Chelsea are up for sale. Public confirmation came on Wednesday evening that Roman Abramovich is ready to listen to offers for the club he has bankrolled for almost 19 years.
The transfer of ownership will not be fast-tracked. It will follow due process. While there is intense regret that it has come to this, the oligarch’s was a decision made, he insisted, “with the club’s best interest at heart”.
Yet, behind the scenes, there is a sense of urgency. The talk away from the public utterances was of concrete offers already received – and presumably deemed unacceptable – and the setting of Friday deadlines for further bids, as well as feelers being put out around the globe to unearth prospective buyers for the current European and world champions.
The assumption was that this apparent sudden need to sell was born of an anticipation that Abramovich is to be placed on the United Kingdom government’s sanctions list. After all, the clamour for action against “Moscow-on-Thames” has grown as the Russian invasion of Ukraine intensifies. The topic has been aired regularly in the House of Commons by MPs invoking parliamentary privilege. The leader of the opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, opened Prime Minister’s Questions by referencing Chelsea’s owner on Wednesday. So too had a distraught Ukrainian journalist when confronting Boris Johnson at a press briefing in Warsaw earlier in the week.
Those close to the oligarch insist they do not expect Abramovich to be placed on the sanctions list. They suggest he has done nothing to justify such action and is merely a successful businessman removed from politics. It remains to be seen, too, whether the UK’s Foreign Office and National Crime Agency would be able to prove links to Vladimir Putin’s regime to justify freezing his British-based assets.