An extra place had been laid for a mystery guest but no one guessed the identity of the man who would take the additional seat at the dinner table.
It was a warm late summer evening in Jerusalem in 2019 when Roman Abramovich joined Emma Hayes and her Chelsea players for a memorable few hours. “It was a great surprise, the players were giggling like teenagers,” Hayes would recall. “We sat around at dinner talking about Middle Eastern history and the love of working for a club that supports its women’s football team in the way Chelsea have. We spent time talking about how proud he is of us and what we do.”
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Until very recently Hayes was happy to enthuse about that pre-season tour of Israel and the day she and the players spent on a private sight-seeing trip alongside Chelsea’s owner in Jerusalem. With the Wailing Wall serving as an evocative backdrop, the Russian oligarch stood shoulder to shoulder with her as they posed happily for photographs beneath a searing Levantine sun. “It was a wonderful, brilliant self-reflective day,” said Chelsea’s manager. “The experience was immensely spiritual for everyone. It’s brought us closer together and reinforced the value of taking care of each other. Roman spending time with us in Israel meant an awful lot.”
Three years ago few of those staring up at the Mount of Olives can have envisaged the geo-political train hurtling down the track towards them. Back then Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine seemed almost inconceivable. The idea that the British government would impose sanctions on Abramovich, placing Chelsea in paralysing limbo as his UK assets were frozen, would have been dismissed as fanciful by
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