Abramovich: Football & the Moral Panic
There is zero to like about the Chelsea oligarch...so why are even (honest) liberals feeling creeped out by this purge?
In English football, all efforts at moral reform come contorted with hypocrisy. Yet even by Premiership standards, last Sunday’s match between Chelsea and Newcastle United was a marvel of virtue acrobatics. This was Chelsea’s first match minus the spectre of Roman Abramovich, the Russian who made billions from privatisation and spent it turning football into an image-laundering service for a global class of plunderers.
By any metric, there is little to like about Abramovich. His link to Putin is less direct than many imagine, but, quite aside from his standing with the Kremlin, Abramovich has put his wealth and power to nefarious ends. Indeed, his most direct complicity in empire-building lies far from Ukraine, in the Middle East, where he has donated $100 million to Israeli settler groups that illegally occupy Palestinian land.
So why does the purge of this saturnine presence feel less like a victory for justice than a product of collective psychosis? Even for those who have no sympathy for Chelsea, or Putin’s Russia, or the oligarch himself. Even for unabashed pinko liberals. Even the Guardian’s chief sports writer considers it a little creepy, calling it a “state of cognitive dissonance”.
There is little debate over Abramovich’s character, save, perhaps, among Chelsea fans. He belongs with Bezos and Musk as a candidate for the paradigm of entrepreneur as Bond villain. The problem is that principles for Russians are being invented on the hoof, with zero thought about their broader implications. The result might politely be called a metaethical muddle; or, less politely, rampaging hypocrisy.
Consider Chelsea’s opponents on Sunday, Newcastle United. Their owner is a sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabian: not just any old Saudi businessman, but the state itself. Just prior to Sunday’s game, that state executed 81 political dissidents. Internally, Saudi Arabia’s approach to democracy, sexual rights and freedom of speech makes Russia look like Portland. Externally, they are culpable for a war in Yemen that has produced the world’s worst humanitarian disaster and 400,000 deaths. As Ronan observes:
Newcastle’s ownership is not just ‘associated with’ or distantly tied to the destabilising, undermining and Biblical-scale destruction of its own neighbour Yemen. It is openly and personally engaged in it… Newcastle’s fund is owned by an entity that is literally, not potentially, sending tanks to kill civilians. But in this case those arms are supplied by Britain.
And it gets worse. Currently, with Abramovich’s assets frozen, the sale of Chelsea is suspended. But if the sale goes ahead, one of the favourite bidders is the Saudi Media Company: not directly affiliated with the Saudi state, perhaps, but nor is Abramovich directly affiliated with Putin. So English football’s great purge may simply mean replacing one character linked to a crooked regime with another.
Nor does it end there. Chelsea’s title rivals Manchester City are owned by the deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, a federation of absolute hereditary monarchies who are also embroiled in the Yemeni disaster. Aston Villa’s owners include an Egyptian who helped overthrow democracy and return the country to military rule; Wolves are owned from China.
And by the letter of the charges against Abramovich, there is space for a further provocation. If the aim of sanctions is to punish those who, by dint of national background, are benefitting from “undermining and threatening the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence” of other nations, then Liverpool, Manchester United and Arsenal had best be worried. Because they, like much of the Premier League, are owned from the United States of America.
Britain, remember, is not technically at war with Russia. The sanctions are being imposed, putatively, to punish violations of international law and to show solidarity with those afflicted. Formally speaking, nothing is stopping those sanctions being applied elsewhere. Indeed, some fantasy prone leftists are cheering on the measures against Chelsea, imagining that the anti-Russian mood might generalise to a wider purge against oligarchs of all national backgrounds. Sadly, this is unlikely; less likely, even, than the hope that solidarity with Ukrainian refugees might generalise into sympathy for all victims of persecution.
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