentrating both economic and political power.
Roman Abramovich, from relatively humble origins as an orphan in Siberia, takes advantage of the liberalising economy making entrepreneurial forays of larger and larger scale. At some point in the mid 1990s, his success became entangled with murky underworld business, which in fact typified the whole system. His rise through this system leads to a meeting with the incredibly powerful Boris Berezovsky. Abramovich and Berezovsky purchased the Siberian oil fields, Sibneft, for roughly $150 million, far below market rate in an apparent rigged auction where they were the only bidders. It is now worth in the tens of billions of dollars. Abramovich also purchases, through dubious methods, much of Russia’s aluminium production: a large part of this money was laundered through Cyprus. (John Sweeney’s documentary from 2006 is worth watching for a snapshot of much of this.) And just to hit home how important and influential Ambramovich became, he married Yeltsin’s daughter Tatiana, becoming a key advisor to the family in the turbulent times of the 1990s. During the handover to Putin, Abramovich remains a key elite figure, whereas his partner Berezovsky runs afoul of the new regime and flees to London, showing the sort of volatile in-fighting that was par for the course.
In a parallel course of events the 1990s provides the period from which English football becomes reintegrated into acceptable national culture and its accompanying ideology: from the 1970s and 80s subcultural stylings of hooliganism and football casuals, through to commercialisation and founding of the Premier League as a breakaway elite league rooted in advertising and television contracts. The final rapprochement between mainstream society and football finding itself in Euro 96, held in England, with the hosts going out on penalties to the Germans in the semi-finals; Messrs Shearer, Gazza and Southgate, icons of a tragi-comic Englishness, that would go on to feed a New Labour emphasis on culture as national spectacle when Blair takes power in 1997.
No team encapsulates this turn-around as much as Chelsea. Ken Bates bought the club for £1 in 1982, a moment when the club was reaching a nadir: infamous for its hooligan element, the much-vaunted Chelsea Headhunters epitomised a decaying club in heaps of debt and performing very poorly down in the second divisions, a far-cry from the successful period from 1955 to 1971. Bates ushered in something of a renaissance, one that curbed the unruly contingents in the Shed End with electric fences installed, though never fully used, and brought the club back from the brink, salvaging the rights to pitch by granting control of the freehold of Stamford Bridge to the Chelsea Pitch Owners in 1992, a group controlled by supporters with shares limited to 100 per person. The group also had rights to the Chelsea FC name as tied to the pitch freehold, with a change of venue needing 75% member approval. This was a resolution which came out of a dispute with a property developer, Mahler Estates, who had bought the freehold during Chelsea’s financial troubles and sought to provide a check to any single actor making drastic changes in future disputes. In 1993, following calls from Bates for further investment after Chelsea became one of the founding members of the Premiership, insurance broker Matthew Harding invested £26.5 million into the club joining its board of directors. Harding, often at loggerheads with Bates, would later donate £1 million to Blair’s New Labour before dying in a helicopter crash in 1996 and having a stand at Stamford Bridge named after him.
In footballing terms, 1996 was a watershed moment for the Chelsea renaissance with Dutch superstar Ruud Gullit taking charge as manager, after previous player-manager Glenn Hoddle took the England job. Gullit brought in players from the continent including Gianfranco Zola, Frank LeBoeuf, Roberto Di Matteo and Gianluca Vialli, and they went on to win the FA Cup, finishing a respectable 6th in the league. The next season, success continued with two trophies in the League Cup and European Cup Winners’ Cup while Vialli took over as player-manager. Over the next few years Chelsea would continue to perform relatively well, with new arrivals such as Didier Deschamps and Marcel Desailly heralding pastures unthought of before. In 2000 Vialli was replaced by Claudio Ranieri, making record signing Jimmy-Floyd Hasselbaink for £15 million; inflation was soaring as football’s financialisation was taking full root.
It was around about here that I started taking notice of the game, with my parents engaged with the revitalisation of the sport; my dad the Chelsea supporter due to that fateful 1970 FA Cup Final against Leeds. Hasselbaink and Gudjonsson, Zola and Gronkjaer, Babayaro and Mario Melchiot, Desailly and Petit; nostalgic figures that seemed to speak of some sort of cosmopolitan multiculture, one imbued with the double-edged sword of New Labour culture industry where Rupert Murdoch was still king.
