The end of the novel: how Abramovich fell in love with Chelsea and invested a billion pounds in the club

On the sale of the football club, he could earn hundreds of millions, but the love for the game turned out to be stronger.

Saturday's Tottenham-Chelsea match could be the last London derby for the Blues' Russian owner. Visa renewal issues and complicated Russian-British relations could force Roman Abramovich to sell the club. To do this, however, will not be so easy: Soviet Sport found out that Abramovich has invested about 1.2 billion pounds in Chelsea all the time and may want to return this money upon sale.

Manchester, which made Chelsea rich

April 23, 2003. Champions League match between Manchester United and Real Madrid. There are more than 66 thousand spectators at the Old Trafford stadium. Among them is a Russian businessman Roman Abramovich, he was invited to the game by business partners.

Abramovich was lucky - he got to the match, which turned into a legend, as soon as the final whistle sounded. Played the two richest clubs in the world with a full set of superstars in the compositions: for Manchester United played Beckham, Van Nistelrooy, Veron, Giggs, for "Real" - Zidane, Figo, Ronaldo And Roberto Carlos. Scored to the eyeballs, Old Trafford saw Ronaldo score three goals, how Manchester United equalized twice, and only after David Beckham entered the field did he take the lead (the day before, Becks quarreled with Alex Ferguson, and the coach kept him on the bench until the 63rd minute. Beckham came out and scored two, but Real Madrid still reached the semi-finals on aggregate).

Eyewitnesses say that this game made a strong impression on Abramovich. Before that, he was not fond of football and did not watch it. “22 people are running after one ball - it’s just not interesting,” Abramovich said about football, according to his first business partner Vladimir Tyurin.

A month and a half after Manchester United - Real Madrid, Roman Abramovich bought London's Chelsea for 140 million pounds. According to rumors, he first wanted to buy Manchester United, but could not. Only after that Abramovich turned his attention to the London clubs and chose Chelsea, burdened with debts. In his first year, he invested more than £200m in the team. Next year - another 150 million pounds.

Already in the 2003/04 season, Chelsea was able to climb to second place in the final table of the championship of England. The following season, the club became champions of the English Premier League (EPL).

Chelsea reached the Champions League final in 2008. The match was with Manchester United and was held in Moscow at Luzhniki. Everything came together in the game - the club that made Abramovich fall in love with football, his own team and the Russian city. But Chelsea lost - the meeting ended on penalties, in regular time they played 1:1.

Moscow Champions League Final 2008 - key moment for Roman Abramovich and Chelsea. By that time, he had already invested £700m in the club, an average of over £100m annually. After a dramatic defeat in the 2008 final, another era of Chelsea began - the proceeds from Abramovich became more modest and he no longer invested more than 100 million a year.

Soviet Sport calculated that in 2009 Abramovich sent only £25.5m to the club, and in 2010 even less - £13m. But the trend did not last long - the very next year, Abramovich's love for the club returned, and he invested 80 million pounds in development. And in the 2011-12 season, Roman Abramovich's dream came true: his club won the Champions League, defeating Bayern in the final.

Today, Abramovich is in danger of leaving the club. The British authorities did not extend his visa, problems may arise due to difficult Russian-British relations. Abramovich was already offered $2.3 million for Chelsea, but he did not sell. We calculated that this amount would be enough to recoup all investments and still receive income of almost half a billion dollars. The transaction itself could become the largest in the football market.

A love that only three billion can kill

The volume of Abramovich's investments in the club can be estimated from the reporting of Fordsdam Ltd. is the parent company of Chelsea. In addition to the club, Fordsdam also has a stadium, a concert club and other Chelsea-related assets.

Abramovich's spending on Chelsea is reported as non-interest bearing loans. "Soviet Sport" collected and analyzed all the financial statements of Abramovich's company from 2004 to 2017. During all this time, Abramovich's investments amounted to 1 billion 166 million pounds.

Abramovich had to make the biggest investments at the beginning of his career as the owner of a football club.

Chelsea's own earnings have doubled in 15 years to £368m in 2017.

The club's main source of income is the sale of TV rights. In 2017, the club received £162.4m from this. For example, this is twice as much as the entire income of CSKA Moscow.

Despite rising revenues, Chelsea are a consistently loss-making club. Only one year (2014) was completed with a small profit.

For Roman Abramovich, as well as for potential buyers, the financial results of the club are not of great importance. We are talking about the "emotional profit" that the owner receives.

“If you are in Abramovich's house or on his yacht, you will see a screen in every room, which almost always shows football,” said one of the interlocutors of the British edition of Bloomberg (bloomberg.com). According to the publication, Abramovich is ready to sell the club for only 3 billion pounds. The amount itself is twice as much as Abramovich has invested in Chelsea for all time.

