The End of the Abramovich Era at Chelsea

Amid the chaos in Ukraine and the rush for everyone to divest any Russian links or securities, a little drama has been playing out in West London, as Chelsea Football Club has found itself at the center of some of the controversy. The club is owned by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, about whom Labour MPs have been asking why he's not being sanctioned. Abramovich claims no links to Russia's president Vladimir Putin, though certain reports have linked him with the Kremlin, so it's fair to say that things are a little murky there.

When the war started, Abramovich said he'd transfer the day-to-day running of Chelsea to the trustees of its charitable foundation, a move that was scotched when said trustees said they wouldn't do it, and that it fell afoul of regulations. He then said he'd sell the club, with the proceeds going to benefit the victims of the war (though that phrasing implies that it won't only go to Ukrainians).

In the wake of the news Abramovich has been held up alongside the more recent sports washers that he helped to enable, like the Saudi acquisition of Newcastle and the Abu Dhabi acquisition of Manchester City. Certainly his acquisition of Chelsea led the way for other oligarchs, whether Russian or not, to buy their way into European football, so it's interesting to reflect on his time in charge of the club.

I remember when he bought Chelsea back in 2003, and the club immediately used its riches to buy essentially an entirely new team. The manager at the time was Claudio Ranieri, who came in a respectable second but was still sacked for not winning any trophies (and for not being José Mourinho). Because nothing like that had ever happened, there was a lot of excitement around Chelsea and what they might achieve with their new wealth.

In the short term, they certainly broke the effective duopoly on winning the Premier League, previously held by Manchester United and Arsenal, and won every domestic title available. It took a few years, but they also eventually won the Champions League and the Europa League, and most recently the Club World Cup.

The success came with high expectations: the club has had 15 managers in the time that Abramovich has owned Chelsea, not counting caretakers who took charge for one or two matches. That number does count both of Mourinho's terms as manager, and both of Guus Hiddink's terms as interim manager, since they came mid-season and involved significant chunks of their respective seasons. That's almost one new manager per season for the 18 years that Abramovich has owned the club.

In terms of honors, the club won the Premier League five times; the FA Cup five times; the League Cup three times; and the Champions League and Europa League twice each; as well as the Club World Cup, which makes for a trophy each year on average. The club is out of this year's League Cup and unlikely to win the league, but is still in the FA Cup and the Champions League, so has a chance to win at least two more trophies this season.

It's clear that Abramovich's money helped buy a big chunk of Chelsea's success, though I also think he brought in good coaches who really stamped an identity on the club. A lot of the iconic Chelsea players from the first Mourinho era were already there, but Mourinho undeniably molded them into an impressive unit, which survived long after his own third-season implosion. But of course, money doesn't just buy success, it also buys expertise.

In terms of accusations of sports washing, it's hard to put Abramovich on the same level as the owners of Newcastle, Manchester City or Paris St-Germain, though he certainly opened the door for rich owners to swoop in to buy a club and turn it around. You could argue that Manchester City have taken that same model and done it even better than Chelsea (City have won 13 trophies since being bought by Abu Dhabi in 2008, and have had just four long-term managers under that ownership), while other clubs have had rich owners but far less on-field success. Certainly, if discounting the war in Ukraine, Abramovich would likely still pass any version of the fit-and-proper persons test that's been changed to keep out people who are known to have ordered the murder of journalists.

At any rate, when he bought Chelsea in 2003 there was no concept of sports washing, and if anything I thought at the time he was trying to safeguard his money in case Putin ever got sick of him. It was just seen as the rise of Russia after a few years of post-Soviet chaos, and one that heralded the imminent primacy of Russian football in Europe. That didn't happen either, of course.

Looking to the future, I wouldn't be surprised if Abramovich is done with football after this. He'd already largely given over the running of the club to others, intervening only when someone needed to be sacked, so even if Russian owners can ever buy clubs in the rest of Europe again, Abramovich will probably turn to other interests.

