Post by QPR Report on Jan 11, 2009 1:31:59 GMT
Observer - v *
Has the Chelsea dream gone sour for absent Abramovich?
Where once he was passionate, the owner seems struck by ennui at the club's questionable progress
Roman Abramovich at the opening of Chelsea's new Cobham training facilities in 2007, but the Russian's big spending habits look to be over. Photograph: Ian Walton/Getty Images
At Chelsea even frugality costs the earth. Roman Abramovich was some £600m out of pocket before it became indisputable that he would insist on the club living within its means. The owner is not expected to attend the match at Manchester United tomorrow and some suppose he would absent himself entirely from the Premier League scene if there was anyone around still capable of making an attractive bid for Chelsea. This is an Abramovich subdued by experience.
The Russian was once so much a serial attender of games that he might have passed for a groundhopper. Nowadays he keeps his distance. The manager Luiz Felipe Scolari is adamant that Abramovich is "still committed" but it is not an opinion built on prolonged acquaintance with the proprietor since his summer arrival.
"Until now I have only spoken with Roman three or four times," he said, "I think this is normal. I don't know what Roman is thinking about the club, and I don't ask." Scolari also remarked that his post-match duties with the media allow him scant time to chew the fat with Abramovich. "For me," he said, "it makes no difference."
It is not, in truth, any kind of crisis. The club will be an attractive asset whenever the economy next has an irrational upsurge. Abramovich, in addition, has had a break-even target of 2010 and, with turnover leaping by 25% to £190m in the most recent accounts, the business is far from moribund.
Back in 2003, however, he was not dispassionate. The price for buying Chelsea, including the debt he inherited, was £140m. He was far from subdued by that, yet the excitement was his outdoing. Abramovich is not the first new owner to embark proudly on a spree, but the scale of it continues to look dumbfounding. His time at Chelsea has been conducted in the wrong order. Rather than reaching a great conclusion after prudent beginnings, he has followed the reverse course. Sanity has come belatedly to a man who looks faintly chastened.
Football histories will always record the epic fiascos. Juan Sebastian Veron, whose value had dropped by a half in two years at Manchester United, was bought by Chelsea, where he became all but worthless within a couple of years? That was the epitome of folly, but it also tends to divert attention from the persistent illogicality of even routine transactions.
Chelsea, with Wayne Bridge on the books, had no need for another international left-back, but they still bought Asier del Horno from Athletic Bilbao for £8m in 2005. When he was offloaded a year later his price had dropped by 40%, but it felt petty to ponder such matters. The club did not have profit in mind then and it was a landmark for Abramovich's Chelsea this week when the maximum value was realised on Bridge, sold for £12m to Manchester City. The mantle of exorbitance had also changed hands.
City are actually lagging slightly behind Abramovich, although that could be corrected at any moment. He had no sooner arrived than £100m had left the coffers as Chelsea bought Veron, Bridge, Adrian Mutu, Claude Makelele, Damien Duff, Joe Cole, Geremi and Hernan Crespo. The club was hell-bent on glory and if there were trophies to count then the cost could be reckoned later.
This worked in a histrionic fashion once Jose Mourinho was the manager. There were consecutive Premier League titles, but the Portuguese was also a turbulent employee. The definitive breach came not with a hapless defeat, but following a drab draw with Rosenborg that was no impediment to Chelsea's advance in the Champions League.
So boisterous and truculent an employee is only tolerated so long as he succeeds. Pat Nevin, the Chelsea winger of the 1980s, points out that efforts had already been made to curb Mourinho. Avram Grant, who would replace Mourinho as manager, had been named director of football three months before Rosenborg . The Portuguese was also unhappy to have Frank Arnesen encroaching on his territory when the latter was prised away from Tottenham to become Chelsea's director of youth development.
"They tried to wrest some power back from Mourinho," Nevin says of the Stamford Bridge hierarchy. He knows, too, that Chelsea did not have to fear confrontation when they appointed Scolari last summer. "He would be mad to do that," say Nevin. "What happened to the last guy that did it? If someone is seen as a dominant person then once he is gone the club will say that they still want a big character, but with a smaller power base. That's normal and it happens at other clubs."
Financially and emotionally, Abramovich would like to regularise Chelsea's affairs. He himself has literally distanced himself as typified by tomorrow's match. The seething conjecture about which person had been the motivating force behind any specific transfer is over. Whatever else is said, Scolari must have been at ease with the summer signings of Deco and Jose Bosingwa. They were respectively members of the full national team and the Under-21 side when he was manager of Portugal.