Abramovich bought Chelsea in 2003 for £140m, £3bn today is a fantastic figure. She looks outrageous and says rather that the Russian businessman is in no hurry to sell Chelsea. This club personifies Abramovich, it is associated with his name. Abramovich and Chelsea have become almost synonymous, and the fans do not want to part with this. In mid-August, in a game against Arsenal, they placed a banner "15 years - 15 trophies" in the stands. Above was another one - "Empire Roman".

source: "Soviet Sport"

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Still didn't renew my UK visa. According to The Telegraph, in order to get the right to enter the UK, a Russian businessman must explain the origin of his fortune. Roughly speaking, Abramovich must prove that he earned his billions legally.

The Chelsea owner has already had to miss the FA Cup final against Manchester United (1-0). Sources close to Abramovich say that everything is in order - it's just that the process of obtaining a visa was delayed, and nothing more. However, this spring, after the poisoning of former GRU agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, news periodically surfaced that sanctions could be applied against Abramovich, up to and including the confiscation of Chelsea. Perhaps all this is not true. But given such a negative background, the visa story may seem like a planned action against a billionaire who has invested a lot, a lot of money in Chelsea.

TRANSFERS

Abramovich bought the London club in June 2003 for £140m (because we are talking about Britain, we will be counting in this currency, which is larger than both the dollar and the euro).

The first transfer window was huge. £139.7 million was spent. In the future, the pace was maintained.

A full breakdown of Chelsea's spending on transfers over the past 15 years (data from transfermarkt.de) - in millions of pounds:

2003/04 - 152,28
2004/05 - 149,76
2005/06 - 82,35
2006/07 - 79,56
2007/08 - 53,10
2008/09 - 27,45
2009/10 - 27,00
2010/11 - 109,35
2011/12 - 86,81
2012/13 - 98,73
2013/14 - 117,32
2014/15 - 123,93
2015/16 - 81,45
2016/17 - 119,52
2017/18 - 232,02
Total: 1.54063 billion pounds

Incredible number.

Chelsea made £774.53m from the sale of players, according to transfermarkt. Thus, the London club in the transfer market for 15 years went into the red by 766 million pounds - spent almost twice as much as it earned.

PENALTY

Chelsea hold the record for the highest amount of compensation paid to coaches for early termination of employment. On these things, according to the newspaper Daily Mail, the London club under Abramovich spent 71 million pounds.

Approximately half fell on the penalties of Jose Mourinho - in 2007 (18 million pounds) and in 2015 (16.5 million). In addition, in 2004 Chelsea paid Porto £1.8m in compensation for Mourinho's move.

And in 2005, an extraordinary incident occurred - Abramovich's club transferred Tottenham from 5 to 8 million pounds for a transfer sports director Frank Arnesen.

SALARY

The main item of expenditure for Chelsea under Abramovich is the salaries of players, coaches, managers, and staff. In May 2017, the Daily Mail reported that £2.4bn had been spent on wages over 14 years. A year has passed and the club's labor costs have risen by at least another £100m.

INFRASTRUCTURE

In 2007, a new Chelsea training facility was opened. The cost of its construction was 20 million pounds.

TOTAL

To summarize, it turns out that over 15 years, Chelsea has spent more than 4 billion pounds. If we take into account the Abramovich era, then no other English club has spent so much. True, none of them have won so many tournaments during this time (except for the FA Super Cup - a tournament consisting of one match). Chelsea have 15 such victories since 2003 (two more than Manchester United).

Here they are:

Premier League - 5 (2004/05, 2005/06, 2009/10, 2014/15, 2016/17)
FA Cup - 5 (2006/2007, 2008/2009, 2009/2010, 2011/2012, 2017/2018)
Cup football league - 3 (2004/2005, 2006/2007, 2014/2015)
Champions League - 1 (2011/2012)
Europa League - 1 (2012/13)

The British authorities continue to put pressure on the Russian oligarch.

Roman Abramovich has not appeared at the matches of his Chelsea for a long time. Throughout the second half of 2018, the British press concocts headlines like “Has anyone seen Roman Abramovich? The Last Days of Londongrad.

But in the vicinity of Stamford Bridge in the fall, Joe Ravitch, a specialist at the investment bank Raine Group, was spotted. His responsibilities include conducting large financial transactions related to professional sports. such as buying and selling football clubs. In 2015, Ravitch acted as an adviser to Sheikh Mansour and helped him sell a 13% stake in Manchester City to Chinese investors.

No, Russian oligarch not tired of the old toy, which was never even a toy. Chelsea for Abramovich has long become a life's work and a potential legacy for millions of football fans around the world. Now life's work is at stake.

