This year, Carlo Ancelotti takes the reins at the club after agreeing to part company with AC Milan, a team he has guided to domestic glory in the Italian league and cup, as well as the European Champions League. Guus Hiddink, who juggled the Chelsea manager’s job for half a season with his commitments as Russia’s national team coach, makes way for the Italian after Chelsea’s owner, Roman Abramovich, had to allegedly bow to pressure from Russian fans to keep the Dutchman solely in charge of running the affairs of Russia’s number one team. Cynics are saying, though, that Hiddink himself did not really want the permanent job at Chelsea, preferring the calmer waters of less demanding international football.

On paper, Chelsea have appointed a manager with a real pedigree. The distinct lack of silverware, with the exception of last year’s FA Cup, since Jose Mourinho’s departure, has caused Abramovich a great deal of concern and he will be hoping that Ancelotti solves the problem. The unfortunate reality of the matter for Abramovich is that he has gone through a number of managers, with outstanding credentials, and none has been able to bring a constant stream of success the Russian owner has been demanding. The Champions League forever eludes Chelsea and the creative attacking type of football that
Abramovich so badly desires has yet to materialise.

It seems odd that a club that has spent £300 million on players since its acquisition by Abramovich has not been able to stamp its dominance on the game. Chelsea, as a football club, remains fairly unimpressive in comparison to the elite tier teams in Europe. Their stadium and pitch, in comparison to, for example, Arsenal’s Emirates or Manchester United’s Old Trafford, is a laughable cabbage patch, seating a meagre 40,000 spectators. The club’s behaviour, both on the pitch and off, starting with the ‘tapping up’ of then Arsenal’s left back Ashley Cole in a London hotel some years back through to Didier Drogba’s idiotic and disgraceful rant at the referee in the semi final of the Champions League this year, leaves much to be desired. Chelsea probably had a right to feel hard done by after a few dubious referees’ decisions went against them, but their behaviour lost them a lot of sympathisers.

Then there is the constant chopping and changing of personnel. How can Abramovich expect to achieve the success he so badly craves when the club appoints a new manager every summer, and then, after a bad run of form which every team at some point of the season experiences, feels the remedy is to simply fire them? Perhaps the hardest reality that Chelsea have yet to accept is that with big money come even bigger problems. The majority of players who join the club are not there because of its history, as frankly, Chelsea doesn’t have a very impressive one. They are there because they are mercenaries, ready to sell themselves to the highest bidder and not necessarily the best team in the game.

The laughable case of former AC Milan star striker, Andriy Shevchenko, is a prime example of how money cannot guarantee success. Abramovich lured the Ukrainian striker, who at that point was at the peak of his game, for £30 million, including £120,000 a week salary. Abramovich was expecting to acquire one of the game’s recognised deadliest finishers. What he ended up getting was a washed out forward who, intentionally or not, found his retirement home. His potency in front of goal almost complete diminished and his pace had vanished. He found himself on the bench most of the time and his goal return at Chelsea was abysmal for a striker of his once undoubted ability. The most ridiculous thing about the situation is that while Chelsea probably thought they would be seeing the back of Shevchenko after loaning him back to AC Milan, he has now indicated he will be returning to pre-season training with his former London teammates, eager to make an impression on his old coach, now manager of Chelsea, Ancelotti. Shevchenko will happily continue to pick up his £120,000 weekly wage and probably be equally content doing from the comfort of the substitutes’ bench. A raw deal for Chelsea, but this is what happens when big money gambles do not pay off, and Abramovich, a man, who has absolutely no idea about football, simply was not prepared for such an outcome.

There is no doubt that Chelsea will continue to snap at the heels of the top four clubs in the English Premiership and reach the semi-final of at least the FA Cup or League Cup, but the Champions League will undoubtedly remain the Holy Grail that Abramovich will probably never find. Big money seems to be unable to buy the ultimate success in football as it creates too much tension within the club where personal rivalries and egos clash and undermine the team.

And then there is the small matter of consecutive managers in Chelsea not speaking decent English. Just like the owner. Which is a bit of a problem in itself.

– End –

Related posts:

1. The Thing About Chelsea FC Is That Roman Abramovich Is Throwing Too Much Money At It
2. Arsenal Beat Chelsea 2:1. And The Blues Did Not Even Manage To Score Once
3. Money Men Throw Millions At English Football. And Undermine It Along The Way

The latest estimate puts Ambramovich’s overall investment into Chelsea at around £710 million. And that is not even including the pay out to Scolari which would be about £8 million and the players’ wage bill for this year that would go over £150 million. Plus, the new care-taker manager Guus Hiddink, who is also managing the Russian national football team, is going to get several million plus for his efforts and he is bound to ask for an injection of new blood into the team this summer that would probably set Abramovich back another £20 million or more, even if it would happen on a sale-to-buy player basis. So by the end of this year we would be talking of an overall £1 billion investment into the club by the Russian oligarch.

Is that bizarre or not? Of course it is bizarre. Considering that even with the silverware that Jose Mourinho produced for the club it does not really constitute value for money. By the way, I personally was never a great admirer of Mourinho. I think his tenure at Chelsea was greatly overhyped. All that power play, all those long passes into the penalty area from midfield for Didier Drogba to pick up were never very impressive. I actually think that the current problems with the team had been created when Mourinho was in charge. And to think that he was paid something like £14 million as a payout when he was sacked in September 2007. What an irony it is in itself. It was like saying: thank you for saddling us with problems for years to come.

I have great doubts that Hiddink would be able to produce any outstanding results this season. It is more of a troubleshooting exercise. Chelsea’s chances of winning the Premiership this year are remote, to say the least. But Hiddink is in a better position than Scolari as he has inherited a team in ‘distress’ and he will have a stronger bargaining position than his predecessor. He may also break the ‘Mourinho stranglehold’ on Chelsea and introduce real changes into the club’s play pattern.
The interesting thing about Abramovich is that he finds himself in a situation when he has no chance of throwing in the towel and walking away. He can’t really sell the club in the foreseeable future, as it is burdened with astronomical debts, and he has to invest a lot more money to see it get its act together and win that elusive European Championship trophy. So when Chelsea says that Abramovich has no plans to ditch the club they are right: he can’t afford to do it.

But all the stories about Abramovich losing most of his fortune in the current financial crisis are probably greatly exaggerated. He obviously did lose a lot, considering that it has been revealed recently that the top ten Russian oligarchs, of which he is one, have seen something like $140 billion wiped out from their balance sheets in past several months. But Abramovich is in a league of his own, with several other big players in Russia. He is a close friend of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who still runs Russia despite it having a new President, Dmitry Medvedev since May last year.

Abramovich, according to our sources in Moscow, has already received a soft loan from the Russian government to the tune of $1.8 billion, to cushion the impact of the crisis on his empire. He has also benefitted from the $200 billion bail-out that the government had spent on trying to save the rouble from collapsing and keeping some banks and businesses afloat. So he still has the financial muscle to experiment with Chelsea.
The problem is that Abramovich is still living under an illusion that money talks in football. It doesn’t and Chelsea’s performance in the last couple of years proves it.

And one more thing: Abramovich was always saying that he was not going to pull Hiddink from the Russian national team that he sponsors by paying its manager. But the way he suddenly changed his mind and shows that he is beginning to get really desperate. And knowing how he does business it does not really bide well for the Blues.

– End –

Related posts:

1. The Curse Of The Blues: Why Money Can’t Buy Chelsea United Any Love
2. Money Men Throw Millions At English Football. And Undermine It Along The Way
3. Sven-Goran Eriksson Takes On A New Challenge. It’s Got Nothing To Do With Money