The trouble with the influx of common sense at Stamford Bridge is that it does not hold out a convincing promise of success. Scolari underlined the limitations recently when he noted that the then-injured Florent Malouda was the only left-sided player he had for the left flank. He was too shrewd to agree yesterday when asked if Manchester United had a better balanced squad, but said, "They choose their players very well and have a good balance, yes."
It was up to his audience to decide whether a contrast was being made. Only a blinkered diehard, though, would profess himself overjoyed by the options when, for instance, the candidates for the forward line comprise Nicolas Anelka and the sometimes truculent Didier Drogba. Such subjects surely add to Abramovich's consternation. After all the sums expended, it was bemusing to find the midfielder Michael Essien at right-back in the Moscow loss to Manchester United last year.
If Abramovich, in his exasperated moments, despairs of shaping Chelsea satisfactorily, the desire to step back is comprehensible. It is presumed, as well, that he has been hurt by the financial crisis, although the recent estimate of his reduced wealth at £7bn did not inspire outpourings of pity. The main question in his mind must have concern the sense of making further investments in the club when the return, in terms of trophies, has disappeared since 2007.
Alternative strategies have run aground. Youth development, unpredictable at any time, has disappointed at Chelsea. Tom Taiwo, for instance, was one of two youngsters who cost the club £5m in compensation after they had been taken from Leeds United in 2005. This season the midfielder spent a month with Port Vale, who then chose not to extend the loan period.
Chelsea can still perform well and could do so again tomorrow at Old Trafford, but there is nothing relentless about them any more. The Scolari system, where the full-backs alone offer real width, is no longer a surprise to opponents . "I enjoy Scolari's system more than Mourinho's by quite a distance," said Nevin, "but whether it is going to be more productive or successful is seriously open to question."
Nevin sees the difficulty in Chelsea's change of gear. "They wanted to build a world club and a world brand," he said. There's only one way of doing that and that's through success. But if you then ask for a period of normality as well then those two things are mutually exclusive."
The signing of Robinho would have given Chelsea the extra source of speed and flair that is absent from the flanks, but it is understandable that Abramovich would not enter an auction with Manchester City. At the moment circumspection is the key. When the Stamford Bridge club does return to the transfer market, potential sellers will at last believe that there are clear limits to the fee that can be set. Chelsea will no longer pay any price.
Abramovich is putting Chelsea on to a rational footing, but it cannot inspire him or revive the passion that was once so obvious in him. He has a club that is inching towards stability and, conceivably, sellability, but it cannot bring him the joy he once felt when the team was dominant and overjoyed fans sang the Russian song Kalinka in his honour.
www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2009/jan/10/chelsea-roman-abramovich-premier-league
Observer - Chelsea ditch expensive foreign kids
Chelsea efforts on young English talent. A large group of players caught in limbo between Luiz Felipe Scolari's senior squad and Chelsea's under-18 team have been made available for transfer or loan - with the club offering to subsidise their unusually high wages in some cases.
Having not played on loan to Portsmouth, Israel striker Ben Sahar has been moved to Dutch Eredivisie strugglers De Graafschap. Danish forward Morten Nielsen - whose father Benny was employed by the club as a scout - is close to joining Saint-Etienne on loan. Italian centre-back Vincenzo Camilleri may return to Reggina, while Portugal youth internationals Fábio Ferreira and Ricardo Fernandes have rejected transfers to Italy and Spain, despite Chelsea offering to pay off the remaining six months of their contracts in full. The futures of a number of English players on loan at lower-division clubs are also under consideration.
Signed before Frank Arnesen's multi-million-pound appointment as chief scout and director of youth development, Ferreira and Fernandes are at the low end of the wage scale at £85,000 a year. Many of Arnesen's recruits take home more than £150,000.
Embarrassingly, the Dane has spent much of his recent time attempting to move his lauded signings on. His failure to establish "the best youth development programme in the world" and produce a player a season for the first team, coupled with comments made about Roman Abramovich's straitened finances, have angered the owner and have led to Arnesen losing influence at Stamford Bridge.
Chelsea officials say the departures of certain youth players is a natural part of the academy assessment process, unconnected with efforts to economise. The club currently have 20 England youth internationals between the ages of 15 and 18, but are seeking to increase that number.
Scolari, meanwhile, has moved to assert his authority over the senior squad by handing out a list outlining a range of penalties to be exacted for ill-discipline. The punishments include fines of several hundred pounds for every minute a player is late for training or club travel, several thousand pounds for leaving the country without permission and others for breaching the dress code by wearing hats
www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/jan/11/chelsea-youth-team
Has the Chelsea dream gone sour for absent Abramovich?