As for Chelsea, a Swiss-US consortium appears to be poised to buy the club, but it's an open question as to whether they'll be as successful under the new owners. Abramovich's Chelsea was successful because he didn't seem to mind how much the club was costing him, as long as it delivered trophies (particularly the Champions League) and signed players he wanted, like Ukraine's Andriy Shevchenko. The new breed of super-clubs, like Manchester City, seem to be even more intent on maintaining stability at their clubs, which has been key to their success, and presumably the new owners will want to do that. A key indicator of upcoming chaos will be if they try to sack the manager, Thomas Tuchel, despite him being one of the most desired coaches in Europe.

At the very least, it'll be interesting to see how many of the great players of the Abramovich era continue to be associated with the club after he leaves. Certainly they'll stick around if the titles keep coming.

Some Thoughts on the War in Ukraine

Like all right-thinking people, I've been glued to the TV and internet this week, following what's happening with Russia's invasion of Ukraine and devouring all sorts of takes from mainstream news sources and also people on social media. Going back through the archives of this blog, it's not the first time we've been here, but the difference back then, almost exactly eight years ago and coincidentally right after the Winter Olympics, is that the Russians appeared content with just taking over a portion of eastern Ukraine and scaring their former satellite.

Now, however, they've gone all out, rolling all the way into Kyiv and intending to topple the entire country. The reaction from the West has been surprisingly unified, though not without some foot-dragging here and there: the EU took a day or two to commit to cutting Russia and Vladimir Putin out of the SWIFT financial messaging system, and Britain's immigration apparatus has had a few missteps with regard to letting Ukrainian refugees in. But even Putin allies like Poland and Hungary have been quick to offer help to fleeing Ukrainians (quicker than they would to Syrian refugees, who were in many cases also displaced by Russian activity, but never mind).

On the one hand, it's hard not to think that these are the actions that the West should have taken eight years ago, when Russian forces drummed up a separatist movement in Crimea and shot down a passenger plane. Re-reading my blog post from back then, it's clear that this week's actions wouldn't have been possible if he hadn't been emboldened by his success in pulling those other things off back then: after all, his vision of an imperial Russia, protected from the West by a buffer zone comprised of former Soviet vassal states, is unchanged.

I've seen pleasingly few tankies arguing in favor of Russia's invasion, but it's worth talking about Russia's claim that the invasion is caused by the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO. This article claims it's a smokescreen to hide the fact that Putin views any liberal democracy on its doorstep as a threat, which is persuasive when you consider that Ukraine's thoughts on joining NATO have changed various times over the last few decades - at the very least, NATO didn't seem in a huge hurry to sign Ukraine up. That seems to bolster the argument I made in the paragraph above.

On the other hand, there's been a lot of commentary over the enthusiasm of many high-profile Republicans, including Donald Trump, for Putin and this invasion. My suspicion is that Trump is excited because he can't see anything outside of the lens of how it makes him look, so anything that threatens to make Joe Biden look bad is good for him. Other Republicans have dredged up "wokeness" and... being tolerant of LGBTQ people as reasons to support Putin. Whatever, guys.

I can't shake the feeling, however, that it's good we don't have Barack Obama in the White House to deal with this. He whiffed hard on the Crimea thing and the Syria thing, which likely has something important to do with Putin's actions this week; if he had still been president, I'm sure Obama would be taking the same actions as Biden, but it's an open question if his State Dept team would have been equipped for anything happening in Europe.

To put it another way, if Biden or (God help us) Hillary Clinton had been president in 2014, would they have taken a stronger line against Russia swallowing Crimea, given their more Eurocentric understanding of foreign relations?

That said, I think the unity among western democracies now is also a response to years (decades) of Russian-funded far right extremism and populism across the US and Western Europe. Trump's presidency and the Brexit vote may have been wake-up calls for the US and EU of just how well-integrated Putin's allies were in media (i.e. Russia Today) and among far-right parties like those in France, Germany and Italy. Germany must also be feeling increasing heat (no pun intended), given its reliance on Russian gas and former chancellor Gerhard Schröder's closeness to Putin.

It's easy to criticize the response in 2014 with hindsight from the Trump administration, where the "president" went out of his way to praise Putin, but eight years ago Obama had no idea who'd be succeeding him as president, nor that the UK would vote to leave the EU. But as I said, kicking Russia out of SWIFT and isolating the regime is probably what Obama should have done in 2014, when the seeds for the current conflict were being sown.

