Foreign Billionaires Bring English Football to World, Agony & Ecstasy to Fans

We’re going to win the league!
We’re going to win the league!

“Well,” says David, an investment fund manager, smiling slyly at my elbow. “What do you make of all this?”

I can only shake my head. But what I’m thinking is that it looks very much like what the local press started calling it shortly after Chelsea was purchased by Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich two years ago. It looks like The New Roman Empire, a force that will upend the prior order of things, that will accomplish precisely the objectives of this revolutionized football club: quite simply to become the biggest, most successful in the world, to be known in your neighbourhood, wherever you happen to live.

I am part of a visible phenomenon at Stamford Bridge these days: the football tourist. Those guys drinking down at the end of the Shed Bar? Norwegians. The people spilling out of the coach that just pulled into the yard? Chinese. The fan clubs from New York and Iceland are both reportedly here. Local fans, I learn with each conversation, are bemused.

“It’s been fifty years since we won the league,” said the man in the seat next to me during that Arsenal match. “Do you have any idea what that means? We’ve been waiting fifty years.”

No, I don’t have any idea. There were no blue-and-white scarves hanging from the coat rack in my West Vancouver boyhood home. My allegiance to Chelsea is a perfectly North American construct: an arbitrary, although inspired, whim. Specifically, a sporting fever picked up watching a five-and-a-half-foot-tall striker named Gianfranco Zola who could tuck free kicks into top corners with a dexterity that took the breath away. “The Little Sardinian” joined Chelsea in 1996, and, after a few years watching him on television skim uprights inches beyond the keeper’s reach and bend wicked shots around walls he couldn’t even see over, I was hooked.

As were many others. Chelsea is located in famous, fashionable West London. Think Chelsea boots, green mohawks, skinhead chic, Sloane Rangers. The place is hard-wired into the global cultural grid, and that’s probably why I’ve run into more remote Chelsea fans over the years than long-distance followers of, say, Scunthorpe County. And the buzz on Fulham Road lately suggests that the Chelsea Football Club might well become the biggest local export of them all.

The club has long had a flamboyant appeal. In the late 1990s, they had so much expensive imported talent, many referred to them as the Foreign Legion. They were led by a player/manager named Gianluca Vialli who grew up in a sixty-room Italian castle. Lots of flash, but success always seemed to elude the team.

“Chelsea had a reputation in those days for pretty football that was ultimately ineffective,” says Rob Hobson, editor of cfcnet, the club’s hugely popular news and discussion website. More bluntly put, Chelsea had the Little Sardinian but not much else to cheer about. Consistently poor on the road and lazy in defence, the derided “Chelsea Millionaires” averaged just sixty points a season through the 1990s, finishing middle of the pack most of that decade.

Over the 2004–2005 season, however, the club was transformed. Abramovich hired a new manager, the utterly confident José Mourinho, who had recently led Portuguese team FC Porto to victory in the European club championship, the Champion’s Cup. And by the end of his first season, Mourinho had revolutionized the club’s play, blending a continental defence with an English-style counterattack. The hybrid has not only resulted in two trophies—the League Championship and the Carling Cup—but Chelsea has smashed records, winning in precisely the areas where they used to be weak. Only fifteen goals were scored against them in league play. They’ve earned the best awaypoints total since the Premier League was established in 1992, and ninety-five points total for league victory.