Where once he was passionate, the owner seems struck by ennui at the club's questionable progress
Roman Abramovich at the opening of Chelsea's new Cobham training facilities in 2007, but the Russian's big spending habits look to be over. Photograph: Ian Walton/Getty Images
At Chelsea even frugality costs the earth. Roman Abramovich was some £600m out of pocket before it became indisputable that he would insist on the club living within its means. The owner is not expected to attend the match at Manchester United tomorrow and some suppose he would absent himself entirely from the Premier League scene if there was anyone around still capable of making an attractive bid for Chelsea. This is an Abramovich subdued by experience.
The Russian was once so much a serial attender of games that he might have passed for a groundhopper. Nowadays he keeps his distance. The manager Luiz Felipe Scolari is adamant that Abramovich is "still committed" but it is not an opinion built on prolonged acquaintance with the proprietor since his summer arrival.
"Until now I have only spoken with Roman three or four times," he said, "I think this is normal. I don't know what Roman is thinking about the club, and I don't ask." Scolari also remarked that his post-match duties with the media allow him scant time to chew the fat with Abramovich. "For me," he said, "it makes no difference."
It is not, in truth, any kind of crisis. The club will be an attractive asset whenever the economy next has an irrational upsurge. Abramovich, in addition, has had a break-even target of 2010 and, with turnover leaping by 25% to £190m in the most recent accounts, the business is far from moribund.
Back in 2003, however, he was not dispassionate. The price for buying Chelsea, including the debt he inherited, was £140m. He was far from subdued by that, yet the excitement was his outdoing. Abramovich is not the first new owner to embark proudly on a spree, but the scale of it continues to look dumbfounding. His time at Chelsea has been conducted in the wrong order. Rather than reaching a great conclusion after prudent beginnings, he has followed the reverse course. Sanity has come belatedly to a man who looks faintly chastened.
Football histories will always record the epic fiascos. Juan Sebastian Veron, whose value had dropped by a half in two years at Manchester United, was bought by Chelsea, where he became all but worthless within a couple of years? That was the epitome of folly, but it also tends to divert attention from the persistent illogicality of even routine transactions.
Chelsea, with Wayne Bridge on the books, had no need for another international left-back, but they still bought Asier del Horno from Athletic Bilbao for £8m in 2005. When he was offloaded a year later his price had dropped by 40%, but it felt petty to ponder such matters. The club did not have profit in mind then and it was a landmark for Abramovich's Chelsea this week when the maximum value was realised on Bridge, sold for £12m to Manchester City. The mantle of exorbitance had also changed hands.
City are actually lagging slightly behind Abramovich, although that could be corrected at any moment. He had no sooner arrived than £100m had left the coffers as Chelsea bought Veron, Bridge, Adrian Mutu, Claude Makelele, Damien Duff, Joe Cole, Geremi and Hernan Crespo. The club was hell-bent on glory and if there were trophies to count then the cost could be reckoned later.
This worked in a histrionic fashion once Jose Mourinho was the manager. There were consecutive Premier League titles, but the Portuguese was also a turbulent employee. The definitive breach came not with a hapless defeat, but following a drab draw with Rosenborg that was no impediment to Chelsea's advance in the Champions League.
So boisterous and truculent an employee is only tolerated so long as he succeeds. Pat Nevin, the Chelsea winger of the 1980s, points out that efforts had already been made to curb Mourinho. Avram Grant, who would replace Mourinho as manager, had been named director of football three months before Rosenborg . The Portuguese was also unhappy to have Frank Arnesen encroaching on his territory when the latter was prised away from Tottenham to become Chelsea's director of youth development.
"They tried to wrest some power back from Mourinho," Nevin says of the Stamford Bridge hierarchy. He knows, too, that Chelsea did not have to fear confrontation when they appointed Scolari last summer. "He would be mad to do that," say Nevin. "What happened to the last guy that did it? If someone is seen as a dominant person then once he is gone the club will say that they still want a big character, but with a smaller power base. That's normal and it happens at other clubs."
Financially and emotionally, Abramovich would like to regularise Chelsea's affairs. He himself has literally distanced himself as typified by tomorrow's match. The seething conjecture about which person had been the motivating force behind any specific transfer is over. Whatever else is said, Scolari must have been at ease with the summer signings of Deco and Jose Bosingwa. They were respectively members of the full national team and the Under-21 side when he was manager of Portugal.
