Chelsea and the Oligarchs: England’s Second Battle of Stamford Bridge

The City of London’s shock blitzkrieg against Chelsea FC, who are currently the reigning European and world champions, will totally transform English football into something football fans will never stomach. 

Red-carding Chelsea’s owner, Israeli citizen Roman Abramovich, because of his alleged Russian links, will destroy the Football Association’s current business model. If regulators can confiscate an Israeli citizen’s assets because Russian peace-keeping forces have entered Ukraine, what of clubs like Newcastle Utd and Manchester City, that are owned by Middle Eastern despots? 

What of the gargantuan salaries that are paid to English-based players, a process which Abramovich initiated but which Chelsea FC can no longer partake in? What of the mini-army of youth players Chelsea have out on loan? Are they also to be sold at fire-sale prices?

In paying for Chelsea out of his own money or, if you prefer, from the vast riches he looted from Russia, Abramovich’s approach is the polar opposite of Manchester United’s owners, who looted the club to pay themselves billions. Why then is the Glazers’ approach kosher, whilst Abramovich’s is not?

The answer lies in the City of London, that quirky entity which has been looting the world’s resources since post-Roman times, much as how the Glazer clan looted Manchester Utd. The brigands, who control London’s Square Mile, care no more about England’s beautiful game than do the Russian cats that are now under sanction. Their game is rape, pillage and especially plunder.

Currently, their latest proxies are in the fight of their lives against Russia in Ukraine. At stake is the future of Western Europe, Germany in particular, whose choice is between constructive trade with Russia and engagement with China’s Belt and Road Initiative or permanent dominance and exploitation by Wall Street, the City and their fellow-buccaneers.

The City hopes to again bankrupt Russia and install another Yelstin drunkard to allow them renew their rape of Russia’s resources. Should they re-colonise Russia, the next step would be another opiate-driven war to sedate and subjugate China. As the Russians and Chinese ain’t buying, war, on a scale the world has never seen, is in the offing.

But Chelsea’s headhunters and their Linfield and Rangers allies can relax as their services are not needed, except to torch the odd Orthodox church or two. The City have a new, tooled-up army: legions of human drones to manipulate market prices, geniuses like Prince Harry to fly their drones and Ukrainian simpletons to fill their body bags.

If the City’s Ukrainian war goes as planned Germany, barred from Russia, will be an American vassal state for decades to come. Wall Street and the City will control the financial and commodities’ markets and Germany will be bereft of economic lebensraum as the City will, by dictating government bond and LIBOR rates, also weaponise inflation, the economic scourge of all great wars and Germany’s worst nightmare. Germany, her Russian and Chinese markets in tatters, will have to march to the City’s drum, accumulating more depreciating American paper, before the Americans once more do a Continental on them.

Unless that is, Germany finds its own Charles De Gaulle, the charismatic French leader, who called the Americans’ bluff by cashing out his Fort Knox chips and causing mayhem in the markets. Germany and Switzerland will eventually turn East as it is only there that profits, along the traditional German banking lines, can be found. To the East lies markets, oil, gas and other raw materials. To the West like Chelsea Football Club, diminishing supplies of bread and endless, diversionary circuses of no intrinsic worth.

Germany is now in the last-chance saloon. She can liaise with China, Russia and the future or she can lie down on her back and think of Wall Street and the City as they rape her of her remaining resources.

Spare no tears for Chelsea’s headhunters. Sad though their demise will be, they can delude themselves, as they always do, that their club died, like Nelson, for England, home and beauty and not, as it did, for the unbridled greed of the City’s Eton-educated brats.

Though future historians will find today’s battle over Stamford Bridge as epoch-making as Trafalgar, they will look further back, to the original 1066 Stamford Bridge battle where the English forces vanquished the Vikings in the North, only to find their exhausted forces being routed in the South shortly afterwards at The Battle of Hastings.

And so it will be with Ukraine, where the City’s media outfits will win the ultimately irrelevant propaganda war but, as with the great Tolstoy’s War and Peace, lose the real war to the cudgels of the troops of Tsar Alexander and Prince Kutuzov, which fell mercilessly on the heads of Napoleon’s Grande Armée until they were not even a shadow of their former selves. Indeed, when Zhukov told Stalin that his forces had conquered Berlin, Stalin testily replied that Tsar Alexander had reached Paris. The hope this time has to be that the Russian wave goes even further and prises not just Stamford Bridge but all of London and beyond from the City’s vultures.