Enter, Stage Right: Roman Abramovich. Russian money had been pouring into London since the early 1990s after the UK government saw opportunities opening for foreign investment into the country. The Soviet collapse and their incorporation into the global financial markets proved prime movers, arguably completing a full economic liberalisation of the planet with China undergoing a transition under Deng Xiaoping from 1978 onwards and India liberalising in 1992. Many emerging Russian elites were investing heavily into London, receiving fast-track residency as a result of a visa system favourable to foreign investors. These elites gained their wealth through effectively expropriating and stealing the nation’s resources, hence investment into London real estate markets was a crucial site of money-laundering that enabled the corrupt snatch. (This podcast on Evgeny and Alexander Lebedev provides interesting context and colour to the time.) Abramovich’s purchasing of Chelsea FC for £60 million in 2003, paying off £80 million worth of debts in the process, would seem to fit this mould. He would go on to invest £1.5 billion in the club over the next 19 years winning many cups, multiple league titles and the champions league twice.
I was there at Munich in 2012 the first time we won the Champions League, with Drogba and co scrapping away to get us to penalties against Bayern. Relief and joy after that slip by JT at Moscow four years previous. My dad and I started going regularly in 2008/9 watching Scolari’s torrid time as he ripped into anything near the technical area. We were there for Ancelotti’s double winning year of 2009/10 managing to get season tickets in the Matthew Harding stand; saw the suave Villas-Boas come and go; and revelled in the good times that Di Matteo’s return to the Bridge provided, all capped off with the triumph in Munich. The year after, I attended university and our visits fizzled out, coinciding with Drogba’s departure and a feeling that we had done what Abramovich had promised to make happen, fulfilling everything Bates had set into motion.
Roman as a figure was understood initially as quite a cold and cut-throat operator, who would change things as soon as the going got bad. And while this didn’t necessarily change in terms of his operation, his image amongst supporters became softer; he appeared to become a fan himself and became a figure fondly looked upon by spectators as he clapped in his demure fashion up in the stands. While this isn’t to rehabilitate him as a person, in a vacuous and nihilistic time tying your ribbons to your club and marking out territory was a social commitment that seemed to cut through the crap. Maybe this was all New Labour ideology being shovelled down our necks; an End-of-History-pilled charade. For sure the floodgates have been opened: the Sheiks had taken over Man City, the Thais Leicester, the Americans Liverpool and Man United, fellow Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov was involved with Arsenal and more recently Everton, while the Saudi state have effectively bought Newcastle this season. And so too has there been resistance, from the Chelsea Pitch Owners dispute with Abramovich over the development of the stadium through to the spirited protests which nixed a breakaway European Super League just last year.
But the control of Chelsea, and of football clubs, is more than money, it's a question of soft power. While it may or may not be true that Putin ordered Abramovich to buy the football club, there is no doubt it is an important lever for him in negotiating the complicated system of power that Russian capitalism entails, one in which a nexus of strong-man figures with connections to the security institutions is balanced by robber-baron capitalists. Soft power, then, is explicitly engaged with an understanding of culture as a battleground that implicates financial systems through wider ideological frameworks. These that can relatively expediently incorporate the popular resurgence of a national pass-time in the form of English football into the shifting political economy of a financialising world power. Spectacle seems to mediate all.
Though, in the middle of all this is the recognition of a broken sovereignty, the failed bourgeois subject – that individuated social actor – becomes a tribal dogmatist, one that disidentifies with the socio-aesthetic realm on show. This may be the way in which many of Chelsea’s followers of colour have stomached the racist element; I could attest to that. The issue is not that Roman’s money is any worse than any other capitalist oligarch, even as we watch the Russian state pummel Ukraine; that would be the double standards of inter-imperial competition. Standards that had no issue with Abramovich’s deep ties to Israeli settlements and the Zionist colonialist project, nor with Putin’s decimations in Chechnya over the years, let alone the role of the Saudis and Emiratis in Yemen and beyond. The issue is of course about the commodification of culture.
If commodification is tied up with financialised markets of aleatory abstraction, then perhaps a response is a contrarian return to territory; one that understands the broken subjectivity that pervades as social condition, knowing full well there will be no great sovereign saviour. The football club brings assembly, and as Roman’s billions get slowly seized and Chelsea faces administration, maybe we’ve always been engaged in a Eurasian frozen conflict; the Battle of the Bridge, the crisis is at home, unheralded openings afoot. Who’ve we got in the cup again?