Long-Term View: Will oligarchs ever get bored?

Sometimes, when I lie awake, I wonder…will Roman Abramovich ever get bored of Chelsea? He seems the one to pick, the first archetype of the men who cleared massive chunks of wealth from their countries’ balance sheets, and then set sail for shores anew with a desire to spend akin to walking out of a casino into a cool evening with three grand from blackjack in your pocket.

Plenty of mega-wealth owners have joined the party since, but there is a distinction to make – modern life: make distinctions – between say Vincent Tan at Cardiff or Tony Fernandes at QPR or Mike Ashley at Newcastle, and Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour. That is, those guys know the keen reality of how many cheap flights to Chang Mai or massive Sports Direct mugs you have to sell to spend £12.5million on Christopher Samba or £8.5million on Remy Cabella. Ashley, you sense, can’t eye up any potential new signing without thinking of the comparable bundles of Slazenger socks. The reason so many of these kinds of owners follow the same template – arrive giddy, splash it about, then at varying speeds go into financial lockdown – might be because they can’t escape that insistent voice telling them, this is real money you’re spending here, on Junior Hoilett.

That’s not to downplay what it probably took for Abramovich to get there, as Boris Berezovsky’s junior partner in Sibneft, one of the fortunate companies across the table from the Russian government on the shares-for-loans deals. These deals were roughly equivalent to Waitrose telling you – I’m dreaming, during my dour Tesco shop – that you can pay a £50 deposit, and if you can find anything in the store beginning with an A, we’ll keep the £50 and you get the store. The government, to everyone’s utter shock, defaulted on the loans, and the oligarchs got lots of jolly things used as collateral, like ‘Russia’s nickel’ and ‘Russia’s oil’.

And thus, so flowed the kind of wealth that must always have a tinge of unreality, that two plus two made four billion, despite the very real-world things Abramovich had to do to make sure no-one took it off him, or put him in jail for having it. Here he is, when being sued in 2011 by Berezovsky, regarding the aluminium wars of the 90s: “Every three days, someone was being murdered.” Abramovic won the aluminium wars, by the way. Something to think about, when you spot that baleful face in the Chelsea box listening to Blue Is The Colour being sung around him. But that unreal tinge can be nothing compared to the champagne supernova of singing angels experienced by Sheikh Mansour.

The issue here, in terms of long-term consequences, is that if the correlation between your money and reality turns everything you spend it on into a toy, to varying degrees – risk-free, there for your entertainment – do you get bored of it?

It obviously depends on the toy. Roman Abramovich can definitely get bored of yachts, and need something that is bigger and demonstrably newer and more exclusive than the one he had before. Mansour, as part of the Abu Dhabi ruling family, appears to have got bored of the initial excitement of building replicas of some of the world’s fine art museums in the desert, and now there’s just a lot of empty spaces and partial scaffolding and sand. Very, very rich people who never had to suffer to make something happen are flakes; that’s just one of the facts that gives life its sense of fairness. Ish.

But do you get bored of football clubs? It’s likely you get bored of them the least, for some reasons very specific to football clubs.

Number one: they have heart, people care, automatically and unreachably, in a way that nobody, their owners included, really cares about yachts. This must appeal to a gazillionaire; they have not, you sense, spent a lot of time around people caring just because they do, not because of how much it costs or how beneficial the relationship might be.

Number two: you can’t replicate them. There will never be another Chelsea. It truly, in a way a gigantic yacht never will, can only have one unique owner. Pleasing, no doubt, to an adult cursed by the brattishness of always being forced to play with toys.

Number three: it connects you to people, makes you feel like you and they actually share something. What would it feel like to walk down a street and know that you could pay the salary for life of every single person you’re looking at? Distancing, I’d think, like you and the rest of the world had got off on different planets.

Number four: it’s unpredictable. These guys can buy the consequences of pretty much everything, which sounds pretty deadening to me; it’s probably a heart-filling reminder of what it’s like to be a normal person, when, for example, John Terry shanks a penalty off the post or Aguero slams in the title winner.

Number five: you get respect, an intangible elevation of your persona beyond ‘that guy who licensed a bunch of money from his country’, a place in the public eye that no longer just recognises you as ‘rich’. You get a starring role in a thing that sets media pulses racing, dictates conversations across the world; you get invited to stuff like Champions League knockout-draws on merit, and don’t just simply have to turn up in the capacity of ‘fanboy with too much time on his hands’. I mean, people will still be thinking that, but they’re no longer allowed to even whisper it.

Nonetheless, all of the above taken into account, it’s ludicrous to think of either Abramovich or Mansour in the same manner as Jack Walker, for example, who you suspect might have had one eye – the entire time he climbed up through the steel industry – on eventually spending the proceeds on Blackburn. There cannot be a Chelsea or a City in the deep bone marrow of these men; in their blood, eventually, maybe, and as long as the Premier League and everything about it keeps that blood hot, they will stay. The irony is, if one thing is to slowly cool the temperature of the Premier League, it’s the increased ‘corporatisation’ of its very modern nature. Maybe they’ll get bored of that.

Toby Sprigings – follow him on Twitter