Chelsea's Roman Empire: The Abramovich Takeover
It Was What It Was : The Football History Podcast
The Overlap
4.9 • 667 Ratings
🗓️ 3 September 2024
⏱️ 76 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome to the latest episode of The Overlap’s football history podcast, It Was What It Was. This week Jonathan Wilson and Rob Draper tell the story of probably the most-consequential football club takeover ever: When Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea in 2003.
Before sportswashing was even a word and in an age when Financial Fair Play didn’t exist, we examine the background to the most-startling and unexpected deal in Premier League history. And the extraordinary impact it would make, as Chelsea splurged what was at the time an eye-watering £100m in that first summer transfer window, laying the foundations for Chelsea to become a super club that would win 18 major trophies in the Roman era.
It transformed the Premier League, threatened Fergie, ruined the latter years of Arsene Wenger’s career, caused UEFA to dream up new FFP rules to curb them and paved the way for the era of nation state investors at Manchester City, Paris St Germain and Newcastle United.
It Was What it Was goes back to that stunning summer which changed the game and debates whether football was ever the same after the Roman Conquest.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Rowan Abramovich has parked his tanks on our lawn and he's firing 50-pound notes at us. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Jonathan Wilson and with Rob Draper, and that was the Arsenal Vice Chairman David Dean, reacting in 2003 to the takeover that summer of Chelsea by the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. Today, and it was what it was, the Football History podcast, we'll be looking at that takeover and the impact it had and the longer term effects for the game. So, Rob, why don't you lead us in? I think we all know the enormous amount of money that Abramvich spent at Chelsea, but why do you tell us a bit about the background where Chelsea were and who Abramwich was and what |
| 0:41.4 | we knew about him back in that summer and the takeover happens? Yeah, well, actually in that summer, |
| 0:46.9 | 2003, we knew virtually nothing about him and it seems extraordinary now. The internet was kind of |
| 0:52.7 | in its infancy. There was very little on the web |
| 0:55.3 | about him. And this takeover came out of nowhere, really. It wasn't trailed. It wasn't |
| 1:01.5 | rumoured in the press. I know one journalist who felt he got a whiff of it, but he was a Sunday |
| 1:06.0 | journalist. It really landed as though from outer space at this 36-year-old Russian. |
| 1:12.5 | No one had ever heard of. |
| 1:13.7 | It sounded too good to be true. |
| 1:15.8 | I actually think this is perhaps the most seismic deal in football history, |
| 1:21.7 | and I'm going to try and justify that now. |
| 1:23.4 | The Premier League starts in 1992, |
| 1:25.4 | but I think it's 2003 is a year that the Premier League |
| 1:28.7 | starts taking steroids and starts, so globally becoming the dominant league. |
| 1:34.9 | And Roman Obronvich's takeover is part of that. |
| 1:37.1 | There are also a couple of completely unknown Americans called De Glazers who buys some shares |
| 1:42.8 | in Manchester United in early 2003. |
| 1:45.2 | I don't know what happened to them. |
| 1:47.2 | But we should just say, when you say the Premier League starts saying to steroids, |
| 1:51.4 | do you mean financial steroids here? |
| 1:53.9 | Absolutely, yeah. |
... |
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