Roman Abramovich is not unusual. This is worth emphasising. Rich as he may be, and as politically connected as befits an ex-governor of a Russian province, Abramovich’s 18 years as owner of Chelsea is just the best known example of the ways in which economic power and political actors have come to shape and dominate global football.
Consider, beyond Abramovich, how Vladimir Putin’s regime has used the game. Russia’s leading clubs have been allocated to allied oligarchs, state companies and local warlords, such as Chechnya’s president, Ramzan Kadyrov. Football ultras have been recruited as muscle for ersatz youth movements and intimidating political opponents. Other pliant, unsanctioned oligarchs who still own foreign clubs include Dmitry Rybolovlev at Monaco and Cercle Brugge and Ivan Savvidis, president of Thessaloniki’s PAOK.
State-owned Gazprom has sponsored Fifa and Uefa, as well as Chelsea, Schalke 04 and Red Star Belgrade, three clubs in politically important markets for the company. And, the jewel in the crown, Russia won the hosting rights to the 2018 World Cup and put on a sporting Potemkin village that obscured both domestic protest over its disastrous pension reforms, and its own international malevolence.
Russia is not alone in this. In the past 20 years, football, never short of political suitors, has in much of the world been colonised by political power and projects. Why have the world’s states, politicians and political movements shown such an unprecedented interest in the game?
Money is a factor for some. Consider the former Honduran president Rafael Callejas, who attempted to financially secure his retirement by becoming the president of the Honduran Football Association, an institution even more corrupt and opaque than the office of head of state, by taking huge bribes from broadcasters.
Football is also the perfect place to launder yet more money. Russian organised criminals bought small Portuguese clubs for precisely this purpose, while Colombian and Mexican football remain awash with drug money.
Football, however, offers many things more alluring than mere graft or money-changing options. At a minimum, association with the game delivers profile and local popularity. More substantially, it offers established popular arenas for playing political theatre, ready-made and ritualised local identities to piggyback upon, and a source of malleable narratives to garnish political progress. Correctly used, it can do so not just for local or national politicians, but for nation states on the global stage.
Consequently, many politicians have systematically incorporated football fandom into their carefully constructed public personas and football metaphors into their language, like presidents Lula, Ahmadinejad, Mugabe and Erdoğan. Silvio Berlusconi and Mauricio Macri began their political ascents as presidents of AC Milan and Boca Juniors respectively. Others have actually played the game professionally while in power, like Bolivia’s Evo Morales or Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.
The perceptible rise in politicians’ engagement with the game has not been merely tub-thumping nationalism or an exercise in personal grandstanding – though there has been plenty of both of those – but has increasingly made football an object of state intervention.
Taking a leaf out of Putin’s book, the Aliyevs, the post-Soviet ruling dynasty in Azerbaijan, have sought to counter international opprobrium for their dismal human rights record with pharaonic stadium projects, hosting games at last year’s European football championships and the 2019 Europa League final and using the state oil company to sponsor Uefa and Atlético Madrid.
In Hungary and Turkey, publicly funded, multibillion-pound programmes of stadium redevelopment have been used by Orbán and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to help nurture a new class of allied construction and real-estate oligarchs, and both have acquired, in effect, their own football clubs, Puskás Akadémia and Istanbul Başakşehir.
Latin America is wearisomely familiar with the political uses of football and the 21st century has seen a short-lived Chavista takeover of Venezuelan football and a bitter 10-year battle between left and right over the nationalisation and then privatisation of domestic football’s television rights.
However, the real ambition is in Asia, where even the small teams can dream. After deciding against using public money to buy Manchester United, Myanmar’s junta ordered the country’s richest men to create and fund a Myanmar premier league. In China, where Xi Jinping’s “three wishes” – qualifying for, hosting and winning the men’s World Cup – have become official national priorities, a gigantic school football programme has been initiated to make it happen.
The UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who each own a major European football club, are spending heavily on football sponsorships and carry considerable influence at Fifa, Uefa and in Asian football too. In Qatar, the game is the single most important instrument in the state’s programme of economic and urban development and the most powerful plank in its foreign policy of visibility.
What appears so remarkable about this is that, like Abramovich’s arrival at Chelsea, it has, for the most part, been waved through, even welcomed, nowhere more obviously than the Premier League’s acceptance of Saudi state ownership at Newcastle United while the brutal war in Yemen continues to rage.
The world’s football federations and leagues have blithely accepted all of this, despite continuing to mouth the “sport and politics don’t mix” pieties of the 19th century. Even where they do have to face the political realties of our age, they are equipped with neither the legitimacy nor the legal or political instatement to do much about it – our own leagues, for example, persist with “a fit and proper person’s test” designed to exclude small-time fraudsters, not global powers.
None of this would matter very much if football had not become the singularly most important space in global popular culture. None of this would matter if sportswashing did not work, and football did not buy influence, but they do, as demonstrated so accurately by the Chelsea fans who chanted Abramovich’s name while others showed solidarity with Ukraine’s plight.
So what is to be done? We could start with a shift to the social ownership of all football clubs. We could insist on the strictest financial and legal regulations of football institutions. We could demand real transparency and accountability from national and international football federations, the empowerment of players and supporters and their deeper democratisation. Politics is not leaving football in the near future. The question is: what kind of politics do we want?
• This article was amended on 14 March 2022 because an earlier version referred to one of the clubs owned by Dmitry Rybolovlev as “Club Brugge”. It is another Belgian club, Cercle Brugge, which he owns.
• David Goldblatt is the author of The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football and The Game of Our Lives