All because of the aggravated last years relations between the West and Russia. In the summer, the British authorities began to consider for an unexpectedly long time the issue of extending Abramovich's investment visa and asking leading questions about the origin of financial assets. The billionaire, who has been working in London for 15 years, considered this an insult and acquired an Israeli passport, allowing him to stay in the UK for six months.

https://twitter.com/guardian/status/998217479490072576

The second problem is the ever-expanding range of US sanctions. Getting into the "black list" instantly hits the business, and Abramovich is restructuring assets in order to reduce his stake in some enterprises below 50%.

The owner of Chelsea reduced his stake in Crispian Investments, which owns a stake in Norilsk Nickel, to 49.95%, and also divided his stake in Evraz with business partners. The mark of 50% is not taken from the ceiling: the US Treasury prohibits individuals and legal entities from cooperating with companies from the "black list" and with legal entities "if they own 50% of the company."

The trouble is that Chelsea is 100% owned by Abramovich.

And if the pressure from the Americans was expected - for them Abramovich is a stranger - then the sharp reaction of the British authorities for the billionaire was a stab in the back.

Two months after the poisoning of the Skripals, the English House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee issued a report titled Moscow's Gold: Russian Corruption in the UK. Of the £4.4bn of questionable pounds invested in the UK real estate market, Transparency International estimates that more than a billion is owned by the very Russians Robbie Williams sings about.

Whether Abramovich wanted it or not, the body of the English system began to reject the foreign body without any sentiment. And the Israeli passport does not save the situation - a Russian billionaire can be in London as a tourist, but does not have the right to work.

Finding a buyer for Chelsea is easy. The press wrote about generous offers from investors from China and the Czech Republic. British billionaire Jim Ratcliffe offered a market price of £2bn for the London club (that's what Forbes estimates Chelsea are worth). So far, the Russian refuses all offers. At first glance, he would have made serious money by selling for 2 billion what was bought for 140 million in 2003. Abramovich has spent more than £4bn on Chelsea in 15 years, mostly on the salaries of players, coaches and staff.

https://twitter.com/Alanrkatz/status/1044485917896044544

But the fact is that Abramovich is emotionally not yet ready to part with the project he so loved. Already aware of the gravity of his position, the Chelsea owner fired coach Antonio Conte, providing the Italian with a large penalty, issued a large contract to coach Maurizio Sarri and spent a record amount on Basque goalkeeper Kepa Arrizabalaga.

Prudent businessmen in similar conditions do not behave this way. Alisher Usmanov, who was also blacklisted, sold all his shares in Arsenal (which is more than 30%) to the American businessman Stan Kroenke. Abramovich does not spare money for love, including the love of fans who raise banners "15 years - 15 trophies" and "Roman Empire" in the stands of Stamford Bridge.

And still it looks like the last kisses before the inevitable parting. The Chelsea stadium renovation project has been put on hold indefinitely, ostensibly due to the unfavorable investment climate. Although Abramovich sought permission to carry out reconstruction work alone for many years. “You can’t play football like that!” Three terrible fouls in the Champions League, but only two removals. Why?

London "Chelsea" at Ken Bates seemed just a rich man's experiment on his money. What would come of it, no one could predict. But now it is clear: this purchase has become historic not only for the club itself, but for the entire Premier League.

Before Abramovich, Chelsea was a club middle class and chronic financial problems. Bates himself (a professional football manager) bought it from the previous owner, Brian Mirza, for a symbolic 1 pound. At that time, Chelsea had debts of several million pounds - a lot of money at that time, the club was even banned from registering players. Mears got burned out when he decided to rebuild Stamford Bridge, making the arena the first fully seated stadium in the country. But the results collapsed, and football hooliganism flourished. Spectators became less and less, the more the team played in the second division.

Bates returned the team to the elite, but did little to change the perception of Chelsea. best result was third in the 1998/99 season. Good players like Gianfranco Zola, Marcel Desailly and Gustavo Poyet, playing coach Gianluca Vialli - perhaps this was the only squad between the 1955 title and the Abramovich era that could fight for the championship.

The cunning fox Bates took part in the creation of the Premier League, tried to raise the results by the massive importation of legionnaires, but gradually realized that he would not succeed in anything special. Interest from Abramovich turned out to be his lucky ticket: Chelsea had nearly £100m in debt, a serious amount by the standards of 15 years ago. But the Russian businessman solved these problems, and at the same time paid about £140 million for the club itself. Plus allocated another £120m to sign 14 new players!

Reaching a new level

Chelsea has become radically different. The club has transformed itself and transformed the league. From 1993 to 2003, only three teams won the title in it - the crazy Blackburn in 1995, Arsenal and Manchester United. Chelsea became a third force, and a very powerful force.

