Stamford Bridge hosts dark day for those who care for football’s soul

There cannot have been a better way to sum up the rotten state of English football than the moral vacuum that lay at the heart of this strange and upsetting occasion at Stamford Bridge, where a capacity crowd turned up to watch one club with a disqualified owner take on another backed by the public investment fund of a nation which executed 81 people on Saturday.

This was a dark day for anyone who cares about the game’s soul. No amount of sportswashing could make the putrid air hanging over this fixture disappear. Not when some Chelsea fans were still determined to belt out their boorish chants of support for Roman Abramovich, a man described by the UK government as a pro-Kremlin oligarch with long-term links to Vladimir Putin, and the sight of flags of Saudi Arabia in the Shed End served as further evidence of soft power at play, making Newcastle look like little more than a useful tool for a repressive regime hoping to cleanse its reputation through sport.

This behaviour, this farcical cognitive dissonance, cannot be defended any more. There was defiance spilling over into sheer blinkered arrogance, witnessed when the home crowd roused themselves in the second half and sang in praise of Abramovich, even now they have seen the government accuse him of being involved in destabilising Ukraine by supplying steel which may have been used to build Russian tanks (a claim that has been denied).

A reminder: Abramovich is no hero. Nineteen years ago he turned up out of the blue to buy a football club and transform it with his billions. He was a mystery back then and it is only now that Ukraine has been subjected to Russia’s monstrous invasion that the source of Abramovich’s wealth has been openly questioned so widely, leading to