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by **Reg** » Mon Feb 16, 2009 1:23 am

From The TimesFebruary 16, 2009

Roman Abramovich knows Chelsea have not aged well

The look on Roman Abramovich’s face, as he sat alongside Guus Hiddink in the directors’ box at Vicarage Road on Saturday evening, was a strangely familiar one, but at first it was hard to place. It gradually became recognisable as the look of someone who is making you listen to his favourite album and is slowly coming to realise, from your pained expression, that it is not half as good as he remembers.

This, with the club’s new interim manager alongside him, was the first time in several years that Abramovich found himself having to showcase Chelsea, the club in whose reflected glory he would bask. Over the past 12 months he has rarely been seen at Stamford Bridge, less eager to bask in the relative mediocrity of the Avram Grant and Luiz Felipe Scolari regimes, so looking at his team anew on Saturday, both through his own eyes and then those of Hiddink, gave him the perfect opportunity to assess the state of a troubled nation.

To be blunt, Chelsea are a mess. It is a mess that a world-class coach such as Hiddink may prove able to clean up in the short term, as he takes charge today until the end of the season, but it is not where Abramovich expected his project to be in February 2009. He envisaged a club that, with his financial backing, would first rule London, then England, then Europe and then, finally, to borrow Peter Kenyon’s colourful phrase, “turn the world blue” — oh yes, and they would do so playing beautiful football of the type he saw Real Madrid and Manchester United produce on the night he fell in love with the game at Old Trafford in April 2003.

It has not happened and the worry for Chelsea supporters is that, as Abramovich’s interest and priorities fluctuate, it never will. Almost from the moment he bought the club, it has been run on a whim and a prayer, with splurges of extravagant and at times highly capricious spending in the transfer market punctuated by outbreaks of prudence. For all the attempts to characterise this as part of a smart, intelligent business plan — “losses reduced again”, the official website exclaimed on Friday, as they reported a £65.7 million loss for the previous financial year — the reality is that Chelsea, on and off the pitch, continue to fall short of the ambitious targets set by their Russian owner.

Chelsea must sell before they can buy after £65.7m loss
More questions have been raised in recent months about Abramovich’s commitment to Chelsea, with his interest appearing to fade while his vast fortune has been hit by the dramatic fall in the global price of oil.

The announcement that potentially Abramovich had written off £369.9 million by turning half of his interest-free loans to the club into shares was viewed by some in the industry as a cosmetic exercise that raised almost as many questions as it answered. More interesting, perhaps, was Kenyon’s talk of Chelsea’s “ambitious targets to be EBIDTA-neutral (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) on June 30 2010 and to require zero cash funding from the owner at the beginning of the financial year 2009/10”.

Kenyon admits that “any squad restructuring in the summer will be funded predominantly by sales”, but the sales of Shaun Wright-Phillips and Wayne Bridge to Manchester City did not seem to swell Scolari’s transfer budget. While anyone can scribble down the names of Alex, Paulo Ferreira, Branislav Ivanovic, Florent Malouda and Didier Drogba and suggest that £50 million could be raised at a stroke, past experience, with Juan Sebastián Verón, Hernán Crespo, Andriy Shevchenko and others, will tell Chelsea that finding buyers for ageing, demotivated and, crucially, overpaid players is not easy.

There is also a danger in trying to sell five or six players in the belief that one or two top-level signings will raise the standard. In the golden days of José Mourinho, Kenyon suggested that Chelsea’s squad of 24 was the ideal size. Since then, they have offloaded more than they have bought. These days, to get to that magical figure, you have to include Michael Mancienne, Miroslav Stoch and Franco Di Santo, three youngsters, Ricardo Quaresma, on loan from Inter Milan, and Mineiro, a 33-year-old former Brazil midfield player whose Premier League career is unlikely to go beyond 15 minutes.

The squad that Hiddink has spent the past few days surveying is an ageing one that is low on flair and even lower on the spirit that, along with impeccable tactical preparation, took it to two successive Premier League titles. It needs an injection of top-class young players. It is not that they are an old team — John Terry and Ashley Cole are 28, while Petr Cech, José Bosingwa and Michael Essien are 26 — but more that, with a lack of young players coming through, “it’s hard to see where there is going to be an improvement in Chelsea”, as Sir Alex Ferguson put it last summer.

That may have been one of the truths that was dawning on Abramovich as he sat alongside Hiddink at Vicarage Road. “Just wait until you see Ballack, the best midfield player in Europe, and Drogba, a powerful striker without equal. Just wait until you see Cech, a fearless goalkeeper.”

But, like those albums that sounded great at the time, this Chelsea team has not aged well and is in need of more than digital remastering. It is a team that Hiddink will feel he can reinvigorate in the short term, and salvage something from a disappointing season, but, beyond that, they need surgery at the time when Abramovich is retreating from the operating table.
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It always was a house built on sand.

by **Big Niall** » Thu Mar 19, 2009 1:25 pm

Chelsea just aren't a big club. It's a bit like a fat bird with an expensive handbag trying to look glamourous.

by **tubby** » Sat Mar 21, 2009 2:44 pm

Someone on here made a good point the other day that generally their aquad is quite old. Meaning they will have to spend a bit to bring in younger players. I canno't see Roman sanctioning another mega spree like Ranieri/Mourinho went in the current financial climate.

by **das20093** » Mon Apr 13, 2009 10:21 pm

they are old and they have to face it.

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