One by one, top players appeared at Stamford Bridge. And then top coach Jose Mourinho, who replaced Claudio Ranieri in 2004. Whatever the Portuguese may say, it was his career at Chelsea that made him truly special. Before Abramovich, not every player wanted to get involved with Chelsea. After - almost everyone dreamed or at least considered the possibility.

There was a lot of talk about Roman Arkadievich, who was just starting to manage the club: they say that he doesn’t quite understand football and just throws money away. However, the results say otherwise: it took Abramovich only two seasons to become the champion of England.

Frank Lampard, John Terry, Joe Cole, Didier Drogba, Petr Cech, Michael Ballack, Michael Essien, Arjen Robben, Juan Sebastian Veron, Hernan Crespo - the Chelsea squad was rightly envied by many. After all, even Abramovich's failures looked like the dreams of others. Take at least the transfer of the owner of the Golden Ball the best football player Europe of Andriy Shevchenko, for whom moving to London was the beginning of the end. Well, 14 coaching resignations in 15 years is also a bit too much.

Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that Abramovich excelled in sports terms. In "his" 15 years, Chelsea have won the Premier League 5 times. Manchester United have the same number of victories. Manchester City have 3, Arsenal and Leicester have one each. Even though the competition in the league only increases every year, Chelsea manage to manage. It is the team of Abramovich - the most titled English club for this fifteen years (17 trophies).

The long-awaited victory in the Champions League (and there was also the 2008 final lost in Moscow on penalties) is the most powerful proof of the club's strength.

global brand

Over these 15 years, Abramovich's management style has also changed. The starting five-year period passed under the sign of big money. Chelsea had a strong image of a club that was willing to pay whatever they wanted. Such extravagance was often ridiculed.

But over time, the club has seriously optimized spending on the transfer market. The last two titles can be called quite budget. Chelsea abandoned the wholesale buying of established stars and began to pay more attention to young ones. True, they do not always take root: surprisingly, three Premier League superstars of the 2017/18 season - Mohamed Salah, Kevin De Bruyne and Romelu Lukaku - did not play at Chelsea at one time.

Nevertheless, the number of titles convinces: Abramovich's club hits much more often than misses. The victories allowed Chelsea to instantly become a global brand by football standards, surpassing historically strong clubs. Chelsea are by far the most popular club in the Premier League in important markets such as Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, Spain, according to a massive 2015 study by Twitter. It turned out that it was the Blues, and not Manchester United at all, who supported South America and in almost all countries of the Latin Isthmus. Chelsea is number one of the English clubs in Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Cameroon, Ghana, Italy, Belgium, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania. By the way, according to the figures of the same study, Abramovich's club is the most popular club English Premier League in Russia (followed by Arsenal).

Chelsea coped with a task that was beyond the power of, for example, Ajax, Benfica or Anderlecht - the deserved but forgotten heroes of Europe. But now it is the global aspect that is one of the main drivers of profit growth. The shirt and sleeve sponsor of the club right now is the Japanese company Yokohama Tires. In Japan, Chelsea are in the top three in terms of popularity. This is helped not only by victories, but also by regular pre-season tours in Asia.

Infrastructural changes

In 2007, the club opened one of the best training centers in the world. 30 football fields, ultra-modern Gym, medical center, residential buildings for the first team, women's team, club academy - all in one place in Cobham. Young people have the opportunity to follow the work of superstars every day and be inspired. The club academy also switched to new level results - the first pupils like the 22-year-old Ruben Loftus-Cheek, who came with the England team to the World Cup, are already knocking at the base. In the future, this will reduce the cost of transfers.

In addition, Chelsea have been actively exploring options for expanding and renovating Stamford Bridge for several years, which will allow them to earn even more. However, while the implementation of the project has been postponed.

financial success

In 2003, Chelsea earned €134 million. In 2017, the club's income was €428 million. And these figures reflect not only natural inflation in football world but also system work. Throughout the Abramovich era, Chelsea have consistently ranked in the top 10 highest earning clubs in Europe. The stated goal of management is to double revenue in the next ten years through more successful commercial use of the brand. Part of this strategy was breaking the contract with Adidas and signing an agreement with Nike.

A lot was also spent in the Abramovich era. According to The Guardian, the club's total debt to its owner is £ 1.17 billion. At the same time, Chelsea have been balancing financial fair play requirements since the 2011/12 season, when the team won the Champions League.

But, as Abramovich initially said, Chelsea was not bought to make money, but to be happy. And this joy is mutual. Roman Empire banner on each home match team emphasizes: unlike other foreign owners, the fans of the "blue" Russian investor accepted as their own. Which is understandable: it was he who added the prefix “super” to the club.