Manchester City Forums

From Timesonline:

Are the days of Abramovich extravagance at Chelsea over?

Among the dozens of players who have been linked with moves to Chelsea during next month’s transfer window, there has been but one recurring factor: they are all, to use a well-worn phrase, cheap as chips. They range from the uninspiring (Vágner Love) through the mundane (Emile Heskey) to the implausible (Kevin Davies) and, while Luiz Felipe Scolari still hopes to set his sights a little higher, there is a clear message that the extravagance of the Roman Abramovich regime has been curtailed.

The great unanswered question is: why? Those close to the owner insist that it has nothing to do with the £10 billion that he was reported to have lost as a result of the financial crisis. Peter Kenyon, the chief executive, has said it is because Chelsea wish to be self-financing, but then why was Abramovich willing to commit £30 million to signing Robinho on September 1, until being gazumped by Manchester City’s new owners? Others say that he has new passions, such as art, hence his combined £61 million investment on Francis Bacon’s Triptych and Lucien Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping in the space of 48 hours last May.

The truth must lie in a combination of these factors. Even if his troubles on the Russian stock exchange are dismissed as paper losses, the financial crisis has bruised him. So, too, has the struggle to establish Chelsea as a truly big club on the global stage and, in particular, their near-misses in the Champions League. As for the new landscape in English football, transformed by the Abu Dhabi United Group’s takeover of City, Abramovich has little appetite for a bidding war and now appears intent on retreat.

There have been times throughout his ownership of Chelsea when Abramovich has sought to rein in the spending and then opened the chequebook again soon afterwards. In 2007, in the final two transfer windows of the José Mourinho era, they made a £16 million net profit on players. This year they have spent heavily on Nicolas Anelka, José Bosingwa, Deco and others and had also been prepared to sign Robinho, but now, even though the need for a centre forward has been underlined, the money earmarked for that deal has disappeared.

Abramovich’s desire to make Chelsea self-sufficient is an admirable one, but less so when it involves moving the goalposts mid-season, denying Scolari the funds that had been set aside in the summer. The manager would be forgiven for wondering what kind of billionaire benefactor he is working for. The answer is a capricious one, whose love for football and for Chelsea should not be overestimated in these straitened times.