Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea for €170 million in 2003 and put the club up for sale this week for €4 billion. For those who think that Botafogo and Cruzeiro were sold at a very low price, think that the Russian oligarch paid less for a Premier League football team than Paris Saint-Germain paid for Neymar.
Having an oligarch in charge of such a powerful institution is not necessarily a good thing. The daily El País showed last week that there is a dossier in Parliament, in London, whose title has only one word: “Russia”.
The Premier League repeats what is conventionally called British pragmatism. In other words, if you have the money, you can come.
It shouldn’t be like that.
In the Abramovich era, Chelsea won a record 21 trophies. Adding the Super Cups, they have one more cup than Manchester United in the same period.
The Premier League also has friends of Vladimir Putin at Everton, controlled by the Iranian Farhad Moshiri, a partner of the oligarch Alisher Usmanov in the Russian company USM. Bournemouth, from the second division and with five consecutive seasons in the first, is controlled by businessman Maxim Demin.
This is not a witch hunt, but a reflection on how the Premier League became the best national championship in world football.
FIFA is rightly criticized for contradictory decisions, when comparing, for example, Russia’s suspension to complacency with Pinochet.
The world is different, or should be, to the point where the threat of nuclear war no longer exists. Banning Chile in 1973 would also mean expelling Brazil from Medici, Argentina from Videla, the Soviet Union from Brezhnev.
The International Volleyball Federation took a day longer than FIFA to announce that this year’s World Cup will not take place in Russia. If FIFA expelled Putin’s country on the fifth day of war, the FIVB only decided to change its headquarters on the sixth.
The impact of football is unparalleled. That’s why few people notice the delay of volleyball.
The Premier League is the most passionate league on the planet and also the paradise of the international pick. Kia Joorabchian joined Corinthians in 2005, left in 2007 and responded for years to a money laundering process at the Superior Court of Justice (STJ).
He began to act freely in the English market, took Brazilian players there, negotiated Carlitos Tevez with West Ham, Manchester United and Manchester City, put Willian at Chelsea and, later, at Arsenal.
Before, the Corinthians midfielder played for Shakhtar, from Ukraine, and Anzhi, from Russia.
Kia was a partner of Boris Berezovski, partner of Abramovich, when, well placed in the Boris Yeltsin government, they became the executives of the oil company Sibneft.
The Chelsea owner and Berezovski later became rivals.
Abramovich did well to the structure of the Blues. He built a new training facility, signed heavyweights like Ballack, Deco and Drogba, but he also helped reveal players like Mason Mount, Reece-James and Chalobah.
But the lesson is that it can’t just be money.
That goes for England, which now pursues Russian tax irregularities. It is also valid for the recently created Sociedades Anônimas do Futebol, in Brazil. International investors are very welcome, as long as they comply with the law and pay taxes.
Club owner is not good for signing autographs. Their money is important, if clean and helping to build the foundation of the new Brazilian football.
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