About That Two-Year World Cup Idea

Amid the controversies around FIFA's corruption and support of dictatorial regimes worldwide, the organization also seems intent on bugging the hell out of football fans. A good example of this is the idea being championed by former Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger, which would see the World Cup take place every two years instead of every four.

It's kind of surprising that nobody, at least in the sources I read, has anything good to say about this plan. The theme seems to be that the existing World Cup format, with its 32 teams (expanding to 48 in 2026), is already bloated, so doing it twice as often would be terrible. It would also crowd the regional championships out of the calendar, particularly the European championships, which are typically held on the non-World Cup even-numbered years. Also, I don't know how many pundits have raised this, but the players are already exhausted by the existing schedule, and shoe-horning another global tournament into the capital won't help with that.

Yet FIFA seems to still be exploring this idea, despite it getting about as much support (or maybe less) as the European Super League. This is fairly good proof that they don't care about what fans want, so in the interest of offering bad ideas, let me make a suggestion on a changed format to the two-year World Cup.

The first point is that it would be lighter-touch, to keep from wearing the players out and bankrupting host countries, so we'd cut it back down to 24 teams. The second is that it would be even more global than the existing tournament, so instead of complicated allocations that inevitably favor Europe, each confederation would be represented by a four-team group, arrived at by whatever qualifying format that individual confederation prefers.

Obviously this would dramatically reduce the number of European teams participating, and probably limit it to four of the biggest five teams (England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain). That said, each of those teams except for England has won one of the last four tournaments, so you can argue we're just cutting the chaff out. Also, remember that this is a thought experiment piling bad ideas on top of more bad ideas.

Most of the other confederations would have similar numbers of teams participating, but the big winner would be Oceania, which currently gets up to one place but only if its qualifying team wins a playoff against another confederation. Giving Oceania four spots would guarantee participation for New Zealand, of course, and potentially convince Australia to return from Asia, where it's been competing since after 2006.

The groups would play out as normal, each team playing each other team in its group once, and the top team from each confederation would move to the second round, consisting of two groups of three teams, with the top team progressing to the final. There would not be seeding, so Europe and South America could potentially meet in this round, otherwise they'd still dominate the final... though it must be said that having a regular Europe v South America final would already be an improvement over the last four World Cups, as a South American team reached the final just once (Argentina in 2014) and the semi-finals just twice (Uruguay in 2010, Brazil and Argentina in 2014). 

And there you have it: my facetious suggestion for a format that would support a two-year World Cup schedule, while also making it more equitable among each confederation. You'd get classic matches between the biggest teams of all regions every two years, which is surely what FIFA really wants, and the tournament would be easier to fit into a single country, meaning it wouldn't require host nations to bankrupt themselves (and therefore wouldn't be limited to taking place in dictatorships or across multiple countries).

As I've said, this is more of a joke than anything else, but it gets to a competitive imbalance that's been evident in the global game for the last decade and a half, namely that Europe has sucked all the competitive air out of the room. As mentioned, the last four winners have been among the traditionally strongest teams in Europe (and if England continues its progress from the last World Cup and Euros, is in with a decent chance of winning in Qatar 2022); at the same time, because Europe got 14 spots last time, even though as many European teams went out in the first round as Asian teams, there were still 10 European teams in the knockout rounds.

It's pretty clear that European teams are the strongest overall, since the club system across UEFA is the best-funded and most organized, meaning that even its relatively mediocre teams, like Sweden or Poland, benefit from players being in the best leagues and honing their skills against the best players in the world. And these best players in the world get lured to Europe, thereby weakening their home leagues, most notably in South America. It's notable that two of the semifinalists in 2018, Belgium and Croatia, weren't in the top five of Europe and still proved stronger than almost everyone else in the world.

I generally like the format of the World Cup as it is, and because my first World Cup was 1998, which was the first to field 32 teams, I also don't mind that number of participants. That said, while the format favors the strongest regions, it would be nice to see the other regions narrow the gap with Europe, but it's unlikely to happen as things stand. My suggested format isn't really workable, but at least opens the possibility of non-European winners, and makes the tournament an actual "world" cup, rather than a showcase for the big five European leagues with everyone else making up the numbers.

