Chelsea

[Scott_M]

Reading The Athletic article, if they get to the FA Cup Semi & Final or CL Final, they might not be allowed any supporters there because Chelsea would likely make money from the ticket sales. 

[Scott_M]

12 minutes ago, Bjornebye said:

They've got about 3000 players on loan and all. What happens to their loan fee's? 

All existing contractual obligations can still be met, apparently. 

[Clem H Fandango]

Wheres Steve sinatra and Chelsea number 1 fan when you need them.

[Megadrive Man]

[Harry Squatter]

[AngryOfTuebrook]

9 minutes ago, MegadriveMan said:

That's wonderful.

 

They'll probably look better than the shite that Nike dress them in.

[Creator Supreme]

1 hour ago, Lario said:

Time for Nike to step up and do the right thing.

Yep, walk away from making Liverpool's kits!

 

 

I saw an opportunity and I took it!

[dockers_strike]

20 minutes ago, Scott_M said:

As well as the £1.5bn Abramovich is allegedly writing off, Chelsea lose hand over fist each season. They rely heavily on players sales to mitigate loses. 
 

If these sanction’s are lifted by June, it likely won’t be too damaging to them. It’ll have an impact, but not disastrous. If it goes on into the summer and they can’t sell players, season tickets, new shirts etc, I assume they’ll then fall foul of FFP or administration?

Wait, what?! A club backed by a mega rich individual still has to sell players to balance the books? WTF are FSG playing at?

19 minutes ago, Bjornebye said:

They've got about 3000 players on loan and all. What happens to their loan fee's? 

Id imagine these loan fees are generally paid up front? Even if not, the club with the loaned player would still have to pay and the money frozen once it reaches chelsea's bank account.

8 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

@Barrington Womble How does a buyer write a note in this deal - you can't do a transaction with Abro atm.

 

The question of away fans seems sketchy as well. Certainly it is a sporting advantage to have no away support.

Government isnt bothered about 'away' fans getting into games or any advantage. They've applied a sanction and the business, in this case chelsea have to comply.

 

I cannot see the PL sanctioning chelsea for being unable to admit away fans when the Government have stated the restrictions on the club.

[Tj hooker]

3 hours ago, Section_31 said:

Live scenes from inside the Chelsea store. 

 

Hahahaha 

[coachpotato]

17 minutes ago, Jennings said:

I don't think the government will let Chelsea go down the pan.

This.

There’ll be some wriggling with the rules and their application to stop them imploding.

[Barrington Womble]

31 minutes ago, No2 said:

I think you're massively underplaying what has happened here. Three have basically said the brand is toxic, the rest surely have to follow, no proper business will jump straight into bed with them.

 

None of the mentioned billionaire's are buying it, they will be all be scheming to get it as cheap as possible and will gladly watch it burn so it reduces in price, regardless the Tories have probably already lined up a buyer, run it into the ground and sell it to their mates for 50 quid. 

 

I would say a Rangers situation is more likely than a swift sale to proper owner who will run it well.

I hope you are right and they go down the shitter. I don't see the 3 thing as big at all, it's just reactionary. If they really felt the brand was toxic, their 1st statement today would have been they are terminating their contract with Chelsea. But it wasn't. It was they were reviewing and will discuss with Chelsea. Which they then followed with a suspension of their arrangement and not a termination. 

11 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

@Barrington Womble How does a buyer write a note in this deal - you can't do a transaction with Abro atm.

 

The question of away fans seems sketchy as well. Certainly it is a sporting advantage to have no away support.

I think Dorries said some key things this morning. 

1. Their aim isn't a cultural impact to football, hence this special dispensation through the license. 

2. She never said the club couldn't be sold. Instead said abromovich could not profit from the club being sold. I think that statement implicitly says the club can be sold under the right conditions. 

3. She also said the license is constantly under review, so despite the 31 may end to the current license, it can be altered before then. So while it is true abromovich cannot sell right now (and certainly not at his own will), I don't believe that is a permanent situation. It's just a starting point today to grab headlines. 

[Scott_M]

Imagine the Chelsea boardroom looking a something like this…

 

[TheHowieLama]

9 minutes ago, Creator Supreme said:

 

I saw an opportunity and I took it!

Vladimir Putin liked this.

[Bjornebye]

They can wear their usual shirts tonight with the 3 logo but not again 

[TheHowieLama]

1 minute ago, Bjornebye said:

They can wear their usual shirts tonight with the 3 logo but not again 

Should get behind the owner and tape a Z over the 3.

[Pete]

Fuck them. Hope they go bust.  

[dockers_strike]

2 minutes ago, Bjornebye said:

They can wear their usual shirts tonight with the 3 logo but not again 

Why hasnt FIFA insisted they stop wearing the World Club Champions badge?!

[Barrington Womble]

@TheHowieLama ...  In fact Dorries on BBC news now saying "it's important he doesn't profit from Chelsea, but our priority is the club is protected and the fans are protected". I just don't see the government letting them go down the shitter. 

[Pidge]

Scene is all set for Danny Drinkwater's triumphant return.

[TheHowieLama]

2 minutes ago, Barrington Womble said:

@TheHowieLama ...  In fact Dorries on BBC news now saying "it's important he doesn't profit from Chelsea, but our priority is the club is protected and the fans are protected". I just don't see the government letting them go down the shitter. 

Not profiting would result in him being paid any monies put in though. Not sure it is going to look good saying here is your 1.5 bil back, sorry for the inconvenience.

