Blue brothers: the roubles behind the rise of Chelsea and Sydney FC

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This was published 8 years ago

Blue brothers: the roubles behind the rise of Chelsea and Sydney FC

By Sebastian Hassett
Updated

If you ever wanted two clubs who embody the new faces of 21st century football, Chelsea and Sydney FC – the aspiring kings of Europe and Asia – might well be it.

Despite being from other sides of the world, and playing their first matches exactly 100 years apart, the pair are unlikely poster boys for the game's modern evolution.

And they both have something fundamentally in common: their respective rises to the top of the English establishment and Australia's football experiment has been fuelled by, ironically, a half-way point between London and Sydney.

The vast oil fields of Siberia, closed behind the Iron Curtain for much of the past century, provide the economic grounding for the two clubs' recent success and future ambition.

Big bucks: David Traktovenko presents Sydney FC football hall Of fame recipient Terry McFlynn with his pin earlier this year.

Big bucks: David Traktovenko presents Sydney FC football hall Of fame recipient Terry McFlynn with his pin earlier this year.Credit: Getty Images

Chelsea's owner Roman Abramovich made his fortune trading Russia's newly privatised oil commodities, while Sydney's owner, David Traktovenko, accumulated his fortune in Russia's banking sector – itself driven by the same, unimaginably vast natural resources beneath the nation's soil.

Yet barely 20 years ago, not only did Sydney FC not even exist, but Chelsea were a mid-table London club starved of success, not a patch on the likes of Manchester United or Liverpool or countless others from the game's traditional industrial heartland.

But with megacities across the world amassing untold fiscal power and explosive population growth, football evolved from a regional working man's pastime to metropolitan entertainment for the rich and very rich alike. Abramovich's arrival at Stamford Bridge, in this month 12 years ago, has changed the entire sport irreversibly.

No club has ridden the wave of financial investment more boldly and more successfully than Chelsea. Abramovich has spent £2 billion ($4 billion) in transforming the club from perennial battlers to being among the world's five most popular clubs, securing four Premier League titles and two major European trophies along the way.

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These days, there are Abramovich clones everywhere. Over 60 billionaires now own stakes in clubs, and they now come from nations as diverse as Qatar, Malaysia, Thailand, UAE, Indonesia, India and the US.

One of them is Traktovenko. But while every second oligarch has relocated west to London, Traktovenko flew east. Sydney caught his eye, by virtue of his daughter, Alina, who met and married Scott Barlow after studying here. Barlow is now the club's chairman.

Just as Abramovich wants to make Chelsea the best club in Europe, Traktovenko, through Barlow, has repeatedly stated Sydney FC's desire to be the best club in Asia. They dream of creating their own Chelsea for the world's most populous continent.

While the A-League salary cap limits how much Traktovenko can lavish on his squad, the Sky Blues are keen spenders elsewhere, notably on marquee players and coaches. He has repeatedly spent big in the A-League's first 10 years and shows no signs of slowing down.

Yet it still pales to what Traktovenko might have spent on the club he used to own, the mighty Zenit St Petersburg, until he received "a very attractive offer" from Russian gas giants Gazprom in 2005, understood to be $US36.25 million ($A47.41 million) for the 51 per cent stake he shared with Vladmir Kogan.

The same year, Gazprom paid $US13.1 billion ($A17.13billion) to Abramovich's investment company, Millhouse Capital, for a 75.7 per cent stake in Sibneft (now Gazprom Neft). Clearly, the two men have more than sport in common.

But so profoundly successful have their football projects been – albeit at significant financial cost – that both will be delighted to see their respective clubs playing in front of nearly 84,000 on Tuesday night.

If such a scenario was hard to imagine 10 years ago, it's impossible before that. Whether you like the way football has changed is a different argument, but it certainly now fills the television screens of more homes in emerging markets like Australia than ever before.

While the Sky Blues may not be in the Blues' category of power just yet, and probably never will be, Abramovich and Traktovenko have, in their own way, been powerful players in the game's transformation: slick, moneyed, corporatised and internationalised.

And though their battle at ANZ Stadium will be sold as the battle of princes and paupers, the truth isn't quite so black and white. It's just a different shade of blue.

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