Two Bad Takes on the Joe Rogan Thing

Quick one this week, because my main focus at the moment is on a novel. However, I wanted to date this blog by writing down some thoughts on the Joe Rogan controversy that's been going on recently. Specifically, I wanted to respond to a couple of takes on it that I've seen, which take opposite sides but that happen to be both a bit short-sighted.

To be clear, I absolutely think Rogan's been platforming a lot of people that he shouldn't, especially when it comes to the Covid-19 vaccines. I just had a look at his guests for the past 18 months or so, and there are far too many who are questioning the vaccines, and nowhere near enough who are talking about the actual science. I was briefly heartened when I saw he'd talked to Oliver Stone, but then I dug into Stone's views on the virus and he's notable in this sphere for having gotten the Russian Sputnik V vaccine. Nothing too wrong with that, I suppose, though the article mentions that Vladimir Putin himself wouldn't get that vaccine (not a great endorsement, y'all); it then also quotes Stone as saying that Russia and China aren't enemies of the US, which is... also short-sighted. Though it's not one of the bad takes I'm writing about here!

The point is, I'm fully in support of Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and all the other artists who are removing their work from Spotify over its deal to be the sole platform for Rogan's podcast. It doesn't really matter that these are older artists whose listeners are not likely to overlap much with Rogan's. Rogan is doing society a disservice, and acting in bad faith, and Spotify's reaction to the whole thing has been shameful.

Now, the first bad take is from Edward Snowden, for whom I usually have a lot of time. I saw some comments of his on Twitter where he talked about this controversy, pointing out (rightly) that there are a lot of people condemning Rogan who've never listened to his podcast (this is related to the next bad take, about which more anon). He then suggested that no one is actually taking Rogan's advice on vaccines seriously, which... what? What? What?

That makes no sense! Of course people take what he's saying seriously - if they didn't, Spotify wouldn't have blown $100 million getting the exclusive rights to his show. Snowden pointed to Rogan's logo, a vision of his grinning face with a third eye, as the reason why nobody's going there for medical advice. I agree that sensible people shouldn't do that, but when you repeatedly have Robert Malone, Pierre Kory and Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying on, to say nothing of that mentalist Alex Berenson, then you're actively trying to get people to not take the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines. Snowden should fucking know better.

The other bad take is from a friend of a friend who said on Facebook that Rogan had turned into Rush Limbaugh. On the face of it, it's not actually that inaccurate, though I think that talking to Andrew Yang and Bernie Sanders during last year's primary race adds a little nuance. What annoys me about this comment is that it's perpetuating this false dichotomy of everything falling into either left or right.

Rogan probably does fall more on the rightward side of things, because he seems to have a lot of guests on who are concerned with "cancel culture". But I'm just wary of lumping him in with people like Limbaugh, because he just doesn't seem clever enough to exploit the forces he's helping to unleash. He's probably smarter than I'm giving him credit for, and he's probably issuing his "apologies" in bad faith, but he also doesn't seem to have Limbaugh's knack for provocation.

What I find annoying is, as Edward Snowden suggested, people who've never listened to a Joe Rogan Experience episode falling all over themselves to declare him the next Donald Trump. I've listened to the odd episode, and all I'll say is, he's stupid and paranoid and riddled with conspiracy theories, but he's not cohesive enough in his ideology to be one of these Ben Shapiro-type dingbats.

Not everyone who questions the vaccines or "cancel culture" is right-wing: as an example, I give you Bill Maher, who has also platformed Weinstein and Heying and who rails every week about how much he hates political correctness. He's not exactly an AOC-style progressive, but you can't legitimately call him a right-winger either. He may be platforming a lot of these people too, but the consensus seems to be that when Milo Yiannopoulos went on Maher's show, he ended up saying all the things that caused his own downfall.

This is the difference between Maher and Rogan, as far as I can tell. Maher may give some of the crazies a platform, but he doesn't give them a free ride. Meanwhile, the crazies know that they can go on Rogan because he still seems to think he's just shooting the shit in his basement. I'm not saying I'm sorry for Rogan, but it does look a lot like he's being taken advantage of. Though if he is, he's getting a lot of money for it.