The trouble with the influx of common sense at Stamford Bridge is that it does not hold out a convincing promise of success. Scolari underlined the limitations recently when he noted that the then-injured Florent Malouda was the only left-sided player he had for the left flank. He was too shrewd to agree yesterday when asked if Manchester United had a better balanced squad, but said, "They choose their players very well and have a good balance, yes."
It was up to his audience to decide whether a contrast was being made. Only a blinkered diehard, though, would profess himself overjoyed by the options when, for instance, the candidates for the forward line comprise Nicolas Anelka and the sometimes truculent Didier Drogba. Such subjects surely add to Abramovich's consternation. After all the sums expended, it was bemusing to find the midfielder Michael Essien at right-back in the Moscow loss to Manchester United last year.
If Abramovich, in his exasperated moments, despairs of shaping Chelsea satisfactorily, the desire to step back is comprehensible. It is presumed, as well, that he has been hurt by the financial crisis, although the recent estimate of his reduced wealth at £7bn did not inspire outpourings of pity. The main question in his mind must have concern the sense of making further investments in the club when the return, in terms of trophies, has disappeared since 2007.
Alternative strategies have run aground. Youth development, unpredictable at any time, has disappointed at Chelsea. Tom Taiwo, for instance, was one of two youngsters who cost the club £5m in compensation after they had been taken from Leeds United in 2005. This season the midfielder spent a month with Port Vale, who then chose not to extend the loan period.
Chelsea can still perform well and could do so again tomorrow at Old Trafford, but there is nothing relentless about them any more. The Scolari system, where the full-backs alone offer real width, is no longer a surprise to opponents . "I enjoy Scolari's system more than Mourinho's by quite a distance," said Nevin, "but whether it is going to be more productive or successful is seriously open to question."
Nevin sees the difficulty in Chelsea's change of gear. "They wanted to build a world club and a world brand," he said. There's only one way of doing that and that's through success. But if you then ask for a period of normality as well then those two things are mutually exclusive."
The signing of Robinho would have given Chelsea the extra source of speed and flair that is absent from the flanks, but it is understandable that Abramovich would not enter an auction with Manchester City. At the moment circumspection is the key. When the Stamford Bridge club does return to the transfer market, potential sellers will at last believe that there are clear limits to the fee that can be set. Chelsea will no longer pay any price.
Abramovich is putting Chelsea on to a rational footing, but it cannot inspire him or revive the passion that was once so obvious in him. He has a club that is inching towards stability and, conceivably, sellability, but it cannot bring him the joy he once felt when the team was dominant and overjoyed fans sang the Russian song Kalinka in his honour.
www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2009/jan/10/chelsea-roman-abramovich-premier-league
Observer - Chelsea ditch expensive foreign kids
Chelsea efforts on young English talent. A large group of players caught in limbo between Luiz Felipe Scolari's senior squad and Chelsea's under-18 team have been made available for transfer or loan - with the club offering to subsidise their unusually high wages in some cases.
Having not played on loan to Portsmouth, Israel striker Ben Sahar has been moved to Dutch Eredivisie strugglers De Graafschap. Danish forward Morten Nielsen - whose father Benny was employed by the club as a scout - is close to joining Saint-Etienne on loan. Italian centre-back Vincenzo Camilleri may return to Reggina, while Portugal youth internationals Fábio Ferreira and Ricardo Fernandes have rejected transfers to Italy and Spain, despite Chelsea offering to pay off the remaining six months of their contracts in full. The futures of a number of English players on loan at lower-division clubs are also under consideration.
Signed before Frank Arnesen's multi-million-pound appointment as chief scout and director of youth development, Ferreira and Fernandes are at the low end of the wage scale at £85,000 a year. Many of Arnesen's recruits take home more than £150,000.
Embarrassingly, the Dane has spent much of his recent time attempting to move his lauded signings on. His failure to establish "the best youth development programme in the world" and produce a player a season for the first team, coupled with comments made about Roman Abramovich's straitened finances, have angered the owner and have led to Arnesen losing influence at Stamford Bridge.
Chelsea officials say the departures of certain youth players is a natural part of the academy assessment process, unconnected with efforts to economise. The club currently have 20 England youth internationals between the ages of 15 and 18, but are seeking to increase that number.
Scolari, meanwhile, has moved to assert his authority over the senior squad by handing out a list outlining a range of penalties to be exacted for ill-discipline. The punishments include fines of several hundred pounds for every minute a player is late for training or club travel, several thousand pounds for leaving the country without permission and others for breaching the dress code by wearing hats
www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/jan/11/chelsea-youth-team