“If we win the league again next year, the fan base will triple,” Rob Hobson tells me, having seen website traffic already boom from 20,000 users monthly, pre-Roman Abramovich, to 130,000 today.
I met with members of the Chelsea Supporters Group at The Imperial, a Chelsea pub just down from Stamford Bridge on the Kings Road. These aren’t people who excite easily, preferring instead to remind you of leaner times. “We were there when the team was crap,” Gordon says. “The hardest team in London to follow. They hadn’t won anything.”
But on Roman Abramovich, conversation warms. His arrival was like the Kennedy assassination: everybody remembers when and where they heard. And all this because the secretive Russian billionaire grew tired of playing online Fantasy Football and, in the spring of 2003, decided to get involved in the real thing. csg president Trizia Fiorellino tells me how she was at work and her two mobile phones both started ringing at once and didn’t stop for an entire day. Rob Hobson remembers hearing Russian businessman and thinking gangster. “The feeling of the moment was, what exactly is he planning to do with my club?”
What the secretive Russian was planning at that point isn’t clear. Abramovich is the twenty-first richest person in the world according to Forbes, worth over $13 billion (US ). He is unapproachable at the centre of a web of protective corporate layering and he gives no interviews. At the time he bought the club, news outlets scrambled to find a photograph of the man who started selling plastic ducks out of his Moscow apartment and ended up owning the Russian oil giant Sibneft, whose control he secured in 1995 at a fraction of its market value.
What does seem clear is that Abramovich is weirdly committed to Chelsea for someone who—in what seems like a parallel life, lived by a double—also happens to be the very popular governor of Chukotka, in the farthest northeast corner of Russia. He goes to every Chelsea game. He visits the locker room after each one. Even the report that he originally set out to buy Tottenham—and was convinced otherwise by impossible game-day traffic on the high street outside White Hart Lane—doesn’t diminish the heroic timing of his investment. Those Chelsea Millionaires, it seems, were just about to go into receivership.
“We were at the precipice,” Fiorellino says. “Abramovich was a saviour.”
“Four days from bankruptcy,” Gordon says simply.
Abramovich wrote a long series of cheques to change that reality. One to owner Ken Bates, a flamboyant “wide boy” cement magnate who bought the club in 1982 for a single pound from another distressed owner. A second to pay off club debts. Another for new talent, including many English players, eradicating the “Foreign Legion” tag once and for all. A final one to fund a state-of-the-art training facility and football youth academy. Total estimates run to 300 million pounds, a number strongly supporting what Abramovich’s own people declare—that he is in it for the long term. He’s in it to be global.
“We need to increase our international fan base,” Chelsea chairman Bruce Buck said in an interview with British Industry magazine. He was referring to “people in Omaha, that never get to a Chelsea game, but subscribe to Chelsea TV Online and buy a Chelsea replica shirt. People in Osaka doing the same thing.”
Omaha to Osaka. It’s a vision highly evident around Stamford Bridge, with its gaudy Megastore, its architecture more Vegas than SW6 and all those excited, curious international faces. In the West Upper Stand, watching the Arsenal game, I seem to be beside a Dutch tour group. They all grip the seat arms and groan in agony when Chelsea misses a scoring opportunity, exactly like the local man on my other side who has been waiting fifty years.