I'm probably nitpicking here, so I'll wrap up. But as I say, not everything we disagree with on the left is as bad as Limbaugh or Trump. Not every antivaxxer is a right-winger. Yet if we persist in characterizing them as such, we play into the right's hands in portraying us as the woke mob. Let's have some nuance, and let's deplore Rogan from a position of knowledge, rather than of ignorance.

Escape to Victory

Just watched Escape to Victory last night, based on a 2020 episode of the Nessun Dorma football podcast. It occurred to me as I listened that I'd seen bits and pieces, and seen in-jokes and mentions of the movie for more than 20 years, but I'd never sat and watched the whole thing through. The closest I came was watching part of it on TV in a youth hostel in Geneva in 2001, with my friend Erick (who had no idea what was going on) and a Brazilian guy who was also staying there and laughed maniacally every time Pele came on screen. I don't even remember if it was dubbed into French or had subtitles.

So I rented it on my Apple TV, and watched it over the course of a couple of nights. The Nessun Dorma crowd were right when they said it felt like a 1950s war film, but it also still felt very late-70s/early-80s, even apart from the presence of Sylvester Stallone and Michael Caine.

For those who don't know, it starts in a German POW camp during WWII, when the Allied inmates are challenged to a football match by the German guards. It goes from being a "friendly" to a propaganda exercise, on the part of the Germans, and an escape attempt on the part of the Allies. The real draw, however, is that it features a number of actual footballers, most notably Pele but also Bobby Moore and Ossie Ardiles, among quite a few others.

(I'm not going to bother with spoiler warnings because the film is over 40 years old, and we all know the Allies won the war) 

Another impressive thing about the movie, beyond the players who star in it, is the fact that it was directed by none other than John Huston. It was fairly late in his career, and not listed among the notable films in his filmography, so it's possible he was just hired on to direct, but it's still interesting that they got a director of that caliber for it.

Overall it's fairly disposable. The acting from the footballers isn't exactly on the level of Olivier, and Stallone turns in the kind of performance you'd expect. But there's something earthy and real about the camera work and sound, the kind of thing you only see in movies from that period, with the dialogue sounding weirdly naturalistic, almost like Robert Altman's MASH.

The acting from the other professionals isn't amazing either, though Caine is good as Colby, the working-class captain of the team who finds himself at odds with the more aristocratic British officers who insist on using his team as a means to escape. It's a little strange that he spends the first part of the movie fighting against the escape plans, including not wanting Stallone's character on his team because he worries his escape attempts will get the team in trouble. On the other hand, it's a nice touch that Colby convinces the Germans to let him have a few Eastern European players - the Germans resist at first, because the Poles and Czechs have no legal status (code for starving them to death), but eventually relent. Colby doesn't even use the Easterners, but they manage to escape at the end with the rest of the players.

I also like Max von Sydow, who plays the German officer who floats the idea of a match because he recognizes Colby; it's notable that he's the only Nazi who cheers when the Allied team equalizes, showing that he's more honorable than his fellow Wehrmacht officers. At the end, when the crowd is bundling the players out and disguising them, it's clear that he sees what's happening, and he gives a little smile of admiration.

The match, of course, is the centerpiece, and although it feels very choreographed, it's an affecting spectacle nonetheless. The filmmakers do a good job of ramping up the tension as the Germans go 4-0 up early on, while the crowd slowly comes to life when the Allied team makes its comeback. It's strangely affecting to hear a stadium full of actors belt out La Marseillaise without accompaniment, as well as seeing Ardiles and Pele score some magnificent goals against the Germans.

Overall, the movie probably holds up better if you care about football, and if you're familiar with the Ipswich Town team of that era (which provided most of the players) then you're on even more familiar ground. But it's a fun movie, and I couldn't get over the sight of Michael Caine conspiring with both Sylvester Stallone and Pele against the Nazis. I read that there's a remake in the works, supposedly, but I hope it never gets made, because it'll never hit the heights of this version.

