Do you remember Roman Abramovich’s much-vaunted role as peacebroker between Ukraine and Russia? A full 11 days ago in Russia’s repulsive war of choice on Ukraine, the erstwhile Chelsea owner was reported to be engineering some kind of impeccably connected end to hostilities. Can I shock you? This has turned out to be cobblers.
And yet, it was dutifully parroted to the world’s media by Chelsea Football Club’s spokesperson, Rola Brentlin. “I can confirm that Roman Abramovich was contacted by the Ukrainian side for support in achieving a peaceful resolution,” she announced, “and that he has been trying to help ever since.” Well done, Rola! This story made headlines around the globe for precisely one calendar day, and we haven’t heard a single word of it since. Unfathomably, Abramovich has been seen nowhere near the negotiating table, and it seems more likely that far from being engaged in “trying to help ever since”, the oligarch has spent most waking hours trying to shift his various UK assets before those nice pre-warners of the British government finally got around to freezing them on Thursday. The government claims his more measurable part in the war effort is owning 29% of a firm that may have supplied steel for Russian tanks. The firm denies it.
Claims of Roman’s pivotal strategic role in potentially ending the war felt so fantastical that they might as well have cast him as some peacemaking chameleon, a very Zelig of international diplomacy. He was there at Westphalia in 1648, where he played some of his best treatying, and at Versailles in 1919, where he had an absolute shitter. And yet, many accepted and repeated the claims – performing ever more unpaid service in the reputation laundromat. Abramovich had bought himself yet another day of grace to add to the thousands and thousands of days of grace he has enjoyed in the UK since buying Chelsea in 2003.
The fact is, a lot of people have always just preferred thinking the best of the oligarch. He was never hated by supporters at Stamford Bridge, for instance, and Chelsea’s travelling fans were even chanting his name within a minute of kick-off on Thursday night at Norwich. Not for their departing owner the indignities suffered by, say, former QPR owner Flavio Briatore, who was once caught on camera fuming: “Give me the names of the ones booing me or I sell the club!”
No point looking for the grownups in the room because there weren’t any. You always had a strong sense that the authorities in and around English football would have been extremely relaxed if Chelsea had started enriching uranium, or acquired medium-range ballistic missiles. Ooh, he’s put far more in to football than he’s taken out, you know?
As for Roman himself, that blank, mildly hangdog face was so often described as inscrutable, but it was actually very scrutable. It was perfectly obvious to anyone who spent more than a minute considering it that he continued to enjoy a super relationship with Vladimir Putin. Football was the lesser but still significant part of it. Aside from assisting Putin in successfully bidding for the sportswashing 2018 World Cup, Abramovich was also required by the Russian president to pay for some of it “in partnership with the state”. For a long time he effectively bankrolled the then Russia manager Guus Hiddink’s £6.25m salary.
Sport was so slow to catch itself on to reality that it would be hilarious, if the circumstances were any less horrific. Tomorrow Chelsea will host Newcastle, who are now owned by a group led by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia – but remember, those guys are the good autocrats, because they buy our weapons. And use them in a war in Yemen that has thus far gone on for seven years, killing or starving hundreds of thousands, the vast majority believed to be children under five. But of course, the sovereign wealth fund isn’t the same as the Riyadh government. They just have a good relationship with it, same as Roman Abramovich just has a good relationship with Putin. “Which owner knows the guy who’s killed more babies?” is a question you won’t be seeing on any banners at Chelsea-Newcastle.
Still, you have to say that Abramovich had a very good run. In this country there are murderers demonised less than guys who only become football fans later in life; the otherwise grotesque faux pas of being a footballing Johnny-come-lately was tolerated in Abramovich because he was stinking rich, which the English love.
And that love goes far beyond football. The English Premier League may have allowed itself to become disgusting in so many ways, but blaming all the ills on football really won’t do. Football doesn’t make society, it reflects it. The game is really just a small part of a much bigger British industry of servicing, laundering and enabling dirty money that is so large these days as to appear almost respectable. So let’s have no talk of people finally “waking up”, because people knew about Abramovich’s connections all along and preferred not to see, just as they are continuing to do with less newsworthy individuals. Pretending to be morally shocked by something you turned a blind eye to for years – that’s another thing the English are very, very good at. We must be the world’s leading importer of smelling salts. Which mild-mannered international businessman controls those mines? Because he’s had another good week.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
