As Kepa Arrizabalaga’s losing penalty kick soared high into the dark Wembley skies, still rising, some said, as it cleared Wembley Park tube station, the mass of Liverpool fans behind the goal produced a vast barrelling cheer, bodies tumbling, flares turning the night red.
For the Chelsea end, relieved from glorious distraction of an apparently never-ending penalty shootout, the immediate future seems less clear.
Perhaps some will call for change. Sack the charitable foundation! It wasn’t like this under Roman. Say what you like, he made the startlingly generous flow of private cash into a winning playing squad work. Either way, a losing Carabao Cup final felt like a suitably low-key day one for the post-Roman era; the alternate, rebooted Roman era, or wherever it is Chelsea FC finds itself heading off into right now.
It was a strange day all round. As Chelsea’s players missed chance after chance in the opening hour, as Mason Mount bludgeoned the ball into the advertising boards with all the finesse of man kicking an empty can of baked beans along the hard shoulder of the motorway, Thomas Tuchel could be seen beating the touchline turf with his fists, beseeching the Wembley skies, a tableau of agonised confusion. Yes, get it out Thomas. Because these are certainly fraught and interesting times. On the pitch this was an absorbing, ruminative cup final. Off it, this was football with a side order of European land war, the second-tier domestic cup competition spiced with a sense of impending mutual assured destruction.
And right now everything about Chelsea FC seems fraught with macro-chaos. Not least the exact status of the club’s ownership. The idea that Roman Abramovich has handed over “stewardship and care” of the club, as per Saturday night’s weirdly casual official statement, is baffling enough.
Really? Define “stewardship”. What about “care”? Can the trustees of the club’s charitable foundation decide to sell it? Can they buy a better centre forward or sack the manager? Or refuse to compete in the Champions League until Russian clubs are expelled? If not, why not?
The Labour MP Chris Bryant has already suggested the stewardship stuff could be an attempt by Abramovich to avoid being caught up in the process of sanctions. Abramovich vehemently disputes any suggestion of his alleged closeness to Vladimir Putin and Russia or that he has done anything to merit being sanctioned.
“I’m worried that this is a classic Russian ruse,” Bryant told the Guardian on Saturday, although his suggestion that Abramovich “could save himself a lot of bother by condemning Putin and his criminal invasion of Ukraine” is at least a chance for a little laughter in the dark. Let’s be clear, Abramovich could create a vast amount of bother for himself by saying that, whatever his past loyalties.
And for now nothing has really changed. The club will receive its usual top-ups. The £1.5bn loans have not been called in. The show goes on, sealed within that pool of distracting light. And Wembley was a chilly, crisp, crackly place at kick-off, the thin afternoon sun creeping down the roof of the far stand. Football tends to do this. The world keeps on ending. Still people keep showing up asking where the party is.
There was an early moment of apparently genuine absurdity as the in-house PA asked the crowd to stand so that Ukraine would know “the whole football family” supports them, even as death rains down on their houses and the bodies pile up in Kyiv.
This is of course nauseating double‑speak. In reality the football family, led by its governing bodies, has spent the past 12 years legitimising Vladimir Putin’s regime, and bolstering his influence. The wretched, fawning Gianni Infantino has dishonoured his sport, and humiliated himself by padding after Putin like a needy puppy. Russian clubs are still in Uefa competitions. Russia are still en route to the World Cup. A club owned and funded by a Russian oligarch: well they’re out there right now dressed in blue.
Meanwhile, the game juddered on towards that apparently inevitable penalty shootout. Édouard Mendy made an incredible double save midway through the first half. Both teams had goals disallowed And so the mind began to wonder. There was once a dream that was Roman. It is 19 years now since Russia’s most famous billionaire paid £140m to take control of Chelsea. It was a style‑setting administration from the start. Two decades on, as he cruises from around the Med, still low key super-flash but essentially mute, oddly untouchable, it is easy to forget the glossy, celebrified aspect of Abramovich’s arrival in west London.
Nobody really stopped to ask why he was here, or why he wanted to own Chelsea. Why would you?
In the summer of 2003 the common response to the appearance of the English football’s first overseas billionaire was a collective gawp, a phwoar, a wa-hey, a vicarious drool at the flash, the show, the trappings of the post‑communist uber-lad lifestyle. Abramovich owned a yacht with two helipads and its own submarine. He bought a house that looked like an embassy. He was a fun-loving billionaire. Of course this was normal.
And everything was new in this picture. Vladimir Putin had come to power in Russia just three years previously. The fall of the Berlin wall was only nine years before that. Oligarchs: what were they exactly? How did this work, this evolving system of commerce and power? The assumption was that buying Chelsea offered a kind of “insurance policy”, a way of making himself known in another country, protected by his visibility. Does that seem right now? Does anything seem right?
At Wembley there were Ukraine flags in both ends, and plenty in the blue end. The Chelsea Supporters’ Trust has made its feelings clear: “We stand with the people of Ukraine”. And, this is the strange lot of the football supporter now. Blaming a club’s fans for the sins of its owners makes little sense. But it is quite possible to have a voice while still loving the team, the shirt, the players. That connection, that source of joy: none of it attaches to whoever the current owner happens to be.
Within 10 minutes of that final penalty kick the Chelsea end was almost empty. Liverpool’s fans stayed to dance and shout and applaud the medals being handed out. This is a vital little notch on the belt for Jürgen Klopp, a first domestic cup in a decade, and another step in the building of an era.
For two hours at Wembley football had shut the doors on the world outside and staged its own show. For Chelsea, day one of the new world felt quite a lot like the old one. But it seems likely change is coming in one form or another.
