Chelsea’s pathetic fine for Abramovich-era payments puts Tierney row in shade | Barney Ronay

You might feel enough has already been said about the Chelsea huddle. You would be wrong, of course. It is impossible to say enough about the Chelsea huddle. A week on, that moment when the Chelsea players formed a scrum on the centre circle around what appeared at first glance to be a depressed hatstand, but turned out to be the immovable figure of referee Paul Tierney, is still the most moreishly haunting image of the season.
What did it mean? Even the basic geometry is fascinating, with its fractal-like symmetries. Here we have the Chelsea players making a circle inside a circle around a sphere on top of a smaller circle, above which a single bald head protrudes like an orbital moon.
The question of why has been part-explained as simple superstition. Chelsea did this before their game in Naples and won. In which case it’s a good thing they ended up losing to Newcastle last Saturday or it would have been necessary not just to carry on doing it but to force Paul Tierney to stand in the middle of the huddle looking noble and nonchalant and vaguely interested before every game until the end of the season.
More interesting is the question of why it has proved so upsetting. Location is key here. By gathering on the centre spot, Chelsea are taking possession of the room, the ohmic centre of mother football. They’re also standing in the opposition half. It’s a personal space invasion. It’s flooding the zone. It’s armrest one-upmanship. It’s dominating the conference buffet breakout overflow.
So far, so LinkedIn. But there is an echo here of a deeper online culture, the Looksmaxx-zone, a popular masculine status register where young men measure their shoulder width against some uber-incel ideal and hit their faces with hammers so that women will be hard-wired to find them attractive [narrator’s voice: and yet women will not be hard-wired to find them attractive].
What Chelsea are doing is a version of “frame mogging”, a popular practice from this area whereby a larger, more athletic, better‑groomed person visually dominates another on screen. For example, if I were to pose for a photo next to a tiny, beaming 87-year-old Hungarian grandmother and, unknown to her, as she smiles for the camera, I’m aggressively dominating the frame with my pipe‑cleaner forearms and gleaming vape-stained teeth. In that moment I would be frame-mogging that Stacy.
Intentionally or not, the Chelsea huddle is a form of pitch mogging. This is why it’s disturbing on some basic level, not just to the opposition but to Tierney, a bit like those moments when a band of urban urchins do wheelies on mountain bikes along a busy city street and you feel inexplicably upset and provoked and threatened, like you’re being taunted by savages.
None of this is meant to add to the general pile-on around Liam Rosenior, who has explained this away with his own respect-the-ball schtick. Chelsea’s manager still says some odd things. Memorably, he described conceding a goal from a corner against Burnley – “an assignment was missed” – like a man in charge of an underground black ops kill squad. But Rosenior is too bright and committed and resourceful to be judged too harshly on half-a-novice season in the Chelsea meat grinder. The real power of that moment was the way it spoke to the club itself, and to the many strange things that continue to happen around it, which can get a little lost in the weekly business.
This week also brought the Premier League’s verdict in its investigation into payments made by the previous Chelsea regime, described fittingly as “a sanction agreement”. The punishment seems pathetically light. A £10.75m fine and a suspended transfer ban: this is what you get for deliberate financial deception that materially enriched the club at the expense of others.
Chelsea admitted making previously undeclared payments totalling just over £47.5m to unregistered entities and agents between 2011 and 2018. These appear to have been intended to smooth signings, including Eden Hazard, David Luiz, and Nemanja Matic, proper era-building players other clubs also wanted.
The verdict mentions deception and concealment. It recognises these offences attach to the club and don’t walk off with its previous officers. And yet a great deal is also made of Chelsea’s willingness to self-report. This seems naive. Of course the new people reported it. They will want to eventually sell this asset. This is clearing the decks. More to the point, the new owners had a £150m malfeasance fund built into the purchase price. Anything left over from this will be handed back to Roman Abramovich after five years. Why would you not report it? It’s a free hit.
A fudge then, and one that will be glossed with the response: “Well, everyone’s probably doing it.” Are they, though? This was genuine deep-pocketed largesse, on a scale that skewed entire competitions. Throw your medals in the bin, you won them by cheating. Brian Clough was talking about badgering the referee and rotational fouling. What would he make of this?
This isn’t even the deeper point. Which is, as ever, the question of who exactly, no really who, actually bought Chelsea in the first place all those years ago? Four years on, the funds from the club’s enforced sale are still frozen in a Barclays bank account. The UK government is said to be considering suing Abramovich to force the distribution of the £2.4bn raised from selling Chelsea after he missed a deadline to do so. Separately, the Jersey attorney general is investigating whether any of this money amounts to the proceeds of criminal activity.
Meanwhile that sum just sits there, like a taunt from history. It belongs, ultimately, to whoever made an era happen, and redefined European football. It seems quite funny now that the initial media take on Abramovich was that he was some kind of plucky, modernising semi-dissident, that he was perhaps at Chelsea just to make himself visible in the west, to escape from Vladimir Putin’s arc of influence.
It took the invasion of Ukraine for the British government to decide, almost overnight, that, in fact, this sporting institution, this champion club, was owned by a “Kremlin-connected oligarch” and that 20 years on someone really should do something about this. It is a definition Abramovich still flatly denies, as he denies any of his funds can be defined as the proceeds of crime.
What is certain is that the current era, the lurch into BlueCo asset status, feels like its own distinct form of sanction. Chelsea have become a very silly team, hostage still to that bizarrely amateurish Todd Boehly supermarket sweep. There is also a creepiness about this entity now, a vague sense of the classic gothic horror trope, uncertainty as to whether something is really alive or dead. Is this actually a football club? Is it an investment brand, a talent clearing house, a way of selling flats and marketing movies?
More widely, the Premier League seems diminished on a very basic level. The delay over the Manchester City charges has no obvious explanation. But both elements are damaging to the robustness of the product. In the verdict there is talk of “the need to preserve public confidence”.
But how are you supposed to feel about a league where in 11 of the past 15 seasons, the Chelsea payments era, the title has been won by two teams either accused or convicted of cheating? With, as yet, no sanction or non-sanction on trophies won and points gathered?
Some will say the Premier League is being sensibly political in its dealings at a difficult time. Or that it can’t afford to fall out with anyone else while City’s lawyers are bleeding it white. Keep the lights on. Business as usual. Head down. Eyes on the grass. And don’t break the huddle.