[Reckoner]

[Harry Squatter]

[dockers_strike]

Ouch! Sounds like some old scores being settled here. And funny how now, after 19 years, the trophies are only now described as 'tainted.! Should have massive fucking asterisks against them if you ask me, same for city. He does make a great point about travelling to Norwich though.

 

After 19 years of writs and injunctions, Roman Abramovich can no longer steam-clean his reputation through his lawyers. His fierce and long-litigated claims that he has nothing to do with Vladimir Putin today lie in the same deep freeze as his British assets.

 

No sooner does a Treasury document reveal his passport numbers than it labels him a “pro-Kremlin oligarch” and Putin as a figure “with whom Abramovich has had a close relationship for decades”.

 

Chelsea’s owner is found by the Government to have been not just a sympathiser of the Russian president but a man who has used this connection for his own financial and material benefit, whether through “tax breaks, buying and selling shares from and to the state at favourable rates” or “contracts received in the run-up to the 2018 World Cup”.

 

This, then, is the figure for whom Amanda Staveley, financier of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund’s similarly grim acquisition of Newcastle United, feels “really sad”. This is the individual about whom former Chelsea captain John Terry posts mawkish tweets, describing him as “the best” and attaching a cluster of blue heart emojis. This is the same benefactor whose name Chelsea fans still chant in helpless gratitude, even when it ruins a minute’s applause to mark the myriad atrocities that Putin is inflicting upon Ukraine.

 

It is one of the game’s bleaker truths that many fans care far less about the dubious origins of their clubs’ money than about how much there is to burn on the latest larcenously-priced left-back. After multiple reports that the Saudi state had ordered the murder and dismemberment of a journalist, grown men turned up with their sons at St James’ Park with dishcloths on their heads, a shabby mock-sheikh tribute to their buyers.

 

Even in the midst of disgrace, Abramovich will still have his credulous acolytes in the stands. Even the Government’s devastating accusation that he is, via his mining company Evraz, involved in “destabilising Ukraine and threatening the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine” will not deter those who have hung “The Roman Empire” banners all around Stamford Bridge.

 

But the collective delusion is plain for everybody to see. It was grim enough that Abramovich bankrolled Chelsea’s transformation with the billions he amassed at Sibneft, an oil giant that even his own lawyer admitted had been acquired through a “rigged” auction. It is to his club’s graver discredit that he now finds himself exposed as a henchman of Putin, whose forces are reducing maternity wards in Mariupol to rubble.

 

At times like these, it is apt to remember those who have incurred the full force of his litigious wrath. Take Catherine Belton and HarperCollins, the author and publisher of Putin’s People, against whom he settled a libel claim last December. Belton described how, for 12 months, she had been caught in a “war of attrition”, in which she was “bombarded with lawsuits”. One of the 26 passages by which Abramovich purported to be defamed stated that he was under the “control of President Vladimir Putin”. And yet a mere 10 weeks on, we see this claim supported in black and white on Treasury letterhead. “Abramovich,” the department declares, “has received preferential treatment and concessions from Putin and the government of Russia.”

 

One positive upshot of the Abramovich affair would, as Conservative MP Bob Seely has argued, be an end to the intimidation of a free media by “oligarchs and kleptocrats”. But in the short term, it cannot hurt Chelsea to learn the meaning of humility. Under Abramovich, a man whose largesse extends to buying a flotilla of superyachts and his own Boeing 787 Dreamliner, the club mastered the art of ostentatious excess.

 

At the height of their spending, they would travel to a game in Norwich on a 25-minute charter flight. How deliciously ironic, then, that the first trip taken under their newly-straitened circumstances, with away-day spending capped at £20,000, should be to Carrow Road. This time, they would be lucky to afford an overnight stay at a Premier Inn.

 

Chelsea have long bristled at being caricatured as vulgarians. Each one of 18 trophies won under Abramovich’s ownership would somehow be portrayed as proof of his noble intentions and clarity of vision. Even Thomas Tuchel, an intelligent manager who has spoken eloquently in recent days about being caught in the crossfire, has fallen prey to this blind loyalty. After lifting the Club World Cup in Abu Dhabi last month, he offered a paean to his employer more gushing than any spokesperson could script. “I told him, ‘This is for you, it is your club. Your input and passion have made it possible’. This trophy is for him.”

 

How naive those words now look. Within a month, the owner depicted by Tuchel as a paragon of virtue has been identified and sanctioned by the Government as a direct associate of a head of state unleashing vast bloodshed and slaughter against a sovereign neighbour. Even amid the mayhem, Abramovich still desperately sought to salvage his image: first came the suggestion that he was participating in peace talks on Ukraine’s side, despite not having once condemned Russia for invading, then the assurance that any “net proceeds” of a Chelsea sale would be channelled towards reconstruction efforts.

 

Neither ruse helped avert the outcome he feared most. His beloved Chelsea cannot even shift any further match tickets, with Government convinced he is complicit in enabling a murderous tyrant. Let this once-unthinkable turmoil - the ban on everything from player signings to merchandise sales - become an indelible part of the Abramovich legacy. Difficult though this might be for Chelsea supporters to swallow, every achievement over which he has presided, from the five league titles to the nights of European glory, belongs now to an irredeemably tainted enterprise.

 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2022/03/10/every-chelsea-success-roman-abramovich-era-now-tainted/

[Barrington Womble]

6 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

Not profiting would result in him being paid any monies put in though. Not sure it is going to look good saying here is your 1.5 bil back, sorry for the inconvenience.

You mean from the debt that's on the books? 

[TheHowieLama]

31 minutes ago, Barrington Womble said:

You mean from the debt that's on the books? 

yea