Roman Abramovich and Chelsea symbolise the rotten state of football

Imagine we were starting again. Imagine this was a world when professional sport was in its infancy and even the concept of a league was controversial in case it made people overprioritise winning. Imagine you had a vague sense the clubs in this new competition might represent their local areas, that they might come to fulfil some sort of community function. Who would you want running them?

Would it be a fabulously rich Russian who made his fortune exploiting the economic chaos that followed a period of political turmoil to buy up his country’s oil and gas reserves and who was accused – although he strenuously denied it – of having close ties to that country’s autocratic leader?

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How about the investment fund of a Middle Eastern state that is engaged in a brutal war with one of its neighbours, the chair of which told the Atlantic this month that if he had ordered the murder of a journalist for a US newspaper, which he definitely didn’t because frankly this guy was small fry, his boys would have made a better job of it?

Or what about an investment group run by another member of a Middle Eastern royal family, whose purpose in investing in the club was, as a Human Rights Watch report had it, to “construct a public relations image of a progressive, dynamic Gulf state, which deflects attention from what is really going on in the country”?

Probably not. But then neither would it be a US family who saddled a club with £660m of debt as part of its takeover. Nor would it be a hedge fund that tried to trademark the name of the city and dabbled with destroying sporting structures stretching back more than a century for financial gain.

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