When Chelsea’s players kicked off their Champions League campaign on Wednesday, they wore shirts proudly emblazoned with two stars, one for each time the club has lifted football’s most prestigious club trophy. The twin triumphs count among 21 honours collected during the free-spending tenure of Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch who bought the club in 2003 and injected it with his oil and gas billions.
Last week, the Football Association issued 74 charges against Chelsea relating to alleged financial irregularities during that trophy-laden era. The club must respond to the charges by Friday. A parallel Premier League investigation has yet to conclude. The allegations are understood to relate partly to payments by offshore companies owned by Abramovich to agents involved in Chelsea transfers, as well as to controversial “third-party” investments in footballers. Details of the transactions were first revealed by the Guardian, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and international partners in 2023 after a months-long investigation.
The powers-that-be at Chelsea are heavily hinting that they expect a financial penalty, rather than a more painful sporting sanction, such as a transfer embargo or points deduction. Their logic is the slate has been wiped clean, because the consortium that bought the club from Abramovich for £2.5bn in 2022 voluntarily reported financial irregularities to the football authorities. The Chelsea of 2025 is not the Chelsea of the Abramovich era, so why should the alleged sins of the father be visited upon the son?
It would be a grave error for the FA – and the Premier League for that matter – to swallow such a nakedly self-interested argument.
First, the Clearlake-Boehly consortium that owns Chelsea has set aside £100m to cover potential financial penalties, after it became clear during takeover talks that a slap-on-the-wrist war chest may be required. Any punishment that falls within that range will have all the impact of a fly colliding with the windscreen of the juggernaut that is Chelsea, a club that has spent about £1.5bn on players since the takeover. What would be the deterrent for other club owners to do the same?
More importantly the payments uncovered by the Guardian and its media partners are far from trivial matters that can simply be walled off in the past. To recap, they involve millions of pounds in secret payments, routed through offshore companies to – among others – agents and business figures connected to players including Willian, Samuel Eto’o, Eden Hazard and the club’s former manager Antonio Conte. Hazard scored 110 goals for Chelsea in 352 games. Conte won them the Premier League and FA Cup.
The Chelsea we know today cannot simply be divorced from the Chelsea that enjoyed those glories. The trophies brought not only prize money but soaring commercial income, as the club’s on-field exploits won them legions of fans around the world. The best players came to see Chelsea not only as a source of sky-high wages but as part of a prestigious elite befitting their talents. In football, success breeds more success.
What is more, for every winner, there must be a loser. In every cup final a beaten finalist, in every Premier League campaign a runner-up. When Chelsea were allegedly flouting the rules, dozens of rivals lost out. Thousands, if not millions, of fans spent their hard-earned money and put their emotions through the wringer, only to end up disappointed. Chelsea’s alleged cheating – for that is what, if proven, repeated rule-breaking would be described as – made ripples that spread though time and still make waves.
All of this is before one considers precedent. Luton Town are among clubs to have suffered the severest consequences of previous regimes’ financial shenanigans, having in effect been ejected from the Football League in 2008. Their fans did not get so much as a single Champions League trophy to savour.
There is another element to Chelsea’s argument that appears to have gone largely unnoticed. The club may have self-reported financial irregularities but it is far from clear that the disclosure included everything uncovered by the Guardian and its media partners. Chelsea and the FA have declined to comment on this. If the charges relate partly to transactions that were not disclosed – potentially because the new Chelsea regime did not know about them – the already thin rationale for mitigation on that basis falls away.
Finally, while it may not be a matter for the FA or Premier League, nobody should forget the context in which this is happening. Abramovich remains subject to sanctions over his ties to the Kremlin, as a result of the invasion of Ukraine. He has still not made good on a promise to divert the £2.5bn from the club’s sale to aid victims of the war in Ukraine, prompting threats of legal action by the UK government.
This month, it emerged that authorities in Jersey are investigating the oligarch for money laundering linked to the £13bn oil deal that made him one of the world’s richest men. As the Guardian has previously shown, it was this money that flowed into Chelsea to fund even the transactions that the FA or Premier League knew about. Abramovich has denied any wrongdoing and has not been charged with any crime.
Football fans might also spare a thought for one tragic figure in the Abramovich saga, largely forgotten outside one corner of the Netherlands. The billionaire secretly bankrolled Vitesse Arnhem to the tune of €117m, leaked documents suggest, as Chelsea used the club effectively as its B team. Unlike Chelsea (so far) Vitesse ultimately ended up slapped with a huge points deduction. The club avoided complete disappearance only by the skin of its teeth and has emerged a shadow of its former self.
The plight of Vitesse is unlikely to feature in the FA’s deliberations but it could offer a salutary lesson. Actions have far-reaching consequences. That must be true for the big fish, as much as for the minnows.