RIP Bob Saget

Saw the news about Bob Saget passing away yesterday, and I've spent the last 24 hours seeing reactions and listening to Marc Maron's tribute episode containing each of Saget's three appearances on WTF. I won't pretend to have a large knowledge of Bob Saget's work outside Full House and America's Funniest Home Videos, but since those shows formed part of the backdrop to my childhood, it feels right to acknowledge him here.

Like probably everyone, I was delighted to discover that outside of his ABC shows he was an amazingly foul-mouthed standup, starting with his cameo in Half-Baked.

Later on I heard more of that persona on podcasts, like the Nerdist and now WTF, and loved some of those close-to-the-bone jokes. I also heard his voice as the older Ted Mosby on How I Met Your Mother, another role that maybe didn't have much to do with his stage persona, but felt like excellent casting based on his earlier TV work.

I understand he appeared on Fuller House, the revival show, which is funny. I also hear that he remained close to the actresses who played his daughters, which is sweet (even though the AV Club reports that their parents weren't too happy with the language he'd use in front of them on set).

Listening to him on Maron today, I'm also struck by how long he worked in standup, and how many big names he came up with. It's sad that, at the relatively young age of 65, we've lost another veteran of the 80s comedy boom.

Thoughts on Emily in Paris

I have no shame, so I'm committing to the internet that I've just finished the second season of Emily in Paris, and I quite like the show. I'm under no illusions that it's the kind of prestige drama that HBO trades in, but for what it is, it's a charming enough show that I was happy to see a second season coming out. And while I watched the first season with my now-ex, my sister was on hand this January to watch the first few episodes before she went back to London.

So what's to like about a show that even its writers think is pretty silly? It's a fairly cliche look at Paris and the French, and it essentially completely ignores the lived experience of people who live in the outer arrondissements. Even at the individual level, most of the characters are pretty thin archetypes, like the sassy gay guy and the horny coworker.

However, it may just be the pandemic talking, but it makes Paris look so good. I love the city, even though I haven't been there since 2014, when I stopped long enough to grab a sandwich between the Eurostar and the TGV on my way from London to Turin. My previous visit before then had been in 2011, when I went for a work conference. But whenever I'm there, I love the feel of walking around the city, enjoying the cafes and deploying my rapidly declining French (to be answered in English). Watching Emily scurry around the city on her stilettos transports me there and lets me imagine how much fun I'd have out there, if it weren't for a global pandemic.

The city itself makes for a wonderful supporting character in the show. It struck me today that you couldn't really do something like this with any other European city. London's too rainy to host an American's candy-colored fantasies of romance, Berlin is too grimy and Rome is too frustrating (though Rome would make a great setting for a similar show). It's also worth noting that Americans don't really know anything about Europe anyway, so it's better to set it someplace that comes with its own associations, even if a cute romantic comedy set in Krakow or Barcelona would be a fun watch on its own terms.

Emily in Paris is also a great showcase for classic and recent French pop music, which I've always liked. I'm a little weird about music in languages other than English, but the French have long had a good sense of mixing genres, adding some jazzy and electro inflections to their pop and guitar music. The French pop from the 60s that I particularly like (think Moi Je Joue by Brigitte Bardot) leans hard into the bright, exciting image that Paris has long cultivated, especially with playful lyrics and charming singing by beautiful singers. It's a nice backdrop for watching characters zoom around Paris's landmarks on scooters or walking down the Seine.

Another thing I like about the show is watching it with someone else. It's fun to tease the characters, or be catty about their clothes, when watching it with my girlfriend or my sister. More serious shows like Mare of Easttown or even Star Trek demand a certain focus, lest you miss a plot point; this is a good communal watching experience, where paying attention is less important than the social aspect.

It doesn't matter that I'm not really the target demographic. For 30 minutes or so, I can enjoy pretty people having their romantic problems against the backdrop of a city I miss terribly, and not worry about seeing some gritty depiction of urban decay or sci-fi violence. It makes for a nice palate cleanser, which everyone needs from time to time. So avant le saison trois! If they do a third season, I'll be eagerly waiting for it to drop by the end of this year.

After all, we need to see what happens with Gabriel and with Emily's job...